quarter of an hour. You must let me introduce you to her--she'll be so
glad to know you. I dare say she has read every blest word you've
written."

"I shall be delighted--I haven't written so very many," Overt pleaded,
feeling, and without resentment, that the General at least was vagueness
itself about that. But he wondered a little why, expressing this
friendly disposition, it didn't occur to the doubtless eminent soldier to
pronounce the word that would put him in relation with Mrs. St. George.
If it was a question of introductions Miss Fancourt--apparently as yet
unmarried--was far away, while the wife of his illustrious confrere was
almost between them. This lady struck Paul Overt as altogether pretty,
with a surprising juvenility and a high smartness of aspect, something
that--he could scarcely have said why--served for mystification. St.
George certainly had every right to a charming wife, but he himself would
never have imagined the important little woman in the aggressively
Parisian dress the partner for life, the alter ego, of a man of letters.
That partner in general, he knew, that second self, was far from
presenting herself in a single type: observation had taught him that she
was not inveterately, not necessarily plain. But he had never before
seen her look so much as if her prosperity had deeper foundations than an
ink-spotted study-table littered with proof-sheets. Mrs. St. George
might have been the wife of a gentleman who "kept" books rather than
wrote them, who carried on great affairs in the City and made better
bargains than those that poets mostly make with publishers. With this
she hinted at a success more personal--a success peculiarly stamping the
age in which society, the world of conversation, is a great drawing-room
with the City for its antechamber. Overt numbered her years at first as
some thirty, and then ended by believing that she might approach her
fiftieth. But she somehow in this case juggled away the excess and the