ld I would not offend you,' he said.
This sufficed. Lady Carbury again looked into his eyes, and a promise
was given that the articles should be printed--and with generous
remuneration.

When the interview was over Lady Carbury regarded it as having been
quite successful. Of course when struggles have to be made and hard
work done, there will be little accidents. The lady who uses a street
cab must encounter mud and dust which her richer neighbour, who has a
private carriage, will escape. She would have preferred not to have
been kissed;--but what did it matter? With Mr Broune the affair was more
serious. 'Confound them all,' he said to himself as he left the house;
'no amount of experience enables a man to know them.' As he went away
he almost thought that Lady Carbury had intended him to kiss her
again, and he was almost angry with himself in that he had not done
so. He had seen her three or four times since, but had not repeated
the offence.

We will now go on to the other letters, both of which were addressed
to the editors of other newspapers. The second was written to Mr
Booker, of the 'Literary Chronicle.' Mr Booker was a hard-working
professor of literature, by no means without talent, by no means
without influence, and by no means without a conscience. But, from the
nature of the struggles in which he had been engaged, by compromises
which had gradually been driven upon him by the encroachment of
brother authors on the one side and by the demands on the other of
employers who looked only to their profits, he had fallen into a
routine of work in which it was very difficult to be scrupulous, and
almost impossible to maintain the delicacies of a literary conscience.
He was now a bald-headed old man of sixty, with a large family of
daughters, one of whom was a widow dependent on him with two little
children. He had five hundred a year for editing the 'Literary
Chronicle,' which, through his energy, had become a valuable property.
He wrote for magazines, and brought out some book of his own almost
annually. He kept his head above water, and was regarded by those who
knew about him, but did not know him, as a successful man. He always
kept up his spirits, and was able in literary circles to show that he
could hold his own. But he was driven by the stress of circumstances
to take such good things as came in his way, and could hardly afford
to be independent. It must be confessed that literary scruple had long
depar