and of course Stella hadn't time to meet any other men. Perhaps she wouldn't have believed there were any if it hadn't been for Marian. Marian knew them; she knew them literally in dozens, and they were generally in love with her, and they always wanted to make her laugh and to do dull things for her. Stella used to be afraid sometimes that Marian, in an embarrassment of riches, might overlook her destiny. But Marian knew what she wanted and was perfectly certain that she would sooner or later get it. Stella had no such knowledge; she had long ago come to the conclusion that the simplest way of dealing with her life was to like what she had.

She took a scientific secretaryship at nineteen, and left it only at twenty-six, when her scientist, who was very stout and nearly sixty, died inconveniently from curried lobster. He left Stella an interesting experience, of which she could make no immediate use, and a testimonial which won her job at the town hall. It was very short. "This young woman," the learned scientist wrote, "is invaluable. She thinks without knowing it. I have benefited by this blessed process for seven years."

It did not seem to Stella that she was invaluable. She always saw herself in the light of the family failure, overlooking the fact that she was their main financial support.

Cicely was the practical and Eurydice the intellectual genius; but she was content if she could be the padding on which these jewels occasionally shone.

Sometimes she met Cicely in a tea-shop and had a real talk, but Eurydice was her chief companion. Eurydice shared with Stella nearly every thought that she had. She seized her on the stairs to retail her inspirations as Stella went up to take her things off. She sat on her bed late at night, and talked with interminable bitterness about the sharpness of life. Even while Stella buttoned up her boots and flung things at the last moment into her despatch-case, Eurydice pelted her with epigrams. She sometimes quoted Swinburne while Stella was jumping on the corner bus, till the bus-conductor told her not to let him catch her at it again. There was only one subject they did not discuss: neither of them voluntarily mentioned Mr. Bolt. Mr. Bolt was the editor of a magazine called "Shocks," to which Eurydice with trembling delight contributed weekly. Mr. Bolt had met her at a meeting of protest against Reticence, and he had taken to Eurydice at once; and almost at once he told her that her charm was purely intellectual. Emotionally he was appealed to only by fair, calm women with ample figures.

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