“I think we must be speaking of two different ladies. My Miss Mallow could not by the broadest interpretation be called impertinent.”

“Not to your face maybe. She does a fine job of ripping you up behind your back.”

“Indeed!” He looked stunned. “May I ask what she said? We are virtual strangers. It is odd she should speak to my discredit.”

“It is rather your works she dislikes than yourself.”

“I seem to recall she complimented me on the cantos.”

“Ask her sometime for her true opinion.”

“I am asking you, Hettie. What did she say?”

“My, how your head has become swollen! A fellow writer may not find a single fault in your work without your mounting your high horse. Well, it was nothing so very bad after all. She only took exception to your being chased by Indians and rescuing three women and emerging unscathed to attend a ball and dally with the governor’s wife the same night. I must say, it seemed a point well taken.”

He shrugged. “I am not a novelist who counts up the hours in a day, but a poet. Was there anything else?”

“She was not happy at your hogging the whole world for your setting. She is to launch her next heroine off into the cosmos and out-do you in wonders.”

“She is welcome to try her hand at it. I make no claim to having visited the stars. Is that the sort of thing she writes?”

A peal of laughter escaped Lady Melvine. “Good God, no! She was funning. Very down to earth indeed. She couldn’t be more so. Well, I have her three books here. See for yourself.”

“I don’t read novels.”

“Suit yourself. You’re missing a good bet.”

He picked up The Composition and glanced at it. “Very well, I’ll try it. It will lull me to sleep one night, I expect.”

“Indian giver!” Hettie charged. “Oh, by the way, if you chance to be speaking to her again, she knows you gave me the book-and the very day you received it, too, so don’t put your foot in it.”

With a tapered finger, he reached up and adjusted his black patch. “Now I wonder if that is what got her hackles up? I've already told her how much I enjoyed it.”

“Oh, when did you see her again?” Lady Melvine naturally had no hope of making a romantic conquest of her nephew, but she took a proprietary interest in his affairs.

“Last week. I found her a dead bore-not a word to say for herself, but she has an uncle whose acquaintance I could come to cherish.”

Hettie teased him to say more, knowing by his smile there was some joke in the matter, but he refused to satisfy her vulgar curiosity. The rout was a squeeze, at least until Lord Dammler took his leave, when several others left as well. He went to a club and lost half the money he had won the week before. As he was about to step out of his carriage before his apartment, his hand brushed Miss Mallow’s book, and with a shrug he carried the three slim volumes into the building. It was not yet late. Taking a glass of ale, he opened Volume One, skimming a line here and there. He smiled at a telling phrase or a description, and before long was reading in earnest. Unlike his aunt, he was a fast reader. Before he went to bed, rather late, he had finished the second volume, and before he had his breakfast in the morning, he finished the third and was converted to Miss Mallow’s growing list of supporters.

Had he been informed beforehand that the novel was about a youngish spinster and her boring aunt, living alone in a quiet neighbourhood with only a country person for romantic interest, he wouldn’t have opened the cover. But though nothing much happened, he kept turning the pages, eager to peer into the minds and hearts of these normal people. It had an air of reality about it- that, he fancied, was the trick. No preposterous doings of the sort he wrote about-no, to face the dreadful truth, here was literature, and what he wrote was claptrap. He sat musing for some time on the matter, and the more he compared the prim little lady’s work with his own tales, the more dissatisfied he became. He went out and bought copies of the other two novels, and spent an afternoon reading The Cat in the Garden. Having already met her uncle, he recognized him as the musical lady in The Composition. He marvelled at her nerve in serving up such a parody-she, who looked as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. She knew, of course, that the old boy didn’t read. But who was she writing about in this other one? He was convinced it was a real person, and one he was curious to meet. Tired with reading, he went out to a dinner party that evening and found himself seated beside “Silence” Jersey, the most renowned chatterbox in London. He smiled to think what Miss Mallow would make of her. The fact that she was never silent removed nine-tenths of the burden of conversation from him, and he thought again of Miss Mallow. On an impulse he decided he would call on her again-take her out for a drive to get her away from the babbling uncle, and see what she had to say for herself. He figured he could draw out a shy young lady without too much trouble. How the ton would goggle to see him driving in the park with an unknown little spinster! This too amused him.

Next day he stuck to his resolution, and prepared himself in the morning to pay her a visit. He was amazed to find himself a little nervous. Not in a missish quake, of course. He had supped with princes and dined with princesses, flirted with duchesses and countesses without a qualm, but he did feel a qualm at calling on this little lady no one had ever heard of. The thought had taken hold that she would be judging him, as she so obviously had judged her uncle, and found him wanting. What would she write of himself if she decided to slip him into one of her books? “A gentleman who brought Society to its knees with the aid of an eye patch and a piece of doggerel…" No, she would cut closer to the bone than that.

But when he was later confronted with the live novelist, the qualm seemed to have transferred itself from his bones to hers. She looked quite thunderstruck to see him in her saloon, but not so surprised that she failed to warn the butler there was no need to disturb Mr. Elmtree. No more than he did she want that tongue ruining their visit. Her mother, a sensible but not remarkable woman, sat with them for ten minutes, at the end of which time Dammler repeated the mention of a drive. “I will take good care of your daughter, ma’am,” he assured Mrs. Mallow.

“Prudence is pretty well able to take care of herself,” she replied.

“She is well named,” he smiled.

Prudence looked at him closely. At that instant she realized he was mere flesh and blood. The most pleasing combination of flesh and blood ever seen, perhaps, but a mere mortal after all. Her awe of him fled like a small cloud before a howling wind.

“I wonder how many times you have had to listen to that platitude,” he said as they went out the door.

“More times than I care to remember.”

“And it isn’t true either,” he said, giving her a hand into the carriage. It was far and away the grandest carriage Miss Mallow had ever been in. Papa had kept a little gig, and Uncle Clarence had a lumbering old coach that had been in the family twenty years. Dammler's was a spanking new one, shiny with a crest on the side. Silver mountings gleamed everywhere, and in the interior the seats and squabs were covered in real tiger skin.

“Oh, how savage!” she laughed.

The carriage seemed suddenly to be in very poor taste. “I am not prudent either, to have put my pelts to such a base use. I’m sorry I didn’t keep them for rugs.”

“Surely walking on them is no more noble than sitting on them?” she remarked.

It was a mere nothing-a thoughtless comment to fill time until they should be moving, but again it made him feel foolish.

“Why did you call me imprudent?” she asked, trying not to show in too obvious a manner her interest in this magnificent carriage. There were little doors and silver pulls mounted on the side, which raised her curiosity. “To have treated your uncle Elmtree so was a shabby trick, Miss Mallow.”

She looked at him in amazement. Could it be he considered meeting himself such a treat he felt her uncle to have been deprived because she told the servant not to call him? Certainly Clarence would think so, but for Dammler to suggest it himself was a piece of pride she could scarcely swallow without chewing it a bit.

“What have I said to make you hate me already, ma'am?" he asked. “I intended to be on my best behaviour. You must own you gave him a fine raking in The Composition.”

“Oh, you mean you read it?” she asked.

"Indeed I did, as soon as I could tear it out of Hettie’s hands. I lent it to her,” he added, not considering it a real lie, as he had no notion of returning the gift.

“Oh, but he never guessed, nor would he if he ever got round to reading it. How did you figure it out? My changing him to a woman fooled everyone else. Not even Mama suspected.”

“I saw what you were up to at once. Bach’s fugues are the Mona Lisa, and the baroque counterpoint is her foreshortening. I don’t think you worked in an analogy to the eyelashes, did you?”

It was horrid to laugh at Uncle Clarence, but so very nice to have someone who understood and did not disapprove, that she could not suppress a smile. “No, nor the symbols either-they are a recent innovation.”

“Lawrence will snap it up in no time,” he warned her with a quirk of his black wing of eyebrow, and a conspiratorial smile.

“And claim it for his own-that is another of his tricks to be watched out for. He took to putting on a bit of impasto to highlight the nose as soon as ever Uncle Clarence invented it.”

“Plagiarist! He’ll be posing them in three-quarters profile with their hands folded if we don’t keep a sharp eye on him. I adored your books. You are a real artist with words.”