lute."

"What lute?" said her mother.

"It's a quotation," said Eleanor.

To say that anything was a quotation was an excellent method, in
Eleanor's eyes, for withdrawing it from discussion, just as you could
always defend indifferent lamb late in the season by saying "It's
mutton."

And, of course, Arlington Stringham continued to tread the thorny path
of conscious humour into which Fate had beckoned him.

"The country's looking very green, but, after all, that's what it's
there for," he remarked to his wife two days later.

"That's very modern, and I dare say very clever, but I'm afraid it's
wasted on me," she observed coldly. If she had known how much effort
it had cost him to make the remark she might have greeted it in a
kinder spirit. It is the tragedy of human endeavour that it works so
often unseen and unguessed.

Arlington said nothing, not from injured pride, but because he was
thinking hard for something to say. Eleanor mistook his silence for an
assumption of tolerant superiority, and her anger prompted her to a
further gibe.

"You had better tell it to Lady Isobel. I've no doubt she would
appreciate it."

Lady Isobel was seen everywhere with a fawn coloured collie at a time
when every one else kept nothing but Pekinese, and she had once eaten
four green apples at an afternoon tea in the Botanical Gardens, so she
was widely credited with a rather unpleasant wit. The censorious said
she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family
denied both stories.

"The rift is widening to an abyss," said Eleanor to her mother that
afternoon.

"I should not tell that to anyone," remarked her mother, after long
reflection.

"Naturally, I should not talk about it very much," said Eleanor, "but
why shouldn't I mention it to anyone?"

"Because you can't have an abyss in a lute. There isn't room."

Eleanor's outlook on life did not improve as the afternoon wore on.
The page-boy had brought from the library BY MERE AND WOLD instead of
BY MERE CHANCE, the book which every one denied having read. The
unwelcome substitute appeared to be a collection of nature notes
contributed by the author to the pages of some Northern weekly, and
when one had been prepared to plunge with disapproving mind into a
regrettable chronicle of ill-spent lives it was intensely irritating to
read "the dainty yellow-hammers are now with us and flaunt their
jaundiced livery from every bush and hillock." Besides