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Dean, who was dispensing coffee, hailed her arrival cheerfully.
    “Come along! Here’s coffee that is coffee. Can nothing be done about the Hall coffee, Steve?”
    “Yes, if you’ll start a coffee-fund,” replied the Bursar. “I don’t know if you’ve ever worked out the finance of really first-class coffee for two hundred people.”
    “I know,” said the Dean. “It’s so trying to be grovellingly poor. I think I’d better mention it to Flackett. You remember Flackett, the rich one, who was always rather odd. She was in your year. Miss Fortescue. She has been following me round, trying to present the College with a tankful of tropical fish. Said she thought it would brighten the Science Lecture-Room.”
    “If it would brighten some of the lectures,” said Miss Fortescue, “it might be a good thing. Miss Hillyard’s Constitutional Developments were a bit gruesome in our day.”
    “Oh, my dear! Those Constitutional Developments! Dear me, yes—they, still go on. She starts every year with about thirty students and ends up with two or three earnest black men, who take every word down solemnly in note-books. Exactly the same lectures; I don’t think even fish would help them. Anyway, I said, ‘It’s very good of you. Miss Flackett, but I really don’t think they’d thrive. It would mean putting in a special heating system, wouldn’t it? And it would make extra work for the gardeners.’ She looked so disappointed, poor thing; so I said she’d better consult the Bursar.”
    “All right,” said Miss Stevens, “I’ll tackle Flackett, and suggest the endowment of a coffee-fund.”
    “ Much more useful than tropical fish,” agreed the Dean. “I’m afraid we do turn out some oddities. And yet, you know, I believe Flackett is extremely sound upon the life-history of the liver-fluke. Would anybody like a Benedictine with the coffee? Come along, Miss Vane. Alcohol loosens the tongue, and we want to hear all about your latest mysteries.”
    Harriet obliged with a brief resume of the plot she was working on.
    “Forgive me. Miss Vane, for speaking frankly,” said Miss Barton, leaning earnestly forward, “but after your own terrible experience, I wonder that you care about writing that kind of book.”
    The Dean looked a little shocked.
    “Well,” said Harriet, “for one thing, writers can’t pick and choose until they’ve made money. If you’ve made your name for one kind of book and then switch over to another, your sales are apt to go down, and that’s the brutal fact.” She paused. “I know what you’re thinking—that anybody with proper sensitive feeling would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don’t why proper feeling should prevent me from doing my proper job.”
    “Quite right,” said Miss de Vine.
    “But surely,” persisted Miss Barton, “you must feel that terrible crimes and the sufferings of innocent suspects ought to be taken seriously, and not in made into an intellectual game.”
    “I do take them seriously in real life. Everybody must. But should you say that anybody who had tragic experience of sex, for example, should never write an artificial drawing-room comedy?”
    “But isn’t that different?” said Miss Barton, frowning. “There is a lighter side to love; whereas there’s no lighter side to murder.”
    “Perhaps not, in the sense of a comic side. But there is a purely intellectual side to the detection.”
    “You did investigate a case in real life, didn’t you? How did you feel about that?”
    “It was very interesting.”
    “And, in the light of what you knew, did you like the idea of sending a man to the dock and the gallows?”
    “I don’t think it’s quite fair to ask Miss Vane that,” said the Dean. “Miss Barton,” she added, a little apologetically, to Harriet, “is interested in the sociological aspects of crime, and very eager for the reform of the penal