which no argument could swerve him, to deliver the rest of his lecture
in the coal-cellar gave the meeting a jolt from which it never
recovered.
I have dwelt upon this incident, because it was the means of
introducing Cuthbert Banks to Mrs. Smethurst's niece, Adeline. As
Cuthbert, for it was he who had so nearly reduced the muster-roll of
rising novelists by one, hopped down from the table after his stroke,
he was suddenly aware that a beautiful girl was looking at him
intently. As a matter of fact, everyone in the room was looking at him
intently, none more so than Raymond Parsloe Devine, but none of the
others were beautiful girls. Long as the members of Wood Hills Literary
Society were on brain, they were short on looks, and, to Cuthbert's
excited eye, Adeline Smethurst stood out like a jewel in a pile of
coke.
He had never seen her before, for she had only arrived at her aunt's
house on the previous day, but he was perfectly certain that life, even
when lived in the midst of gravel soil, main drainage, and company's
own water, was going to be a pretty poor affair if he did not see her
again. Yes, Cuthbert was in love: and it is interesting to record, as
showing the effect of the tender emotion on a man's game, that twenty
minutes after he had met Adeline he did the short eleventh in one, and
as near as a toucher got a three on the four-hundred-yard twelfth.
I will skip lightly over the intermediate stages of Cuthbert's
courtship and come to the moment when--at the annual ball in aid of the
local Cottage Hospital, the only occasion during the year on which the
lion, so to speak, lay down with the lamb, and the Golfers and the
Cultured met on terms of easy comradeship, their differences
temporarily laid aside--he proposed to Adeline and was badly stymied.
That fair, soulful girl could not see him with a spy-glass.
'Mr. Banks,' she said, 'I will speak frankly.'
'Charge right ahead,' assented Cuthbert.
'Deeply sensible as I am of----'
'I know. Of the honour and the compliment and all that. But, passing
lightly over all that guff, what seems to be the trouble? I love you to
distraction----'
'Love is not everything.'
'You're wrong,' said Cuthbert, earnestly. 'You're right off it.
Love----' And he was about to dilate on the theme when she interrupted
him.
'I am a girl of ambition.'
'And very nice, too,' said Cuthbert.
'I am a girl of ambition,' repeated Adeline, 'and I realize that the
fulfilment of my ambitions must come through my husband. I am very
ordinary myself----'
'What!' cried Cuthbert. 'You ordinary? Why, you are a pearl among
women, the queen of your sex. You can't have been looking in a glass
lately. You stand alone. Simply alone. You make the rest look like
battered repaints.'
'Well,' said Adeline, softening a trifle, 'I believe I am fairly
