If Jay’s Family did not know she was a ’bus-conductor, and did not know she was a story-possessor, what did it know about her?  It knew she disliked the smell of bananas, and that she had not taken advantage of an expensive education, and that she was Stock Size (Small Ladies’), and that she was christened Jane Elizabeth, and that she took after her father to an excessive extent, and that she was rather too apt to swallow this Socialist nonsense.  As Families go, it was fairly well informed about her.

The Family was a rather promiscuous one.  It had more tortuous relationships than most families have, although there were only four in it, not counting Mr. Russell.

I might as well introduce you to the Family before I settle down to the story.  From careful study of the press reviews I gather that a story is considered a necessary thing in a novel, so this time I am going to try and include one.

You may, if you please, meet the Family after breakfast at Mr. Russell’s house in Kensington, about three months after Jay had run away.  There were four people in the room.  They were Cousin Gustus, Mrs. Gustus, Kew, and Mr. Russell.

It behoves me to try and tell you very simply about Mrs. Gustus, because she prided herself on simplicity.  Spelt with a capital S, it constituted her Deity; her heaven was a severe and shadowless eternity, and plain words were the flowers that grew in her Elysian fields.  She had simplified her life and her looks.  Even her smile was shorn of all accessories like dimples or twinkles.  Her hair, which was not abundant, was the colour of corn, straight and shining.  Her eyes were a cold dark grey.

Now to be simple is all very well, but turn it into an active verb and you spoil the whole idea.  To simplify seems forced, and I think Mrs. Gustus struck harder on the note of simplification than that of simplicity.  I should not dare to criticise her, however, and Cousin Gustus was satisfied, so criticism in any case would be intrusive.  It is just possible that he occasionally wished that she would dress herself in a more human way—­patronise in winter the humble Viyella stripe, for instance, or in summer the flippant sprig.  But a large proportion of Mrs. Gustus’s faith was founded on simple strong colours in wide expanses, introduced, as it were, one to another by judicious black.  Anybody but Mrs. Gustus would have been drowned in her clothes.  But she was conceived on a generous scale, she was almost gorgeous, she barely missed exaggeration.  In her manner I think she did not miss it.  She had therefore the gift of coping with colour.  It remains for me to add that her age was five-and-forty, and that she was a novelist.  The recording angel had probably noted the fact of her novelism among her virtues, but she had an imperceptible earthly public.  She wrote laborious books, full of short peevish sentences, of such very pure construction that they were extremely difficult to understand.  She wore spectacles with