utting his throat in one of those rooms.

At tea in their hotel on their return Mabel chattered animatedly on all
they had seen. "I'm awfully glad we went. I think it's a very good thing
to know for oneself just how that side of life lives. Those awful people
at the windows!"--and she laughed. He noticed for the first time what a
sudden laugh she had, rather loud.

Sabre agreed. "Yes, I think it's a good thing to have an idea of their
lives. I can't say I'm glad I went, though. You've no idea how awfully
depressed that kind of thing makes me feel."

She laughed again. "Depressed! How ever can it? How funny you must be!"

Then she said, "Yes, I'm glad I've seen for myself. You know, when those
sort of people come into your service--the airs they give themselves and
the way they demand the best of everything--and then when you see the
kind of homes they come from--!"

"Yes, it makes you think, doesn't it?"

"It _does_!"

But what it made Sabre think was entirely different from what it made
Mabel think.

VII

"Puzzlehead" they had called him at his preparatory school,--Old
Puzzlehead Sabre, the chap who always wrinkled up his nut over things
and came out with the most extraordinary ideas. He had remained, and
increasingly become, the puzzler. And precisely as he ceased to share a
room with Mabel and carried himself with satisfaction to his own
apartment, so, by this fifth year of his married life, he had come to
know well that he shared no thoughts with her: he carried them, with
increasing absorption in their interest, to the processes of his own
mind.

An incident of those early school days had always remained with him, in
its exact words. The exact words of a selectly famous professor of
philosophy who, living the few years of his retirement in the
neighbourhood of the preparatory school, had given--for pure love of
seeing young things and feeling the freshness of young minds--a weekly
"talk on things" to the small schoolboys. And whatever the subject of
his talk, he almost invariably would work off his familiar counsel:

"And a very good thing (he used to say), an excellent thing, the very
best of practices, is to write a little every day. Just a little scrap,
but cultivate the habit of doing it every day. I don't mean what is
called keeping a diary, you know. Don't write what you do. There's no
benefit in that. We do things for all kinds of reasons and it's the
reasons, not the things, that matter. Let