“I have told you,” she said again.

“You’ve told me you were my sister,” I said; “but my sister died years and years ago.  Still, if it suits you, if you want to be somebody’s sister ...”

“It suits me,” she answered—­“I want to be placed, you see.”

I knew that my name was good enough to place anyone.  We had been the Grangers of Etchingham since—­oh, since the flood.  And if the girl wanted to be my sister and a Granger, why the devil shouldn’t she, so long as she would let me continue on this footing?  I hadn’t talked to a woman—­not to a well set-up one—­for ages and ages.  It was as if I had come back from one of the places to which younger sons exile themselves, and for all I knew it might be the correct thing for girls to elect brothers nowadays in one set or another.

“Oh, tell me some more,” I said, “one likes to know about one’s sister.  You and the Right Honourable Charles Gurnard are Dimensionists, and who are the others of your set?”

“There is only one,” she answered.  And would you believe it!—­it seems he was Fox, the editor of my new paper.

“You select your characters with charming indiscriminateness,” I said.  “Fox is only a sort of toad, you know—­he won’t get far.”

“Oh, he’ll go far,” she answered, “but he won’t get there.  Fox is fighting against us.”

“Oh, so you don’t dwell in amity?” I said.  “You fight for your own hands.”

“We fight for our own hands,” she answered, “I shall throw Gurnard over when he’s pulled the chestnuts out of the fire.”

I was beginning to get a little tired of this.  You see, for me, the scene was a veiled flirtation and I wanted to get on.  But I had to listen to her fantastic scheme of things.  It was really a duel between Fox, the Journal-founder, and Gurnard, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.  Fox, with Churchill, the Foreign Minister, and his supporters, for pieces, played what he called “the Old Morality business” against Gurnard, who passed for a cynically immoral politician.

I grew more impatient.  I wanted to get out of this stage into something more personal.  I thought she invented this sort of stuff to keep me from getting at her errand at Callan’s.  But I didn’t want to know her errand; I wanted to make love to her.  As for Fox and Gurnard and Churchill, the Foreign Minister, who really was a sympathetic character and did stand for political probity, she might be uttering allegorical truths, but I was not interested in them.  I wanted to start some topic that would lead away from this Dimensionist farce.

“My dear sister,” I began....  Callan always moved about like a confounded eavesdropper, wore carpet slippers, and stepped round the corners of screens.  I expect he got copy like that.

“So, she’s your sister?” he said suddenly, from behind me.  “Strange that you shouldn’t recognise the handwriting....”

“Oh, we don’t correspond,” I said light-heartedly, “we are so different.”  I wanted to take a rise out of the creeping animal that he was.  He confronted her blandly.