Tommy blinked at this.  “I really believe, Mrs. Jerry,” he said slowly, “it is you who don’t know who I am!”

“You prepare the aristocracy for the stage, don’t you?” she said plaintively.

“I!” he thundered.

“He had a beard,” she said, in self-defence.

“Who?”

“Oh, I don’t know!  Please forgive me!  I do remember, of course, who you are—­I remember too well!” said Mrs. Jerry, generously.

“What is my name?” Tommy demanded.

She put her hands together again, beseechingly.  “Please, please!” she said.  “I have such a dreadful memory for names, but—­oh, please!”

“What am I?” he insisted.

“You are the—­the man who invents those delightful thingumbobs,” she cried with an inspiration.

“I never invented anything, except two books,” said Tommy, looking at her reproachfully.

“I know them by heart,” she cried.

“One of them is not published yet,” he informed her.

“I am looking forward to it so excitedly,” she said at once.

“And my name is Sandys,” said he.

“Thomas Sandys,” she said, correcting him triumphantly.  “How is that dear, darling little Agnes—­Elspeth?”

“You have me at last,” he admitted.

“‘Sandys on Woman!’” exclaimed Mrs. Jerry, all rippling smiles once more.  “Can I ever forget it!”

“I shall never pretend to know anything about women again,” Tommy answered dolefully, but with a creditable absence of vindictiveness.

“Please, please!” said the little hands again.

“It is a nasty jar, Mrs. Jerry.”

“Please!”

“Oh that I could forget so quickly!”

“Please!”

“I forgive you, if that is what you want.”

She waved her whip.  “And you will come and see me?”

“When I have got over this.  It needs—­a little time.”  He really said this to please her.

“You shall talk to me of the new book,” she said, confident that this would fetch him, for he was not her first author.  “By the way, what is it about?”

“Can you ask, Mrs. Jerry?” replied Tommy, passionately.  “Oh, woman, woman, can you ask?”

This puzzled her at the time, but she understood what he had meant when the book came out, dedicated to Pym.  “Goodness gracious!” she said to herself as she went from chapter to chapter, and she was very self-conscious when she heard the book discussed in society, which was not quite as soon as it came out, for at first the ladies seemed to have forgotten their Tommy.