pay high honour to
their humourists. Perhaps she has lived too long with Ascher. Perhaps
she has devoted herself too much to art and her steady contemplation of
the sublime has killed her sense of the ridiculous. At all events it is
dead. She has no humour now.

It is almost impossible to imagine that any woman would have been
capable of calling in Gorman and me as advisers and helpers at a
critical moment of her life. Yet that is what Mrs. Ascher did.

We obeyed the summons of course, both of us.

Gorman got there first. I found him seated opposite Mrs. Ascher in the
large drawing-room of the house in Hampstead. Mrs. Ascher is lacking in
humour, but she has a fine sense of dramatic propriety. Great decisions
can only be come to fittingly, mighty spiritual tragedies can only be
satisfactorily enacted, in spacious rooms. And there must be emptiness.
Knicknacks and pretty ornaments kill high emotion. The chamber of a
dainty woman, the room which delicate feminity has made its own, will
suit a light flirtation, the love-making of a summer afternoon, but deep
passion is out of place in it.

I walked cautiously across a wide space of slippery floor in order to
shake hands with Mrs. Ascher. I saw that Gorman was sitting in a huge
straight-backed chair with heavily carved elbow rests. It was the
sort of chair which would have suited a bishop--in the chancel of his
cathedral, not in his private room--. and a major excommunication might
very suitably have been delivered from it.

"I am in great trouble," said Mrs. Ascher, "and I have asked you two to
come to me because you are my friends. I was right to call you, was I
not?"

She looked at Gorman and then at me, evidently expecting us to make a
confession of friendship for her. Gorman wriggled in a way that made me
think the carving of the chair must be sticking into him somewhere. But
he did not fail Mrs. Ascher.

"You were right," he said with deep feeling, "altogether right."

I was not going to be outdone by Gorman.

"'A friend,'" I said, "'must bear a friend's infirmities.'"

The quotation was not wholly happy, but Mrs. Ascher seemed to like it.
She smiled gratefully.

"My husband," she said.

I knew it must be her husband's affairs which were troubling her.

"He is in a very difficult position," I said. "I had a long talk with
him the other night. It seems to me that he has to choose between----"

Gorman interrupted me.

"He's in an infernally awkward h