Vol. 97

No. 4

M

ISS ONORIA STRICKLAND lived in a semi-detached villa and had no nonsense about her. Many women repose through life upon lesser attributes; they may have a handsome profile, a gift for putting on their clothes, a skilful tongue, or a kind heart. Miss Strickland found rest in none of these minor alleviations of the spirit; she took her stand triumphantly upon her direct common sense.

No one could beat her there. "What," she would ask herself as she came to any crisis in her life or in the lives of her neighbors, "is the most sensible thing to do?" And when she had answered this question, she did it; or in cases where an action of her own was not indicated, she ordered it to be done by others.

She had lived at Little Ticklington for forty-five years, and all this time she had had her eyes open and said whatever came into her head, under the impression that she was expressing a peculiarly pure form of truth.

Her friends depended upon her and feared her. When they did n't want to depend upon her, they got out of her way.

Miss Strickland was continually discovering the deceitfulness of human nature,

but she never laid her finger upon its cause. She did not realize that the only way to keep on good terms with an aggressive personality is by the constant practice of evasion.

Miss Onoria Strickland was an exemplary citizen. She had earned her own living with talent and success from the age of twenty-one, and she had been a masterful, but helpful, daughter to her aged parents. They became aged a little prematurely under this assistance, and died within a year of each other.

Onoria had never felt lonely during the lifetime of her parents. She left home at nine o'clock every morning, and returned at five o'clock in the afternoon, except on Saturday, when she came back to lunch.

No one could have had a fuller life; she managed her parents, did the household accounts, worked in the garden, or took Prendergast for a walk. Prendergast was a pug-dog of a self-centered and exacting nature. He had been given to Mr. and Mrs. Strickland by an old friend of that name, and though Onoria had protested against the use of a surname for a pet dog as unsuitable and even ridiculous, her father and mother had querulously insisted that they wanted to call the pug "Prendergast" as a last tribute to their deceased

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friend; and as they were at this time feeble, and it was bad for them to insist, Onoria had wisely let her protest drop.

After her parents' death Prendergast became the pivot upon which the household turned. Onoria was not sensible about Prendergast; she adored him. He was the one licensed folly of her ordered life.

It must not be supposed that romance had passed Onoria by. It had fallen at her feet early in life, and when she discovered how much nonsense it had about it, she had kicked it ruthlessly away.

No one will ever know why Peter Gubbins worshiped Miss Strickland. He was a gentle, inoffensive youth, with a Iweak chin and bottlenecked shoulders; his strongest tastes were for magazines and barley sugar, and though he was easily convinced that he was

unsuitable, he continued to worship Onoria in a melancholy, but resigned, manner for twenty years.

Peter Gubbins was her next-door neighbor, and in time a certain element of relief mingled with his melancholy.

He had a large tabby-cat called Samson of which he was inordinately proud. Samson did not so much return, as passively accept, his master's nervous devotion. He was inconsiderate about sleeping in a basket,-inflexible arrangements, when they were not his own, galled him,-and though he knew his name perfectly, he had never been known to answer to it unless he had reason to believe that fish was at the other end. Peter Gubbins was very fond of all small and reasonably gentle animals, and often took Prendergast for a walk if Miss Strickland had n't time.

Peter Gubbins had a private income and wrote occasional articles and poems for magazines. The articles dealt with sweetpeas, on which he was an expert, and Roman Catholicism, on which he was not; but by dint of studying the works of exnuns and ex-monks he had arrived at some

very startling theories upon the Roman Catholic religion suitable for very lowchurch magazines. The poems were on certain aspects of nature that have unfortunately occurred to other persons in search of poetic subjects; still, they were occasionally published, and Mr. Gubbins signed them "Sirius." As he often wrote about stars, and always referred to them as "bright," his signature could not have been more appropriate. Obviously "Peter Gubbins" applauding the universe would not do.

He never showed the poems to Onoria, but they shared the articles on Rome, and sometimes Onoria liked them, though she felt them to be too milk-and-watery to do real justice to the subject. It was inconsistent of Onoria to have such a decided bias against Rome, for she was very fond of law and order and considered authority final. She said, "This settles it," about a dozen times a day, and no pope has ever made more ex-cathedra proclamations in the twenty-four hours.

Mr. Gubbins was by no means Onoria's greatest man friend; she merely saw the most of him. Men liked Onoria, and Onoria liked men. Women she despised. Men sought Onoria to tell her what they felt for other women, talked politics with her, and took a monstrous and secret pleasure in hearing her abuse her own sex; but