rnal coffers.
But he did not know how to reply to her question, which rather made
him regret the turn the conversation had taken. The one future for him
was that in which floated mystically the figure of the scented
serpent-woman, and he felt that that drift of things he was relying on
had begun by a wrong move.

"Perhaps I shall write stories," he hazarded.

"You alarm me," she cried. "Your idea is hopelessly impracticable. How
could you possibly hope to rival the Robert Ingrams?"

"The Ingrams!" he echoed, glancing at her sharply.

"I only mention him because he happens to be as popular as all the
rest put together, and because I happened to make his acquaintance
some time back."

Morgan made no remark. He was relieved at her explanation, about which
there was nothing surprising, for he well knew that Ingram moved in
high social latitudes.

"Besides," she went on, "you would naturally be tempted to draw women
like me, which would simply be courting extinction. Of course, in
Ingram's novels no fashionable lady ever does the things I do, and
the critics would insist I was an utter impossibility. Now, as to the
fifty pounds you've got--before long the sin of that borrowing will
rise up against you and you'll be signing again, signing away whole
pounds of your flesh. And I daresay you overlook you've various little
debts. No doubt you owe your tailor, say a year's account, and then
your rooms are pretty expensive, and quarter-day has a spiteful habit
of swooping down on one four times a year, and--and you mustn't have
to bother your pretty head about all these sordid things."

This was somewhat of an appalling speech for Morgan, who certainly did
not want to cheat his creditors. And, indeed, it now occurred to him
that he must be indebted to his tailor for quite a large amount.
Although his horror of debts was far above the average, he never
realised the conception "money" as ordinary people realise it. So far
as it figured in his thoughts at all, money was a gorgeous, poetic
unit--the treasure of romance, the gold and silver of fairyland. In
practice, the very abundance of it at his command had till lately kept
his attention from dwelling on it; just as it did not dwell on, say,
the second toe of his left foot--an equally constant factor in his
existence--till some pain might make him aware it was there. His
present forced awareness of the prosaic side of the notion "money"
gave him somewhat of a sense of being