and beside it a tin box of biscuits.  The dormer-windows were hung with Eastern stuffs, a Roman lamp stood on the mantel, a Koran-holder held Omar Khayyam second-hand, and Meredith’s last novel, and “Anna Karenina,” and “Salammbo,” and two or three recent numbers of the Figaro.  Here and there on the wall a Salon photograph was fastened.  A study of a girl’s head that Nadie had given her was stuck with a Spanish dagger over the fireplace.  A sketch of Vambety’s and one of Kendal’s, sacredly framed, hung where she could always see them.  There was a vague suggestion of roses about the room, and a mingled fragrance of joss-sticks and cigarettes.  The candle shone principally upon a little bronze Buddha, who sat lotus-shrined on the writing-table among Elfrida’s papers, with an ineffable, inscrutable smile.  On the top shelf of a closet in the wall a small pile of canvases gathered dust, face downward.  Not a brush-mark of her own was visible.  She told herself that she had done with that.

The girl sat with her long cloak about her and a blanket over her knees.  Her fingers were almost nerveless with cold; as she laid down her manuscript she tried to wring warmth into them.  Her face was white, her eyes were intensely wide open and wide awake; they had black dashes underneath, an emphasis they did not need.  She lay back in her chair and gave the manuscript a little push toward Buddha smiling in the middle of the table.  “Well?” she said, regarding him with defiant inquiry, cleverly mocked.

Buddha smiled on.  The candle spattered, and his shadow danced on three or four long thick envelopes lying behind him.  Elrida’s eyes followed it.

“Oh!” said she, “you refer me to those, do you? Ce n’est pas poli, Buddha dear, but you are always honest, aren’t you?” She picked op the envelopes and held them fanwise before her.  “Tell me, Buddha, why have they all been sent back?  I myself read them with interest, I who wrote them, and surely that proves something!” She pulled a page or two out of one of them, covered with her clear, conscious, handwriting, a handwriting with a dainty pose in it suggestive of inscrutable things behind the word.  Elfrida looked at it affectionately, her eyes caressed the lines as she read them.  “I find here true things and clever things,” she went on; “Yes, and original, quite original things.  That about Balzac has never been said before—­I assure you, Buddha, it has never been said before!  Yet the editor of the Athenian returns it to me in two days with a printed form of thanks—­exactly the same printed form of thanks with which he would return a poem by Arabella Jones!  Is the editor of the Athenian a dolt, Buddha?  The Decade typewrites his regrets—­that’s better—­but the Bystander says nothing at all but ‘Declined with thanks’ inside the flap of the envelope.”  The girl stared absently into the candle.  She was not in reality greatly discouraged by these refusals: