your work pretty trying." 

 "It is very trying. I often feel completely exhausted at the end of the day." 

 "Nerve strain," said Meldon.  "I don't wonder. It's a marvel how you stand it." 

 "Then I can't sleep," said Miss King.  "Often I can't sleep for two or three nights together." 

 "It surprises me to hear that you ever sleep at all. Don't they haunt you? I've always heard—" 

 "My people?" 

 "Yes, your people, if that's what you call them. I'd have thought they'd never have let you alone." 

 "Some of them do haunt me. I often cry when I think of them. It's very foolish, of course; but in spite of myself I cry." 

 "Then why on earth do you go on with it?" 

 "It's my art," said Miss King. 

 "I'm not an artist myself," said Meldon, "in any sense of the word, so I can't exactly enter into your feelings; but I should say, speaking as a complete outsider, that the proper thing for you would be to drop the whole thing, take to smoking a pipe instead of those horrid scented cigarettes, drink a bottle of porter before you go to bed, and then sleep sound." 

 Miss King sighed. There was something in the ideal which Meldon set before her which was very attractive. The details she ignored. Bottled porter was not a drink she cared for, and no woman, however emancipated, likes a pipe. In spite of the satisfaction she found in her literary success, there was in her a desire for quiet and restful ways of life. There was no doubt that she would sleep sounder at night if she lived simply, somewhere in the country, and forgot the excitements of the novelist's art. Meldon, indeed, did not seem to enjoy absolutely unbroken rest at night; but Miss King's imagination, although she wrote improper novels, did not insist on representing a baby as an inevitable part of domesticated life. She got no further than the dream of a peaceful house, with the figure of an inoffensive husband somewhere in the background. 

 

 

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