is?" He pronounced it--it was familiar and descriptive--but I won't
reproduce it here. I don't know whether Leolin mentioned it to his
mother: she would have needed all the purity of the artist to
forgive him. I hated so to come across him that in the very last
years I went rarely to see her, though I knew that she had come
pretty well to the end of her rope. I didn't want her to tell me
that she had fairly to give her books away--I didn't want to see her
cry. She kept it up amazingly, and every few months, at my club, I
saw three new volumes, in green, in crimson, in blue, on the book-
table that groaned with light literature. Once I met her at the
Academy soiree, where you meet people you thought were dead, and she
vouchsafed the information, as if she owed it to me in candour, that
Leolin had been obliged to recognise insuperable difficulties in the
question of FORM, he was so fastidious; so that she had now arrived
at a definite understanding with him (it was such a comfort) that SHE
would do the form if he would bring home the substance. That was now
his position--he foraged for her in the great world at a salary.
"He's my 'devil,' don't you see? as if I were a great lawyer: he
gets up the case and I argue it." She mentioned further that in
addition to his salary he was paid by the piece: he got so much for
a striking character, so much for a pretty name, so much for a plot,
so much for an incident, and had so much promised him if he would
invent a new crime.

"He HAS invented one," I said, "and he's paid every day of his life."

"What is it?" she asked, looking hard at the picture of the year;
"Baby's Tub," near which we happened to be standing.

I hesitated a moment. "I myself will write a little story about it,