lls you what little worth knowing there is in them."

"She doesn't LOOK profound," I admitted, casting an eye at her
meaningless small features as we paced up and down. "I incline to agree
you might easily skim her."

"Skim her--and learn all. The table of contents is SO short.... You see,
in the first place, she is extremely 'exclusive'; she prides herself on
her 'exclusiveness': it, and her shoddy title, are probably all she has
to pride herself upon, and she works them both hard. She is a sham great
lady."

As Hilda spoke, Lady Meadowcroft raised a feebly querulous voice.
"Steward! this won't do! I can smell the engine here. Move my chair. I
must go on further."

"If you go on further that way, my lady," the steward answered,
good-humouredly, but with a man-servant's deference for any sort of
title, "you'll smell the galley, where they're cooking the dinner.
I don't know which your ladyship would like best--the engine or the
galley."

The languid figure leaned back in the chair with an air of resignation.
"I'm sure I don't know why they cook the dinners up so high," she
murmured, pettishly, to her husband. "Why can't they stick the kitchens
underground--in the hold, I mean--instead of bothering us up here on
deck with them?"

The husband was a big, burly, rough-and-ready Yorkshireman--stout,
somewhat pompous, about forty, with hair wearing bald on the forehead:
the personification of the successful business man. "My dear Emmie," he
said, in a loud voice, with a North Country accent, "the cooks have got
to live. They've got to live like the rest of us. I can never persuade
you that the hands must always be humoured. If you don't humour 'em,
they won't work for you. It's a poor tale when the hands won't work.
Even with galleys on deck, the life of a sea-cook is not generally thowt
an enviable position. Is not a happy one--not a happy one, as the fellah
says in the opera. You must humour your cooks. If you stuck 'em in the
hold, you'd get no dinner at all--that's the long and the short of it."

The languid lady turned away with a sickly, disappointed air. "Then they
ought to have a conscription, or something," she said, pouting her lips.
"The Government ought to take it in hand and manage it somehow. It's bad
enough having to go by these beastly steamers to India at all, without
having one's breath poisoned by--" the rest of the sentence died away
inaudibly in a general murmur of ineffective grumbling.

"Why d