"Oh, everybody's more or less English, in these days, you know," said he.

   "There's some truth in that," she admitted, with a laugh. "What a diverting piece of artifice this Wintergarten is, to be sure. Fancy arranging the electric lights to shine through a dome of purple glass, and look like stars. They do look like stars, don't they? Slightly overdressed, showy stars, indeed; stars in the German taste; but stars, all the same. Then, by day, you know, the purple glass is removed, and you get the sun—the real sun. Do you notice the delicious fragrance of lilac? If one hadn't too exacting an imagination, one might almost persuade oneself that one was in a proper open-air garden, on a night in May—Yes, everybody is more or less English, in these days. That's precisely the sort of thing I should have expected Victor Field to say."

   "By-the-bye," questioned the mandarin, "if you don't mind increasing my stores of knowledge, who

    is

   this fellow Field?"

   "This fellow Field? Ah, who indeed?" said she. "That's just what I wish you'd tell me."

   "I'll tell you with pleasure, after you've supplied me with the necessary data," he promised cheerfully.

   "Well, by some accounts, he's a little literary man in London," she remarked.

   "Oh, come! You never imagined that I was a little literary man in London," protested he.

   "You might be worse," she retorted. "However, if the phrase offends you, I'll say a rising young literary man, instead. He writes things, you know."

   "Poor chap, does he? But then, that's a way they have, sizing up literary persons?" His tone was interrogative.

   "Doubtless," she agreed. "Poems and stories and things. And book reviews, I suspect. And even, perhaps, leading articles in the newspapers."

   "

    Toute la lyre enfin?

   What they call a penny-a-liner?"

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