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 work. Ordinary legitimate pride I should not have minded, but to go and boast of a beautiful, inspired book like that was to take away half its charm. 'How very interesting,' I murmured.

'That book took me just six months to write,' she was saying, as if I were an interviewer and had asked for all these facts. 'The first two months I only just dotted down things. I was living right away back in the slums as one of them. I guess you wouldn't have recognised me from one of those flower-women on the London pavements. I just did things wholesale. Then I went straight home and wrote hard. I revised it three times, and got writer's cramp twice, and thought I should have had to give over. But no, I kept on. I couldn't be bothered with a typewriter, though I've just been offered five hundred pounds—five hundred pounds,' she repeated impressively 'to say that I typed it with a Brinton typewriter. I own up I hesitated a bit. Five hundred pounds is five hundred pounds, and I could easily have typed the thing through afterwards so as to have had the type copy by me if anybody came along to nose around to see it.'

I gasped at her effrontery. The book was ruined for me utterly and for ever. I had no desire to finish it now, and closed it sadly and put it on the seat beside me. For an hour its authoress rattled on about it, until, fortunately, it was time for dinner, and I got a respite. Needless to say, I escaped her in the dining-car, where she was joined by a common-looking little man whom she called 'Phil.'