“Adrian wanted to get an atmosphere of rye-whisky and bad tobacco—­not tea and strawberries.”  The eminent novelist’s encomium had aroused the artist’s pride in his first-born.  An altered word would spoil the book.  “My dear girl,” said he, stretching out his great hand, from beneath which she wriggled an impatient shoulder, “my dear Doria,” said he, very gently, “the possessor of the Order of Merit is both a critic and a man of common sense.  Anyway, he knows more about novels than either of us do.  If it weren’t for him I would give you the proofs to blue pencil as much as you liked.  But I’m sure you would make a thundering mess of it.”

Doria made a little gesture—­a bit of a shrug—­a bit of a resigned flicker of her hands.

“Of course, do as you please, dear Jaffery.  I’m quite alone, a woman with nobody to turn to”—­she smiled with her lips, but there was no coordination of her eyes—­“as I said before, I pass the proofs.”

She went quickly through the drawing-room door into the house, leaving Jaffery still scratching a red whisker.

“Oh, Lord!” said he, ruefully, “I’ve gone and done it now!”

He turned to follow her, but Barbara interposed her small body on the threshold.

“Don’t be a silly fool, Jaff.  You’ve pandered quite enough to her morbid vanity.  It’s your book, isn’t it?  You have given it birth.  You know better than anybody what is vital to it.  Just you send those proofs straight back to the publisher.  If you let her persuade you to change one word, as true as I’m standing here, I’ll tell her the whole thing, and damn the consequences!”

My exquisite Barbara’s rare “damns” were oaths in the strictest sense.  They connoted the most irrefragable of obligations.  She would no more think of breaking a “damn” than her marriage vows or a baby’s neck.

“Of course, I’m not going to let her touch the thing,” said Jaffery.  “But I don’t want her to look on me as a bullying brute.”

“It would be better, both for you and her, if she did,” snapped Barbara.  “The ordinary woman’s like the dog and the walnut tree.  It’s only the exceptional woman that can take command.”

I, who had been sitting calm, on the low parapet beneath the tenderly sprouting wistaria arbour, broke my philosophic silence.

“Observe the exceptional woman,” said I.

* * * * *

For a day or so Doria stood upon her dignity, treating Jaffery with cold politeness.  In the mornings she allowed him to wrap her up in her garden chair and attend to her comforts, and then, settled down, she would open a volume of Tolstoi and courteously signify his dismissal.  Jaffery with a hang-dog expression went with me to the golf-course, where he drove with prodigious muscular skill, and putted execrably.  Had it not been a question of good taste, to say nothing of human sentiment, I would have reminded him that the thing he was hitting so violently was only a little