"My name is St. George," he answered as well as he could for virtual speechlessness.
The other members of the Guild were issuing from the room, and Mrs. Manners turned. She had a fashion of smiling enchantingly, as if to compensate her total lack of attention.
"Ladies," she said, "this is Mr. St. George, at last."
Then she went through their names to him, and St. George bowed and caught at the flying end of the name of the woman nearest him, and muttered to them all. The one nearest was a Miss Bella Bliss Utter, a little brown nut of a woman with bead eyes.
"Ah, Mr. St. George," said Miss Utter rapidly, "it has been a wonderful meeting. I wish you might have been with us. Fortunately for us you are just in time for our third floor council."
It had been said of St. George that when he was writing on space and was in need, buildings fell down before him to give him two columns on the first page; but any architectural manoeuvre could not have amazed him as did this. And too, though there had been occasions when silence or an evasion would have meant bread to him, the temptation to both was never so strong as at that moment. It cost St. George an effort, which he was afterward glad to remember having made, to turn to Mrs. Manners, who had that air of appointing committees and announcing the programme by which we always recognize a leader, and try to explain.
"I am afraid," St. George said as they reached the stairs, "that you have mistaken me, Mrs. Manners. I am not--"
"Pray, pray do not mention it," cried Mrs. Manners, shaking her little lamp-shade of a hat at him, "we make every allowance, and I am sure that none will be necessary."
"But I am with the _Evening Sentinel_," St. George persisted, "I am afraid that--"
"As if one's profession made any difference!" cried Mrs. Manners warmly. "No, indeed, I perfectly understand. We all understand," she assured him, going over some papers in one hand and preparing to mount the stairs. "Indeed, we appreciate it," she murmured, "do we not, Miss Utter?"
The little brown nut seemed to crack in a capacious smile.
"Indeed, indeed!" she said fervently, accenting her emphasis by briefly-closed eyes.
"Hymn books. Now, have we hymn books enough?" plaintively broke in Mrs. Manners. "I declare, those new hymn books don't seem to have the spirit of the old ones, no matter what _any one_ says," she informed St. George earnestly as they reached an open door. In the next moment he stood aside and the Readers' Guild filed past him. He followed them. This was pleasantly like magic.