ngs. His mind didn't work like
that. He was eating a huge breakfast, with the "Times" propped up
against his coffee pot. The two and a half columns about her new book
annoyed him. He hated a woman to get herself talked about--June, too, of
all people. There was nothing new-fangled about June. Why, his mother
loved her and she was so pretty and so fond of clothes and babies. There
was really no excuse for her sprawling over his paper when she ought to
have been moving discreetly through the social column like his other
female friends.

There was really no reason for a happy, cared-for woman to write. It
wasn't even as if she had to earn her own living. Richard ought to put
his foot down, but Richard didn't seem to mind. One might almost have
thought that he was proud of his wife's reputation, if one hadn't known
him to be such a manly man. After all, a woman's place was in her
home--or the Court Circular. She should never stray from birth, deaths
and marriages to other parts of the paper. Even the sporting news
(though he liked a woman to play a good game of golf or a good game of
tennis) was _hardly_ the place for a lady.

George knew that he was working himself up and he hated doing that at
breakfast. So he started undoing the elaborate knot of a brown paper
parcel to soothe his nerves--George never cut string. And out of it
emerged her book--her new book. It was beautifully bound (she knew that
he liked a book to look nice) and on the fly leaf was the inscription:
"A leather cover, a little paper and my love."

It was as if she had sent him a box or a paper weight or a clock. It
wasn't the gift, it was the thought that mattered. She knew that he had
never read any of her books, but they were as good a vehicle for her
affection as another.

"You are the only person," she had said to him, "to whom my books are
really tokens," and she had smiled very radiantly as if he were the only
person who had discovered the real secret of her books. George reflected
sadly that he was the only person who understood her. Why, it was
maddening to think that any one reading those paragraphs in the "Times"
might imagine her middle-aged and ugly and spectacled. And how were they
to know that her knowledge of cricket averages was probably greater than
that of the Selection Committee? Probably, too, they pictured her with
short hair, June, with her crinkling crown of autumn beach leaves; and
thick ankles, June with her Shepperson legs;