Wasn't it too bad? I might have been in the _Life and Letters_. You know
he mentions that stupid Madame Vodki, at whose house he first saw her."

"And did you see much of her after that?"

"Not during Rendle's life. You know she has lived in Europe almost
entirely, and though I used to see her off and on when I went abroad, she
was always so engrossed, so preoccupied, that one felt one wasn't wanted.
The fact is, she cared only about his friends--she separated herself
gradually from all her own people. Now, of course, it's different; she's
desperately lonely; she's taken to writing to me now and then; and last
year, when she heard I was going abroad, she asked me to meet her in
Venice, and I spent a week with her there."

"And Rendle?"

Mrs. Memorall smiled and shook her head. "Oh, I never was allowed a peep
at _him_; none of her old friends met him, except by accident. Ill-natured
people say that was the reason she kept him so long. If one happened in
while he was there, he was hustled into Anerton's study, and the husband
mounted guard till the inopportune visitor had departed. Anerton, you
know, was really much more ridiculous about it than his wife. Mary was too
clever to lose her head, or at least to show she'd lost it--but Anerton
couldn't conceal his pride in the conquest. I've seen Mary shiver when he
spoke of Rendle as _our poet_. Rendle always had to have a certain seat at
the dinner-table, away from the draught and not too near the fire, and a
box of cigars that no one else was allowed to touch, and a writing-table
of his own in Mary's sitting-room--and Anerton was always telling one of
the great man's idiosyncrasies: how he never would cut the ends of his
cigars, though Anerton himself had given him a gold cutter set with a