Jane left the chair and spoke too.

I hadn’t known Jane spoke so well.  She has a clever, coherent way of making her points, and is concise in reply if questioned, quick at repartee if heckled.

Lady Pinkerton was sitting in the row in front of Juke and me.  Mother and daughter.  It was very queer to me.  That wordy, willowy fool, and the sturdy, hard-headed girl in the chair, with her crisp, gripping mind.  Yet there was something....  They both loved success.  Perhaps that was it.  The vulgarian touch.  I felt it the more clearly in them because of Juke at my side.  And yet Jukie too ...  Only he would always be awake to it—­on his guard, not capitulating.

2

Jane came round with me after the meeting to the Fact office, to go through some stuff she was writing for us about the meeting.  She had to come then, though it was late, because next day was press day.  We hadn’t been there ten minutes when Hobart’s name was sent in, with the message that he was just going home, and was Mrs. Hobart ready to come?

‘Well, I’m not,’ said Jane to me.  ’I shall be quite ten minutes more.  I’ll go and tell him.’

She went outside and called down, ’Go on, Oliver.  I shall be some time yet.’

‘I’ll wait,’ he called up, and Jane came back into the room.

We went on for quite ten minutes.

When we went down, Hobart was standing by the front door, waiting.

‘How did you track me?’ Jane asked.

’Your mother told me where you’d gone.  She called at the Haste on her way home.  Good-night, Gideon.’

They went out together, and I returned to the office, irritated a little by being hurried.  It was just like Lady Pinkerton, I thought, to have gone round to Hobart inciting him to drag Jane from my office.  There had been coldness, if not annoyance, in Hobart’s manner to me.

Well, confound him, it wasn’t to be expected that he should much care for his wife to write for the Fact.  But he might mind his own business and leave Jane to mind hers, I thought.

Peacock came in at this point, and we worked till midnight.

Peacock opened a parcel of review books from Hubert Wilkins—­all tripe, of course.  He turned them over, impatiently.

’What fools the fellows are to go on sending us their rubbish.  They might have learnt by now that we never take any notice of them,’ he grumbled.  He picked out one with a brilliant wrapper—­’A Cabinet Minister’s Wife, by Leila Yorke....  That woman needs a lesson, Gideon.  She’s a public nuisance.  I’ve a good mind—­a jolly good mind—­to review her, for once.  What?  Or do you think it would be infra dig?  Well, what about an article, then—­we’d get Neilson to do one—­on the whole tribe of fiction-writing fools, taking Lady Pinkerton for a peg to hang it on? ...  After all, we are the organ of the Anti-Potter League.  We ought to hammer at Potterite fiction as well as at Potterite journalism and politics.  For two pins I’d get Johnny Potter to do it.  He would, I believe.’