You see, I was going to live at last, and life for me meant irresponsibility.

"Ah!" I said, ironically, "you are going to be a sister to me, as they say." She might have come the bogy over me last night in the moonlight, but now … There was a spice of danger about it, too, just a touch lurking somewhere. Besides, she was good-looking and well set up, and I couldn't see what could touch me. Even if it did, even if I got into a mess, I had no relatives, not even a friend, to be worried about me. I stood quite alone, and I half relished the idea of getting into a mess—it would be part of life, too. I was going to have a little money, and she excited my curiosity. I was tingling to know what she was really at.

"And one might ask," I said, "what you are doing in this—in this…." I was at a loss for a word to describe the room—the smugness parading as professional Bohemianism.

"Oh, I am about my own business," she said, "I told you last night—have you forgotten?"

"Last night you were to inherit the earth," I reminded her, "and one doesn't start in a place like this. Now I should have gone—well—I should have gone to some politician's house—a cabinet minister's—say to Gurnard's. He's the coming man, isn't he?"

"Why, yes," she answered, "he's the coming man."

You will remember that, in those days, Gurnard was only the dark horse of the ministry. I knew little enough of these things, despised politics generally; they simply didn't interest me. Gurnard I disliked platonically; perhaps because his face was a little enigmatic—a little repulsive. The country, then, was in the position of having no Opposition and a Cabinet with two distinct strains in it—the Churchill and the Gurnard—and Gurnard was the dark horse.

"Oh, you should join your flats," I said, pleasantly. "If he's the coming man, where do you come in?… Unless he, too, is a Dimensionist."

"Oh, both—both," she answered. I admired the tranquillity with which she converted my points into her own. And I was very happy—it struck me as a pleasant sort of fooling….

"I suppose you will let me know some day who you are?" I said.

"I have told you several times," she answered.

"Oh, you won't frighten me to-day," I asserted, "not here, you know, and anyhow, why should you want to?"

"I have told you," she said again.

"You've told me you were my sister," I said; "but my sister died years and years ago. Still, if it suits you, if you want to be somebody's sister …"

"It suits me," she answered—"I want to be placed, you see."

I knew that my name was good enough to place anyone. We had been the Grangers of Etchingham since—oh, since the flood. And if the girl wanted to be my sister and a Granger, why the devil shouldn't she, so long as she would let me continue on this footing? I hadn't talked to a woman—not to a well set-up one—for ages and ages. It was as if I had come back from one of the places to which younger sons exile themselves, and for all I knew it might be the correct thing for girls to elect brothers nowadays in one set or another.

"Oh, tell me some more," I said, "one likes to know about one's sister. You and the Right Honourable Charles Gurnard are Dimensionists, and who are the others of your set?"

"There is only one," she answered. And would you believe it!—it seems he was Fox, the editor of my new paper.

"You select your characters with charming indiscriminateness," I said.
"Fox is only a sort of toad, you know—he won't get far."

"Oh, he'll go far," she answered, "but he won't get there. Fox is fighting against us."

"Oh, so you don't dwell in amity?" I said. "You fight for your own hands."

"We fight for our own hands," she answered, "I shall throw Gurnard over when he's pulled the chestnuts out of the fire."

I was beginning to get a little tired of this. You see, for me, the scene was a veiled flirtation and I wanted to get on. But I had to listen to her fantastic scheme of things. It was really a duel between Fox, the Journal-founder, and Gurnard, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Fox, with Churchill, the Foreign Minister, and his supporters, for pieces, played what he called "the Old Morality business" against Gurnard, who passed for a cynically immoral politician.

I grew more impatient. I wanted to get out of this stage into something more personal. I thought she invented this sort of stuff to keep me from getting at her errand at Callan's. But I didn't want to know her errand; I wanted to make love to her. As for Fox and Gurnard and Churchill, the Foreign Minister, who really was a sympathetic character and did stand for political probity, she might be uttering allegorical truths, but I was not interested in them. I wanted to start some topic that would lead away from this Dimensionist farce.

"My dear sister," I began…. Callan always moved about like a confounded eavesdropper, wore carpet slippers, and stepped round the corners of screens.