“How long does it take you to do one of those things?”

“It depends.”

“Depends on what?”

“Oh, on the amount of trouble I take over it.”

“And do they pay you any more for taking trouble?”

“No, Flossie.  I’m sorry to say they frequently pay me less.”

“Then why on earth do you do it?”

This question seemed to him so curious that it caused him to look up, beholding for the first time the plump figure clothed entirely in a new suit of brown, and wearing on its head a fascinating hat made of something that resembled fur.  He tried to look at it with disapproval, while his mind dealt independently with the amazing question put to him.

“Well, Flossie, if you really care anything about style—­”

“Style?” She stroked down the front of her jacket with a delicious movement of her little hands.  “Don’t you like it?”

He smiled.  “I adore it.  It makes you look like a dear little brown Beaver, as you are.”  “The Beaver” was only one of the many names he had for her; it was suggested irresistibly by her plumpness, her singularly practical intelligence, and her secretive ways.

“Then what do you mean by style?” asked the Beaver in a challenging tone that forced him to lay down his pen.

“What do I mean by style?” He explained, moved by the mad lust for mystification which seizes a man in the presence of adorable simplicity.  “I don’t mean anything in the least resembling a Beaver’s coat (there really isn’t any style about a Beaver’s coat).  And if you want me to say it’s the clothing of your thoughts, I won’t.  The less clothing they have the better.  It can’t be treated as a Beaver treats its coats.  You can put it on and off (I was putting it on when you came in and interrupted me); and you can mend it, and brush it up a bit; but you can’t measure it, or make it to order, and when it wears out you can’t get another where you got the first.  Style isn’t the clothing, it’s the body of your thoughts, my Beaver; and in a slap-up, A 1 style, the style of the masters, my style, you can’t tell the body from the soul.”

“If you’d said you couldn’t tell the body from the skirt it would sound like sense.”

That remark was (for the Beaver) really so witty that he leaned back in his chair and laughed at it.  But the Beaver was in no laughing humour.  “Look here,” she said, “you say that if you write those stylish things that take up such a lot of time, they only pay you less for them.”

“Well?”

“Well, is it fair of you to go on writing them?”

“Fair of me?  My dear child, why not?”

“Be-cause, if I buy stylish things I have to pay for them.  And I’ve been buying them long enough, just to please you.”

“I don’t follow.  But I suppose a Beaver has to reason backwards; because, you know, all its intelligence is in its tail.”