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them to catch their trains. They’ve been a rather
dull crowd so far, and this week’s new arrivals don’t seem much
different. Still, I suppose it’s all to the good that they should come
out here instead of going to Margate or Blackpool or places like that.
I’m sorry you didn’t like the Virginia Woolf—I thought it
quite marvellous. Mrs. Ripley writes that she’d like to borrow my notes
on Silesian minorities to use in a paper she’s getting up, so if she
calls, they’re in the third drawer of my bureau desk, but please
don’t mix up the other papers in it. I expect I shall be returning
to-day fortnight. I hope you’re managing all right in the flat, and
don’t forget to leave the cats their milk when you go out in the
mornings. This is in haste, as I simply haven’t a moment to spare.
    “Your affectionate sister,
    “FLORENCE.”
    That done, and the envelope sealed and addressed, Miss Faulkner wrote half
a dozen other letters, after which she packed them under her arm with her
usual mixed collection of books and papers, and went downstairs to the
post.
    There was a box inside the hotel lobby, but she preferred the short walk
to the little blue letter-box fixed to the lamp-post down the road. She
scampered out, through the swing-doors, into the warm glare of the pavement.
The sun was shining out of a sky that really was the blue of the picture-
postcards, and even the Jungfrau looked somewhat like the advertised
Jungfrau. Miss Faulkner, however, was not normally a person to rhapsodise
over such matters. She walked straight to the lamp-post, inserted the
letters, and walked back. Just as she climbed the hotel steps she noticed a
man sitting on the terrace outside the Hôtel Oberland, the bigger and much
more aristocratic hotel immediately opposite her own, which was the Hôtel
Magnifique de l’Univers. She felt sure he was the man whom the omnibus
had nearly driven down, and in seeking to verify the recognition she stared
so hard that when he chanced to glance up she felt that the only thing
possible to do was to smile. And having smiled, and having received in return
a slight but courteous bow, she felt she must at least say something to
excuse the smile. So she ran across the road and began: “I’m so
sorry about the omnibus dashing into you like that—I do hope you
weren’t really hurt. And I must say, even though it may be true that
you weren’t looking, that man does drive round corners rather
recklessly. It was very kind of you, anyhow, to take it as you did. I mean,
it saved a lot of delay and argument.”
    The man seemed surprised to be accosted thus and with such volubility.
“I assure you I haven’t even a bruise to show for it,” he
answered, looking her down with very blue eyes.
    “I’m so glad…. It’s marvellous weather, isn’t
it?”
    “Yes, great,” he replied.
    Miss Faulkner, smiling again, recrossed the road to her own hotel.
Obviously a gentleman, she had confirmed; his clothes, his accent, his
manner, all were satisfactory. For she had belonged to the Left Wing of the
English Labour Movement long enough to know that though you might attack
gentlemen, as a class, and even, as a measure of social reform, seek to
abolish them, they yet remained, as individuals, most charming and agreeable
people.
    For the rest of the time before dinner she busied herself with the
findings of a commission whose bulky minority report she had been somewhat
pointlessly carrying about all day.
    Miss Faulkner was the headmistress of a council-school in Bermondsey. She
was clever, successful, and possessed an abundance of energy as well as that
immense capacity for taking pains which, whatever else it is, certainly is
not genius. But, genius apart, she was a talented woman; she could speak
fluently at meetings, serve effectively on committees, and bully a
school-inspector into overlooking the fact that her children, though skilled
at clay-modelling