a woman with a bony
throat and a beaky nose would you have read them?"

He thought a moment. "Guess not," he answered. "You're just as bad," he
continued. "Isn't it the pale-faced young clergyman with the wavy hair
and the beautiful voice that you all flock to hear? No getting away from
nature. But it wasn't only that." He hesitated.

"I want to know," she said.

"You looked so young," he answered. "I had always had the idea that it
was up to the old people to put the world to rights--that all I had to do
was to look after myself. It came to me suddenly while you were talking
to me--I mean while I was reading you: that if you were worrying yourself
about it, I'd got to come in, too--that it would be mean of me not to. It
wasn't like being preached to. It was somebody calling for help."

Instinctively she held out her hand and he grasped it.

Flossie came up at the same instant. She wanted to introduce him to Miss
Lavery, who had just arrived.

"Hullo!" she said. "Are you two concluding a bargain?"

"Yes," said Joan. "We are founding the League of Youth. You've got to
be in it. We are going to establish branches all round the world."

Flossie's young man was whisked away. Joan, who had seated herself in a
small chair, was alone for a few minutes.

Miss Tolley had chanced upon a Human Document, with the help of which she
was hopeful of starting a "Press Controversy" concerning the morality, or
otherwise, of "Running Waters." The secretary stood just behind her,
taking notes. They had drifted quite close. Joan could not help
overhearing.

"It always seemed to me immoral, the marriage ceremony," the Human
Document was explaining. She was a thin, sallow woman, with an untidy
head and restless eyes that seemed to be always seeking something to look
at and never finding it. "How can we pledge the future? To bind oneself
to live with a man when perhaps we have ceased to care for him; it's
hideous."

Miss Tolley murmured agreement.

"Our love was beautiful," continued the Human Document, eager,
apparently, to relate her experience for the common good; "just because
it was a free gift. We were not fettered to one another. At any moment
either of us could have walked out of the house. The idea never occurred
to us; not for years--five, to be exact."

The secretary, at a sign from Miss Tolley, made a memorandum of it.

"And then did your feelings towards him change suddenly?" questioned Mis