ion to the sniffing of a flower. It struck
me all the more that Mrs. Limbert was flying her flag. As vivid as a
page of her husband's prose, she had one of those flickers of freshness
that are the miracle of her sex and one of those expensive dresses that
are the miracle of ours. She had also a neat brougham in which she
had offered to rescue an old lady from the possibilities of a queer
cab-horse; so that when she had rolled away with her charge I proposed a
walk home with her husband, whom I had overtaken on the doorstep. Before
I had gone far with him he told me he had news for me--he had accepted,
of all people and of all things, an "editorial position." It had come to
pass that very day, from one hour to another, without time for appeals
or ponderations: Mr. Bousefield, the proprietor of a "high-class
monthly," making, as they said, a sudden change, had dropped on him
heavily out of the blue. It was all right--there was a salary and an
idea, and both of them, as such things went, rather high. We took our
way slowly through the vacant streets, and in the explanations and
revelations that as we lingered under lamp-posts I drew from him I found
with an apprehension that I tried to gulp down a foretaste of the bitter
end. He told me more than he had ever told me yet. He couldn't balance
accounts--that was the trouble: his expenses were too rising a tide. It
was absolutely necessary that he should at last make money, and now he
must work only for that. The need this last year had gathered the force
of a crusher: it had rolled over him and laid him on his back. He had
his scheme; this time he knew what he was about; on some good occasion,
with leisure to talk it over, he would tell me the blessed whole. His
editorship would help him, and for the rest he must help himself. If he
couldn't they would have to do something fundamental--change their
life altogether, give up London, move into the country, take a house
at thirty pounds a year, send their children to the Board-school. I saw
that he was excited, and he admitted that he was: he had waked out of a
trance. He had been on the wrong tack; he had piled mistake on mistake.
It was the vision of his remedy that now excited him: ineffably,
grotesquely simple, it had yet come to him only within a day or two. No,
he wouldn't tell me what it was; he would give me the night to guess,
and if I shouldn't guess it would be because I was as big an ass as
himself. However, a lone man