wife
of a dramatist, whose one successful piece had been followed by years of
ill-fortune.

"_Games?_" said Doris. "Do you mean cards--for money?"

"Oh, dear no! Intellectual games. _Bouts-rimes;_ translations--Lady
Dunstable looks out the bits and some people think the
words--beforehand; paragraphs on a subject--in a particular
style--Pater's, or Ruskin's, or Carlyle's. Each person throws two slips
into a hat. On one you write the subject, on another the name of the
author whose style is to be imitated. Then you draw. Of course Lady
Dunstable carries off all the honours. But then everybody believes she
spends all the mornings preparing these things. She never comes down
till nearly lunch."

"This is really appalling!" said Doris, with round eyes. "I have
forgotten everything I ever knew."

As for her own impressions of the great lady, she had only seen her once
in the semi-darkness of the lecture-room, and could only remember a
long, sallow face, with striking black eyes and a pointed chin, a
general look of distinction and an air of one accustomed to the "chief
seat" at any board--whether the feasts of reason or those of a more
ordinary kind.

As the days went on, Doris, for all her sturdy self-reliance, began to
feel a little nervous inwardly. She had been quite well-educated, first
at a good High School, and then in the class-rooms of a provincial
University; and, as the clever daughter of a clever doctor in large
practice, she had always been in touch with the intellectual world,
especially on its scientific side. And for nearly two years before her
marriage she had been a student at the Slade School. But since her
imprudent love-match with a literary man had plunged her into the
practical work of a small household, run on a scanty and precarious
income, she had been obliged, one after another, to let the old
interests go. Except the drawing. That was good enough to bring her a
little money, as an illustrator, designer of Christmas cards, etc.; and
she filled most of her spare time with it.

But now she feverishly looked out some of her old books--Pater's
"Studies," a volume of Huxley's Essays, "Shelley" and "Keats" in the
"Men of Letters" series. She borrowed two or three of the political
biographies with which Arthur's shelves were crowded, having all the
while, however, the dispiriting conviction that Lady Dunstable had been
dandled on the knees of every English Prime Minister since her birth,
and had