"Well!" she said, with the accompanying sigh which denotes complete
content. "So he did it! Now, I should never have thought it! The last
person of the whole lot! Clever--very clever! Richard, you'll get all the
books that that man has written!"

Viner lighted his pipe, thrust his hands in the pockets of his trousers
and leaned back against the mantelpiece.

"My dear aunt!" he said half-teasingly, half-seriously. "You're worse
than a drug-taker. Whatever makes a highly-respectable, shrewd old lady
like you cherish such an insensate fancy for this sort of stuff?"

"Stuff?" demanded Miss Penkridge, who had resumed her knitting. "Pooh!
It's not stuff--it's life! Real life--in the form of fiction!"

Viner shook his head, pityingly. He never read fiction for his own
amusement; his tastes in reading lay elsewhere, in solid directions.
Moreover, in those directions he was a good deal of a student, and he
knew more of his own library than of the world outside it. So he shook
his head again.

"Life!" he said. "You don't mean to say that you think those things"--he
pointed a half-scornful finger to a pile of novels which had come in from
Mudie's that day--"really represent life?"

"What else?" demanded Miss Penkridge.

"Oh--I don't know," replied Viner vaguely. "Fancy, I suppose, and
imagination, and all that sort of thing--invention, you know, and so on.
But--life! Do you really think such things happen in real life, as those