eeth: I saw the gold
setting one day when he opened his mouth to laugh. I don't say for a
moment, my dear, there is no such thing as love--love pure, ennobling,
worthy of men and women, its roots in the heart and nowhere else. But
that love I had missed; and the other! I saw it in its true light. I
had fallen in love with him because he was a pretty, curly-headed boy. He
had fallen in love with Peggy when she was pink-and-white and slim. I
shall always see the look that came into his eyes when she spoke to him
at the hotel, the look of disgust and loathing. The girl was the same;
it was only her body that had grown older. I could see his eyes fixed
upon my arms and neck. I had got to grow old in time, brown skinned, and
wrinkled. I thought of him, growing bald, fat--"

"If you had fallen in love with the right man," had said Susan Fossett,
"those ideas would not have come to you."

"I know," said Miss Ramsbotham. "He will have to like me thin and in
these clothes, just because I am nice, and good company, and helpful.
That is the man I am waiting for."

He never came along. A charming, bright-eyed, white-haired lady occupies
alone a little flat in the Marylebone Road, looks in occasionally at the
Writers' Club. She is still Miss Ramsbotham.

Bald-headed gentlemen feel young again talking to her: she is so
sympathetic, so big-minded, so understanding. Then, hearing the clock
strike, tear themselves from her with a sigh, and return home--some of
them--to stupid shrewish wives.

STORY THE FIFTH--Joey Loveredge agrees--on certain terms--to join the
Company

The most popular member of the Autolycus Club was undoubtedly Joseph
Loveredge. Small, chubby, clean-shaven, his somewhat longish, soft,
brown hair parted in the middle, strangers fell into the error of
assuming him to be younger than he really was. It is on record that a
leading lady novelist--accepting her at her own estimate--irritated by
his polite but firm refusal to allow her entrance into his own editorial
office without appointment, had once boxed his ears, under the impression
that he was his own office-boy. Guests to the Autolycus Club, on being
introduced to him, would give to him kind messages to take home to his
father, with whom they remembered having been at school together. This
sort of thing might have annoyed anyone with less sense of humour. Joseph
Loveredge would tell such stories himself, keenly enjoying the jest--was