Mr. Rad­cliffe read his own maga­zine on the first of every month at seven o’clock in the morn­ing, from the wrap­per to the last ad­vert­ise­ment, be­fore any­body in Lon­don could tell him what was in it.

He did not read it in proof. In proof a maga­zine was a mat­ter of sheets and er­rors, and he left it to Hol­lis, the over­seer, who was paid to read for the printer and read noth­ing else; but on the first, with the ink scarcely dry and Albe­marle Street not yet awake, he read it as the town would read it, in his chair, with his tea going cold at his elbow, and he had found since he was a boy in Edin­burgh that it was the only way to know what he had pub­lished.

He read the very tem­per­ate art­icle in sup­port of the ma­gis­trates, and found it as tem­per­ate as he had paid for. He read Mr. Wray’s second paper on the Cock­ney School, and found it bet­ter than the first, and noted the two places in it where a para­graph stopped short. Mr. Wray’s para­graphs did not stop short. He knew whose pen­cil had stopped them. He did not think the worse of the paper for it, and he did not think it his busi­ness to say so. Then he read the Warden, be­cause it was in the num­ber, and be­cause Lord Ash­combe would write.

The el­ev­enth num­ber opened at a feast:

Between the King’s let­ter and the feast the Warden had let the Battle of Shrews­bury go by, the one battle of the reign that the town knew from the play­house, and not a blow of it on the page. Mr. Rad­cliffe, who had

asked on the first of Sep­tem­ber for a little more in­cid­ent, noted this as he noted everything that would not sell, and read on. There was a girl at that board, of whom he had not heard be­fore, and the num­ber had hardly begun be­fore it gave her a sen­tence to her­self:

Mr. Rad­cliffe stopped.

He had not a lit­er­ary memory. He had a com­mer­cial one. It kept what the town re­peated, and the town had been re­peat­ing Miss Mor­timer’s gown since August; so be­fore he had well fin­ished the sen­tence he knew that he had read it be­fore, or its sis­ter, and not in the Albe­marle. He got up and went to the press be­hind the door, where he kept every num­ber of every maga­zine in Lon­don that he had read at seven o’clock on the first of the month. He took out the Lud­gate for August, turned to the fourth num­ber of the Mor­timers, and found it near the end: Miss Mor­timer un­der­stood, be­tween the soup and the fish, that she would not be asked to Lady Harrow­gate’s.

He laid the two maga­zines side by side upon the table, the buff wrap­per and the blue, and read the two sen­tences twice over, slowly, as he read a bal­ance-sheet. Every fig­ure had been car­ried across but one.

He did not sup­pose for a mo­ment that the Author of the Mor­timers wrote the Warden. He knew who wrote the Warden. He was one of two men in Lon­don who did, and the other had writ­ten it. The first num­ber had been laid on this table el­even months ago by its au­thor, in a hand that Mr. Rad­cliffe had last seen at the foot of a deed of part­ner­ship; and he had kept the know­ledge ever since as he kept the deed, in a place where nobody else would come upon it. What he had not known until this minute was that the au­thor of the Warden read the Mor­timers; and read them, it ap­peared, with the at­ten­tion a man gives to a thing he means to take. And he re­membered, be­cause it was the kind of thing he did re­mem­ber, that on the first of Sep­tem­ber he had read the Lud­gate from cover to cover at seven o’clock, and that be­fore noon his prin­cipal pro­pri­etor had picked it up off this table and car­ried it away under his arm, and that he had sat af­ter­wards won­der­ing what the devil a man of ten thou­sand a year wanted with a rival’s maga­zine.

He knew now. It was not a thing that would in­terest the town, which did not read the Warden and would not have known the sen­tence if it had. It would in­terest Albe­marle Street a

great deal, and Pater­noster Row a great deal more; and it was worth, as far as Mr. Rad­cliffe could see, ex­actly as much as he did not say about it. That the Mor­timers had robbed the Warden first, in Sep­tem­ber, did not occur to him at all. He had read the para­graph in his own maga­zine in August, and again in Bal­dock’s in Sep­tem­ber, and had not known it for the same; for he kept only what the town re­peated, and the town had never re­peated the Warden. The one man who ever had was Lord Ash­combe, who had not read it. He put the August Lud­gate back in the press. Then he took the Oc­to­ber num­ber off the heap of other people’s maga­zines, which had been brought up from the shop at half past six, and laid it by it­self on the corner of the table nearest the door.

Mr. Lu­cius Wray called for his cop­ies at nine.

He was four-and-twenty, and hand­some in a way that he had not yet been made to pay for. He had been sent down from Christ Church for a reason that im­proved with every telling, and had quar­relled upon the strength of it with his father, who was a dean; and he had come up to Lon­don to make his name by his pen, and wrote in a cof­fee-house in Co­vent Garden, and dined on credit, and had never set foot in a count­ing-house in his life. There were per­haps three men in Lon­don who could do with a para­graph what he could do with one; he knew the names of all three, and spoke to none of them.

“I have been cut,” he said, be­fore he had sat down.

“I saw.”

“You saw. Hol­lis saw. The com­pos­itor saw, I dare say, and laughed; they al­ways know.” He took up a copy of the num­ber and turned to his own paper, which he had read four times already. “Two things. The two best things in the paper, and I do not say so lightly, be­cause there are a good many good things in it. The cook, and the lady of the Acad­emy. I said that the Author must keep a cook in Cheap­side, since he knows to a shil­ling what the tur­bot cost and has not the least no­tion who is asked to eat it. And I said that the Acad­emy ad­mit­ted flower-paint­ing as it had ad­mit­ted Miss Moser, out of po­lite­ness, and had been re­lieved of both in May. It was the best sen­tence I have writ­ten this year.”

“It was a cruel one,” said Mr. Rad­cliffe. “She is not five months dead.”

“All the best sen­tences are cruel. It is how one knows them.” Mr. Wray turned a page. “But he left me the rail­ings. I sup­pose be­cause they were true; it is the only thing he ever asks of a sen­tence. And be­cause they were his: he gave them me at your table in August, over the port. One would think

he had been to Gros­venor Square.”

“He lives there.”

“I know where he lives,” said Mr. Wray. “I have been let in.”

Mr. Kin­ross came in at half past nine, with­out being an­nounced.

Mr. Wray rose, and bowed, an inch lower than a man bows who means it. “I have been thank­ing Mr. Rad­cliffe for your cor­rec­tions, sir.”

“They were not cor­rec­tions,” said Mr. Kin­ross. “You had two things wrong.”

“Which two?”

“Miss Moser was a bet­ter painter than you are a writer. And the Author has never kept a cook.”

Mr. Wray laughed. He had a good laugh, and he used it as other men use a sword-cane. “You know the Author, then?”

“No. I know how a man writes who has.”

“And the rail­ings?”

“The rail­ings were right.”

“I know,” said Mr. Wray. “You said so at the time.”

Mr. Rad­cliffe, who had been look­ing at the win­dow, said: “The Lud­gate is on the corner of the table, sir, if you want it.”

Mr. Kin­ross looked at the Lud­gate, lying by it­self on the corner nearest the door, where nobody had ever put a maga­zine be­fore; and then he looked at Mr. Rad­cliffe, who met his eye with the ex­pres­sion of a phys­i­cian who has just said that a pa­tient is com­fort­able. There was a short pause. Mr. Wray, who was read­ing him­self, did not look up.

“Thank you,” said Mr. Kin­ross, and took it.

It was the first thing, in all the years of their part­ner­ship, that Mr. Rad­cliffe had known about his prin­cipal pro­pri­etor which his prin­cipal pro­pri­etor had not told him; and when the door had closed he put it away, as he put away everything, in the place where he kept the things that would be worth more later.

*  *  *  *  *

Mr. Kin­ross walked to the Temple, where he kept the cham­bers that he had never needed for the law and had al­ways needed for this. He had walked there every day for a month, and Fen­wick had given up ask­ing whether he would take the car­riage, and had begun in­stead, he ob­served with­out re­mark, to have his boots brushed twice.

At the desk he read Mr. Wray first. He had read him already, in proof, with a pen­cil; but he wished to know what it was like to read him as the town would read him this morn­ing, with noth­ing in his hand.

It was very good. That was the worst of it.

The rail­ings were his own. He had writ­ten them first in the mar­gin of the August Lud­gate, with the brev­ity of a man who had never had to ex­plain him­self; and a week later, at Mr. Rad­cliffe’s table, when Mr. Wray asked him over the port what he made of the Mor­timers, he had told him, rail­ings and din­ner-hour to­gether, as he told any­body any­thing that was true, with­out look­ing to see who was listen­ing. He had thought no more of it until the proof came to him in the middle of Sep­tem­ber, and he found his two cor­rec­tions in it, grown to a para­graph. He had struck out Miss Moser, be­cause she was dead and could not an­swer, and the cook, be­cause it was not true; and he had let the rail­ings stand. He had known when he let them stand that they would be read on the first of Oc­to­ber by a young man with sis­ters; that they would be read on the same morn­ing, very likely in the same hour, as the Warden’s an­swer to him; and he had let them stand, be­cause they were true, and be­cause the al­tern­at­ive was to be a man who struck out what was true when it was in­con­veni­ent to him, and he had no in­ten­tion, at two-and-thirty, of be­gin­ning. He found now, read­ing them with the town, that he did not like him­self for it, and that he would do it again. It is the con­di­tion which in other men is called prin­ciple, and which his aunt called a great pity.

Then he opened the Lud­gate.

This month’s num­ber was about Mr. Mor­timer. The Author had kept the prom­ise of the last, which he did not al­ways do, and had told the reader why Thomas gave no­tice. Mr. Mor­timer, hav­ing learned from some­body at his club that in the great houses every foot­man is called James, had called Thomas James for a month; and Thomas, who had been Thomas in Man­chester for el­even years, had borne it for a month and gone, with

his box cor­ded and one sen­tence at the door: I was Thomas in Man­chester, sir, and I find I can­not be James for thirty pounds. Mr. Mor­timer could not see it. Mrs. Mor­timer could not see it. The but­ler, who could, was not asked. Mr. Kin­ross, who had lately begun to keep an hour on the first of the month for the Mor­timers, found that he was read­ing war­ily, and with reason. At the end of the num­ber the Author left Mr. Mor­timer alone in his din­ing-room with the de­canter and the know­ledge, and gave him this:

He did not need to take down the Warden’s an­swer to the King. He had writ­ten that sen­tence el­even times.

It was his again, as the foot­man had been his, and again it had been car­ried into a house where some­body knew what things cost, and had the price put into it: the nine years of the March were nine months of Mount Street, and the peace of a king­dom had be­come a house­keeper’s book with el­even hun­dred pounds at the foot of the page. But the last clause was not his. He had not thought of it. It had not once oc­curred to him, in the Marches or out of them, that a thing broken by its keeper might be past the keeper’s mend­ing; and he sat with the Lud­gate in his hand and the Albe­marle open be­side it at Mr. Wray’s rail­ings, and con­sidered that he had that morn­ing, at his own leave and in his own maga­zine, broken some­thing that he did not see how he was to mend.

The young man had read the Warden’s an­swer to the King, then. In the first days of Sep­tem­ber, while the Warden was an­swer­ing him with the Lady Gwen­llian, he had been help­ing him­self again, and sent this to the press by the tenth of the month, be­fore he could have the least no­tion that the Warden had answered him at all. Each of them had answered a let­ter the other had not yet re­ceived. The post in this cor­res­pond­ence went once a month, on the first; and this morn­ing it had car­ried both an­swers at once, and had car­ried with them, in the Albe­marle, by the pro­pri­etor’s leave, Lu­cius Wray. Mr. Kin­ross had sent his first let­ter, that is to say, in the same post as a horse­whip; and he had packed the horse­whip him­self.

It oc­curred to him, sit­ting there, that he did not know what his own foot­men were called. He had never asked. Fen­wick would know; and for the first time in his life Mr. Kin­ross was

not per­fectly cer­tain that the names Fen­wick knew them by were their own.

He took up his pen­cil. Against the last clause of Mr. Mor­timer’s sen­tence, which was the only part of it that was not his, he wrote one word in the mar­gin, as he had writ­ten one word in August; and the word, this time, was true.

*  *  *  *  *

Clem­ency went up to the Row at noon, as she did on the first of every month, to look at her own num­ber in Bal­dock’s win­dow with­out buy­ing it.

It was there, in its blue-grey wrap­per, be­tween a volume of ser­mons and a treat­ise upon the dry rot, with the con­tents prin­ted down the front of it in the small, plain, Whig type that Mr. Bal­dock bought by the hun­dred­weight: The Mor­timers of Mount Street. No. VI. She looked at it for the proper length of time, which was the length of time a stranger might give it, and was turn­ing away when the win­dow of the of­fice above went up with a bang, and Mr. Bal­dock put his head out and called her in. He had never done it be­fore. She went up the stairs with the feel­ing, fa­mil­iar to any­one who has ever been sent for, of hav­ing already been found out in some­thing.

The Oc­to­ber Albe­marle lay open on his desk. He did not offer it to her. He put his hand flat upon it, as she had once put hers flat upon his counter, and said: “Mr. Wray has done you the hon­our.”

“Is it very bad?”

“It is clever,” said Mr. Bal­dock, who was an hon­est man. “He has read you. I told you they would.” He looked at her over his spec­tacles, which he wore for read­ing other men’s maga­zines and for noth­ing else. “He will sell three hun­dred Lud­gates for me be­fore Sat­urday. They al­ways do. I thought you had bet­ter hear it from me than from the Row.”

“May I see it?”

“You may take it home. I have an­other.” He did not take his hand off it. “I should read it at home, with the door shut. It is not a thing to read in a shop.”

“Then I will read it at home,” said Clem­ency, and did not take it, be­cause she found that she did not want to carry it through the streets; and Mr. Bal­dock, who un­der­stood her, put it away in his drawer with the Man­chester page and the August ac­counts, and changed the sub­ject, which was the kind­est thing he did all day.

The sub­ject he changed it to was not a com­fort­able one. They were to try Car­lile at Guild­hall this month, he said, for print­ing Paine; it was all over the Row; and the At­tor­ney-Gen­eral, hav­ing begun with Car­lile, was not thought likely to stop there. Mr. Bal­dock had prin­ted the names of the dead

from St. Peter’s Field in Sep­tem­ber, with their ages and their trades, in a smal­ler type than the rest of the num­ber be­cause there had not been room for them in any other. He did not say that they would come for the Lud­gate. He said that he had read his lease again on Tues­day night, which he had not done in two years, and that he had found it a very in­struct­ive doc­u­ment.

Clem­ency, who had paid the quarter’s rent in Salis­bury Square on Wed­nes­day, Michael­mas Day, with the whole of Sep­tem­ber’s seven guineas and the bet­ter part of August’s, con­sidered this for a mo­ment in the light of her own lease, which ran from quarter-day to quarter-day and con­tained no in­struc­tion at all.

“Then I had bet­ter write the sev­enth num­ber quickly,” she said, “while there is a Lud­gate to print it.”

Mr. Bal­dock laughed, which was what she had meant him to do. “Bring it by the tenth. If there is a Lud­gate on the first of No­vem­ber you shall be in it; and if there is not, you shall be paid for it all the same.” He meant it. She knew, and she thought that he knew, that it was not a thing a man could prom­ise who had read his lease on Tues­day night; and they par­ted on it, as people do part on a kind­ness that neither of them can af­ford.

She went home by Lud­gate Hill. There was a crowd at a print-shop win­dow halfway down, as there had been all Sep­tem­ber, five deep on the pave­ment, look­ing at the yeo­manry rid­ing down the people at Man­chester in red and black: col­oured by hand, at so much the dozen, by some­body’s daugh­ter in a back room, with rather more red than was strictly needed. She went by on the far side of the street, and did not look, and saw it all the same, and thought, as she turned down into Salis­bury Court, that she knew ex­actly how much red was needed, and that it was none of it hers to put in.

*  *  *  *  *

The Albe­marle came to Salis­bury Square on the first of Oc­to­ber, on the day it was pub­lished, which it had never done be­fore.

Mr. Pel­ham had read one art­icle in it in Hare Court be­fore his din­ner, and had laughed at it twice, and had sent it home with Kit at six o’clock, with his com­pli­ments to Mrs. Lyd­iard and the young ladies and his opin­ion that they would find it cap­ital. Kit brought it up the two pair of stairs to­gether with a bar­rel of oysters, which he had bought out of Michael­mas; his forty pounds had been paid on Wed­nes­day, and was, for the present, en­tire. It was a Fri­day, and there was fish, be­cause in Mrs. Lyd­iard’s house there was al­ways fish on a Fri­day; and the oysters, which Mrs. Lyd­iard said were very ex­tra­vag­ant and ate el­even of, made a feast of

it.

Kit read aloud. He read well, and knew it, and liked an audi­ence that could not get up and go; and he propped the Albe­marle against the water-jug and gave them Mr. Wray’s second paper on the Cock­ney School from the be­gin­ning, with the ex­pres­sion. Nobody at the table knew what Clem­ency wrote for the Lud­gate, bey­ond that it was a little, and was paid for, and was not the kind of thing that any­body in Salis­bury Square had ever asked to see.

Clem­ency knew what it was from the first sen­tence, be­cause Mr. Bal­dock had told her, and from the second, be­cause it named the Mor­timers. She went on eat­ing her fish.

“The Mor­timers!” said Lucy. “Oh, but I like the Mor­timers. Miss Harker lends them to me. I think them ex­cess­ively di­vert­ing.”

“Then you have no taste, and Mr. Wray will tell you so.” Kit found his place. “There is a kind of paint­ing which stands at the bot­tom of the art⁠—”

He gave them the flower-paint­ing, and the petals coun­ted, and the dew put in af­ter­wards; and Clem­ency, who had a port­fo­lio under her bed that nobody in the room had ever looked into, found that her hand was steady and that she could not taste the cod.

Mrs. Lyd­iard, who had been mend­ing a cuff of Kit’s with the air of a woman who does not listen to the maga­zines, said with­out look­ing up: “Miss Moser painted flowers.”

“Who?”

“Miss Moser. She was of the Royal Acad­emy.” Mrs. Lyd­iard drew her thread through. “The Queen had her to paint a whole room at Frog­more. Flowers from the floor to the ceil­ing. Nobody thought that the bot­tom of any­thing.”

“Did you know her, Mama?” said Lucy.

“Every­body knew of her.” There was a short pause. “She died in May.”

It was the first time that Clem­ency had ever heard her mother name a painter. She looked across the table, and Mrs. Lyd­iard said, “Go on, Kit,” in the voice in which she ordered the fish; and Kit went on. But the needle had stopped in the cuff, and it did not begin again, Clem­ency no­ticed, for the rest of the paper.

Then Kit came to the rail­ings.

He gave it the voice of a ver­dict, and lingered over the end of it: it de­scribes the draw­ing-room from the wrong side of the rail­ings.

“That’s a hit,” said Kit, de­lighted. “That’s a palp­able hit.”

“Is it true?” said Clem­ency.

“Of course it’s true. Pel­ham says so. Pel­ham dined in Gros­venor Square in the year el­even and has talked of noth­ing else since.” He re­filled his glass.

“The rail­ings go along the area, Clem, to keep you from fall­ing into the kit­chen. Any­body knows that.”

Any­body who had been let in knew it. She sat with her fork in her hand and saw, with the sud­den plain­ness with which one sees the mis­take in a sum that has been added up wrong for a month, where she had got her rail­ings. In Bread Street there had been posts along the kerb, to keep the carts off the pave­ment, and she had grown up be­hind them; and when she had needed a house in Gros­venor Square she had built it out of the only street she knew, and set the rail­ings where the posts were. She had never been in Gros­venor Square. She had never been in Mount Street. She had writ­ten six num­bers about a house in it, and sold them, and been liked for them by a lady in Rus­sell Square, and she had never once walked down it, be­cause one can­not walk down Mount Street with a par­cel, and she had never had any reason to be there with­out one.

“Have you any­thing in the Lud­gate this month, Clem?” said Kit, turn­ing the page.

“A little.”

“What about?”

“A foot­man.”

Kit laughed so much that he had to put the Albe­marle down. “Lord, Clem, you might write about some­thing,” he said; and Lucy laughed too, be­cause Kit had, and their mother said that she did not see that a foot­man was any laugh­ing mat­ter, she had known a great many; and the sup­per went on.

Clem­ency sat it out. She sat out the oysters, and Mr. Wray’s per­or­a­tion, and the cheese, and Kit’s opin­ion of the Cock­ney School, which was Mr. Pel­ham’s, be­cause to have got up and gone into the back room would have been to own that any of it was hers.

*  *  *  *  *

They went to bed at el­even. Kit left the Albe­marle on the table among the oyster shells, as he left everything, and Clem­ency waited until the house had done creak­ing, and then took it, and a candle, through to the back room, where the desk was.

She read Mr. Wray again by her­self, from the be­gin­ning, which was worse than hear­ing it. It was clever; Mr. Bal­dock was right. He had read her, and read her more care­fully than she had sup­posed any­body in Albe­marle Street read any­thing, and he had found the one thing in six num­bers that she could not have known, and had known that she could not have known it. She would go and look at Mount Street. She did not yet know how a woman walked down Mount Street with­out a par­cel, or what she would say to any­one who asked her what she was doing there; but she would find out, as she found out most things, by tak­ing more trouble

about it than it de­served.

Then she turned the page past Mr. Wray, be­cause the Warden was in the num­ber, and she read the Warden now. She sat down to it. It was one of the things she did not do.

The el­ev­enth num­ber opened at Lud­low at Michael­mas, which the Warden kept with a feast and Salis­bury Square had kept on Wed­nes­day with the rent; and there was a girl at the feast: a Welsh girl, a host­age, the first woman to whom the Warden had given a sen­tence of her own in el­even num­bers. Clem­ency did not know the sen­tence at once. She read it as one reads a let­ter in a strange hand, and she was halfway through the second clause be­fore the hand turned out to be her own.

She sat quite still.

It was Miss Mor­timer. It was Miss Mor­timer to the last stone, ex­cept where it was not: the soup and the fish had gone back four hun­dred years and be­come a grace and a dish, Lady Harrow­gate’s had be­come a high table, and the gown had been made for the feast in­stead of merely put on for it. And at the end, where she had writ­ten that the girl would not go up and change be­cause to change would be to admit that she had known, some­body had taken out the one word on which the whole sen­tence turned, and put in an­other; and the word was hoped.

It had been read, then. Not looked into, nor sub­scribed to, nor taken to pieces over the oysters, but read: the fourth num­ber, in August, through Mrs. Mor­timer’s car­riage and the din­ner at six, to the one sen­tence in it she had been proud of and had shown to nobody. And who­ever had read it had known that it was hers to be proud of, and had taken it, which was the only way of say­ing so that was open to him; and had sent it back to her on the first of Oc­to­ber, as she had sent him his on the first of Sep­tem­ber, so that she should know that it had been no­ticed. She had been right in every par­tic­u­lar but the last. A man of that kind did read the Mor­timers. He had read them, it seemed, as she read the Warden.

Over the roofs the gi­ants of St. Dun­stan’s began to strike twelve, and the first of Oc­to­ber went out with them.

She had never been able to de­cide what the girl in her port­fo­lio would look like at the mo­ment she un­der­stood. There was nobody in the room to see her face.

(To be con­tin­ued.)