lord silverdale had gone and there was now no need for lillie to preserve the factitious cheerfulness with which she had listened to his usual poem, while her thoughts were full of other and even more depressing things. margaret linbridge's miracle had almost undermined the president's faith in the steadfastness of her sex; she turned mentally to the yet unaccepted wee winnie for consolation, condemning her own half-hearted attitude towards that sturdy soul, and almost persuading herself that salvation lay in spats. at any rate long skirts seemed the last thing in the world to find true women in.

but providence had not exhausted its miracles, and lillie was not to spend a miserable afternoon. the miracle was speeding along towards her on the top of an omnibus—a miracle of beauty and smartness. on reaching the vicinity of the old maid's club, the miracle, which was of course of the female gender, tapped the driver amicably upon the hat with her parasol and said "stop please." the petite creature was the spirit of self-help itself and scorned the aid of the gentleman in front of her, preferring to knock off his hat and crush the driver's so long as the independence of womanhood was maintained. but she maintained it charmingly and without malice and gave the conductor a sweet smile in addition to his fare as she tripped away to the old maids' club.

amicably said, "stop please."

lillie was fascinated the instant turple the magnificent announced "miss wilkins" in suave tones. the mere advent of a candidate raised her spirits and she found herself chatting freely with her visitor even before she had put her through the catechism. but the catechism came at last.

"why do i want to join you?" asked the miracle. "because i am disgusted with my lover—because i am a femme incomprise. oh, don't stare at me as if i were a medley of megrims and fashionable ailments, i'm the very opposite of that. mine is a buoyant, breezy, healthy nature, straightforward and simple. that's why i complain of being misunderstood. my lover is a poet—and the misunderstanding i have to endure at his hands is something appalling. every man is a bit of a poet where woman is concerned, and so every woman is more or less misunderstood, but when you are unfortunate enough to excite the affection of a real whole poet—well, that way madness lies. your words are twisted into meanings you never intended, your motives are misconstrued, and your simplest actions are distorted. silverplume, for it is the well-known author of 'poems of compassion' that i have had the misfortune to captivate, never calls without laying a sonnet next day; in which remarks, that must be most misleading to those who do not know me, occur with painful frequency. his allowance is two kisses per day—one of salutation, one of farewell. we have only been actually engaged two months, yet i have counted up two hundred and thirty-nine distinct and separate kisses in the voluminous 'sonnet series' which he has devoted to our engagement, and, what is worse, he describes himself as depositing them.

"'where at thy flower-mouth exiguous

the purple passion mantles to the brim.'

it sounds as if i was berouged like a dowager. purple passion, indeed! i let him kiss me because he appears to like it and because there seems something wrong about it—but as for really caring a pin one way or another, well, you miss dulcimer, know how much there is in that! this 'sonnet series' promises to be endless, the course of our acquaintanceship is depicted in its most minute phases with the most elaborate inaccuracy—if i smile, if i say: 'how do you do?' if i put my hand to my forehead, if i look into the fire, down go fourteen lines giving a whole world of significance to my meanest actions, and making himalayas out of the most microscopic molehills. i am credited with thoughts i never dreamed of and sentiments i never felt, till i ask myself whether any other woman was ever so cruelly misunderstood as i? i grow afraid to do or say anything, lest i bring upon my head a new sonnet. but even so i cannot help looking something or the other; and when i come to read the sonnet i find it is always the other. once i refused to see him for a whole week, but that only resulted in seven 'sonnets of absence,' imaginatively depicting what i was saying and doing each day, and containing a detailed analysis of his own sensations, as well as reminiscences of past happy hours together. most of them i had no recollection of, and the only one i could at all share was that of a morning we spent on the ramsgate cliffs where silverplume put his handkerchief over his face and fell asleep. in the last line of the sonnet it came out:

"'there mid the poppies of the planisphere,

i swooned for very joy and wearihead.'

but i knew it by the poppies. then, dear miss dulcimer, you should just see the things he calls me—'love's gonfalon and lodestar' and what-not. very often i can't even find them in the dictionary and it makes me uneasy. heaven knows what he may be saying about me! when he talks of

"'the rack of unevasive lunar things'

i do not so much complain, because it's their concern if they are libelled. it is different with incomprehensible remarks flung unmistakably at my own head such as

"'o chariest of caryatides.'

it sounds like a reproach and i should like to know what i have done to deserve it. and then his general remarks are so monotonously unintelligible. one of his longest poetical epistles, which is burnt into my memory because i had to pay twopence for extra postage, began with this lament:

"'o sweet are roses in the summer time

and indian naiads' weary walruses

and yet two-morrow never comes to-day.'

i cannot see any way out of it all except by breaking off our engagement. when we were first engaged, i don't deny i rather liked being written about in lovely-sounding lines but it is a sweet one is soon surfeited with, and silverplume has raved about me to that extent that he has made me look ridiculous in the eyes of all my friends. if he had been moderate, they would have been envious; now they laugh when they read of my wonderful charms, of my lithe snake's mouth, and my face which shames the sun and my epipsychidiontic eyes (whatever that may be) and my

"'wee waist that holds the cosmos in its span,'

and say he is poking fun at me. but silverplume is quite serious—i am sure of that, and it is the worst feature of the case. he carries on just the same in conversation, with the most improper allusions to heathen goddesses, and seems really to believe that i am absorbed in the sunset when i am thinking what to wear to-morrow. just to give you an idea of how he misinterprets my silence let me read to you one of his sonnets called:

"'moonshine.

"'walking a space betwixt the double naught,

the what is bound to be and what has been,

how sweet with thee beneath the moonlit treen,

o woman-soul immaculately wrought,

to sit and catch a harmony uncaught

within a world that mocks with margarine,

in chastened silence, mystic, epicene,

exchanging incommunicable thought.

"'diana, death may doom and time may toss,

and sundry other kindred things occur,

but hell itself can never turn to loss,

though mephistopheles his stumps should stir,

that day, when introduced at charing cross,

i smiled and doffed my silken cylinder.'

"another distressing feature about silverplume—indeed, i think about all men—is their continuous capacity for love-making. you know, my dear miss dulcimer, with us it is a matter of times and seasons—we are creatures of strange and subtle susceptibilities, sometimes we are in the mood for love and ready to respond to all shades of sentimentality, but at other moments (and these the majority) men's amorous advances jar horribly. men do not know this. ever ready to make love themselves they think all moments are the same to us as to them. and of all men, poets are the most prepared to make love at a moment's notice. so that silverplume himself is almost more trying than his verses."

"but after all you need not read them," observed lillie. "they please him and they do not hurt you. and you have always the consolation of remembering it is not you he loves but the paragon he has evolved from his inner consciousness. even taking into account his perennial affectionateness, your reason for refusing him seems scarcely strong enough."

"ah, wait a moment—you have not heard the worst! i might perhaps have tolerated his metrical misinterpretations—indeed on my sending him a vigorous protest against the inaccuracies of his last collection (they came out so much more glaringly when brought all together from the various scattered publications to which silverplume originally contributed them) he sent me back a semi-apologetic explanation thus conceived:

"'to celia.'

"(you know of course my name is diana, but that is his way.)

"''tis not alone thy sweet eyes' gleam

nor sunny glances,

for which i weave so oft a dream

of dainty fancies.

"''tis not alone thy witching play

of grace fantastic

that makes me chant so oft a lay

encomiastic.

"'both editors and thee i see,

thy face, their purses.

i offer heart and soul to thee,

to them my verses.'

"i was partially mollified by this, for if his poems were not merely complimentary, and he really got paid for them, one might put up with inspiring them. we were reconciled [pg 316] and he took me to a reception at the house of a wealthy friend of his, a fellow-member of the sonneteers' society. it was here that i saw a sight that froze my young blood and warned me upon the edge of what a precipice i was standing. when we got into the drawing-room, the first thing we saw was an awful apparition in a corner—a hideous, unkempt, unwashed man in a dressing-gown and slippers, with his eyes rolling wildly and his lips moving rhythmically. it was the host.

"'don't speak to him,' whispered the hostess. 'he doesn't see us. he has been like that all day. he came down to look to the decorations this morning, when the idea took him and he has been glued to the spot ever since. he has forgotten all about the reception—he doesn't know we're here and i thought it best not to disturb him till he is safely delivered of the sonnet.'

"'you are quite right,' everybody said in sympathetic awestruck tones and left a magic circle round the poet in labor. but i felt a shudder run through my whole being. 'goodness gracious, silverplume,' i said, 'is this the way you poets go on?'"

"'no, no, diana,' he assured me. 'it is all tommyrot (i quote silverplume's words). the beggar is just bringing out a new volume, and although his wife has always distributed the most lavish hospitality to the critics, he has never been able to get himself taken seriously as a poet. there will be lots of critics here to-night and he is playing his last card. if he is not a genius now, he never will be.'

the poet plays his last card.

"'oh, of course,' i replied sceptically, 'two of a trade.' i made him take me away and that was the end of our engagement. even as it was, silverplume's neglect of his appearance had been a constant thorn in my side, and if this was so before marriage, what could i hope for after? it was all very well for him to say his friend was only shamming, but even so, how did i know he would not be reduced to that sort of thing himself when his popularity faded and younger rivals came along."

lillie, who seemed to have some arrière-pensée, entered into an animated defence of the poet, but miss wilkins stood her ground and refused to withdraw her candidature.

"i don't want you to withdraw your candidature," said lillie, frankly. "i shall be charmed to entertain it. i am only arguing upon the general question."

and, indeed, lillie was enraptured with miss wilkins. it was the attraction of opposites. a matter-of-fact woman who could reject a poet's love appealed to her with irresistible piquancy. miss wilkins stayed on to tea (by which time she had become diana) and they gossiped on all sorts of subjects, and lillie gave her the outlines of the queerest stories of past candidates and in the old maids' club that afternoon all went merry as a marriage bell.

"well, good-bye, lillie," said diana at last.

"good-bye, diana," returned lillie. "now i understand you i hope you won't consider yourself a femme incomprmise any longer."

"it is only the men i complained of, dear."

"but we must ever remain incomprises by man," said lillie. "femme incomprise—why, it is the badge of all our sex."

"yes," answered diana. "a woman letting down her back hair is tragic to a man; to us she only recalls bedroom gossip. good-bye."

and nodding brightly the brisk little creature sallied into the street and captured a passing 'bus.