unconsciously, and she went on with her tremendous indictment.

"It isn't that I find fault with London for being so busy," she said
with strict impartiality, "for if being busy was a crime, I am sure
there are few of us here who would escape hanging. But take my life
here, or yours for that matter. Well, mine if you like. Often and often
I am alone from breakfast till lunch-time, but in those hours I get
through more that is worth doing than London gets through in a day and
a night. I have an hour at my music not looking about and wondering who
my neighbours are, but learning, studying, drinking in divine melody.
Then I have my letters to write, and you know what that means, and I
still have time for an hour's reading so that when you come to tell me
lunch is ready, you will find that I have been wandering through
Venetian churches or sitting in that little dark room at Weimar, or was
it Leipsic? How would those same hours have passed in London?

"Sitting perhaps for half an hour in the Park, with dearest Aggie
pointing out to me, with thrills of breathless excitement, a woman who
was in the divorce court, or a coroneted bankrupt. Then she would drag
me off to some terrible private view full of the same people all
staring at and gabbling to each other, or looking at pictures that made
poor me gasp and shudder. No, I am thankful to be back at my own sweet
Riseholme again. I can work and think here."

She looked round the panelled entrance-hall with a glow of warm content
at toeing at home again that quite eclipsed the mere physical heat
produced by her walk from the station. Wherever her eyes fell, those
sharp dark eyes that resembled buttons covered with shiny American
cloth, they saw nothing that jarred, as so much in London jarred. There
were bright brass jugs on the window sill, a bowl of pot-pourri on the