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An Introduction to Programming
Using Visual Basic®
Tenth Edition

David I. Schneider

University of Maryland

Boston Columbus Hoboken Indianapolis New York San Francisco

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Vice President, Editorial Director, ECS: Marcia Horton

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Printer/Binder: Courier/Kendallville

Cover and Insert Printer: Phoenix Color/Hagerstown

Credits and acknowledgments borrowed from other sources and

reproduced, with permission, in this textbook appear on the appropriate
page within text.

Copyright © 2017, 2014, 2011, 2006 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights
reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This publication is
protected by Copyright, and permission should be obtained from the
publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system,
or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
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Many of the designations by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their

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book, and the publisher was aware of a trademark claim, the designations
have been printed in initial caps or all caps.

The programs and applications presented in this book have been included
for their instructional value. They have been tested with care, but are not
guaranteed for any particular purpose. The publisher does not offer any
warranties or representations, nor does it accept any liabilities with respect
to the programs or applications.

MICROSOFT AND/OR ITS RESPECTIVE SUPPLIERS MAKE NO

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schneider, David I., author.
Title: An introduction to programming using Visual Basic / David I.
Schneider, University of Maryland.
Description: Tenth edition. | Boston : Pearson Education, [2017] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016003346| ISBN 9780134542782 | ISBN 0134542789
Subjects: LCSH: BASIC (Computer program language) | Visual Basic.
Classification: LCC QA76.73.B3 S333633 2017 | DDC 005.26/8--dc23 LC
record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003346

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN - 10: 0-13-454278-9

ISBN - 13: 978-0-13-454278-2

Attention Students
Installing Visual Studio
To complete the tutorials and programming problems in this book, you need
to install Visual Studio 2015 on your computer.

We recommend that you download Visual Studio Community 2015 from

the following Web site, and install it on your system:

www.visualstudio.com

Visual Studio Community 2015 is a free, full-featured development

environment, and is a perfect companion for this textbook.

Note: If you are working in your school’s computer lab, there

is a good chance that Microsoft Visual Studio has already been installed. If
this is the case, your instructor will show you how to start Visual Studio.

Installing the Student Sample

Program Files
The Student Sample Program files that accompany this book are available
for download from the book’s companion Web site at:

http://www.pearsonhighered.com/cs-resources
These files are required for many of the book’s tutorials. Simply download
the Student Sample Program files to a location on your hard drive where
you can easily access them.
 VideoNote Guide to VideoNotes
www.pearsonhighered.com/cs-resources

1. Chapter 2 Visual Basic, Controls, and Events

1. Textbox Walkthrough 22

2. Button Walkthrough27

3. Event Procedures 37

2. Chapter 3 Variables, Input, and Output

1. Numbers & Strings 56

2. Variable Scope 82

3. Input Boxes and Message Boxes 97

3. Chapter 4 Decisions

1. Relational and Logical Operators 115

2. If Blocks 122

3. Select Case Blocks 146

4. Listboxes, Radio Buttons, and Checkboxes for Input 160

4. Chapter 5 General Procedures

1. Function Procedures 180

2. Sub Procedures 197

3. Debugging Functions and Sub Procedures 218

 5. Chapter 6 Repetition

1. Pretest Do Loops 242

2. For . . . Next Loops 257

3. List Boxes and Loops 273

6. Chapter 7 Arrays

1. Declaring and Using Arrays 295

2. For Each Loops 302

3. LINQ 321

7. Chapter 8 Text Files

1. StreamReaders and StreamWriters 413

2. Exception Handling 419

8. Chapter 9 Additional Controls and Objects

9. 1. List Boxes and Combo Boxes 454

2. Timer, Picturebox, Menustrip, and Scrollbar Controls 463

3. Graphics 491

10. Chapter 10 Databases

1. Introduction to Databases 514

2. Querying Tables 521

3. Editing Databases 540

11. Chapter 11 Object-Oriented Programming

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1. Classes and Objects 552

2. Arrays of Objects 569

3. Inheritance 581
Guide to Application Topics
Business and Economics
Admission fee, 164

Airline reservations, 390, 508

Analyze a Loan case study, 376

Analyze fuel economy, 393

Analyze growth of chains, 372

Annuity, 69, 195, 240, 255, 269

APY, 142

Automated directory assistance, 392

Automobile depreciation, 268

Bank account, 600

Bond yield, 112

Break-even analysis, 68, 156

Business travel expenses, 510

Calculate a profit, 68, 127, 194

Calculate a tip, 137, 211

Calculate weekly pay, 138, 184, 223, 485, 567

Car loan, 176, 254, 269

Cash register, 567, 578, 579, 597

Cash reward, 157

Change from a sale, 138

Checking account transactions, 488

Compare interest rates, 141–42

Compare two salary options, 269

Compound interest, 172, 184, 195, 253, 268, 488

Consumer options, 158

Consumer price index, 254

Cost of a computer system, 169

Cost of a tour, 157

Cost of benefits, 165, 166

Cost of electricity, 88

Cost of flash drives, 171

Create sales receipt, 428

Credit card account, 222, 489

Crop production, 70, 271

Currency exchange rates, 534

Depreciation, 268, 286

Discounted price, 68, 87, 143

Display economic data in a bar chart, 270, 495, 502

Display economic data in a pie chart, 494, 502, 504

Dogs of the DOW, 360

Doubling time of an investment, 253, 285

Dow Jones Industrial Average, 360

Employee paycheck receipt, 579

FICA tax, 128, 229, 568

Future value, 91, 185

Gather billing information, 489

Generate an order form, 237

Growth of an investment, 195

Income tax, 140, 171

Individual Retirement Account, 288

Interest-Only mortgage, 598

ISBN code, 386

Itemized bill, 110, 237

Lifetime earnings, 268

Loan analysis, 111, 488

Loan calculator, 239

Mail-order company, 549

Maintain a membership list, 506

Manage telephone directories, 449

Marginal revenue and cost, 156

Marketing terms, 109

Membership fee, 171

Minimum wage, 502

Monetary units of countries, 528

Mortgage, 222, 254, 565

Mortgage with points, 598

Municipal bonds, 92

Number of restaurants in U.S., 70

Pay raise, 222

Payroll, 228, 485, 598

Percentage markup, 69

Postage costs, 194

Present value, 92

Price-to-earnings ratio, 89

Recording Checks and Deposits case study, 439

Rental costs, 175, 196

Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
 Early the next morning, as soon as she had entered the studio
and had begun to set her palette, preparatory to the day’s work,
Tommy Burgrave appeared on the gallery, with a “Hullo,
Clementina!” and ran down the spiral staircase. Clementina paused
with a paint tube in her hand.
“Look, my young friend, you don’t live here, you know,” she said
coolly.
“I’ll clear out in half a second,” he replied, smiling. “I’m bringing
you news. You ought to be very grateful to me. I’ve got you a
commission.”
“Who’s the fool?” asked Clementina.
“It isn’t a fool,” said Tommy, buttoning the belt of his Norfolk
jacket, as if to brace himself to the encounter. “It’s my uncle.”
“Lord save us!” said Clementina.
“I thought I would give you a surprise,” said Tommy.
Clementina shrugged her shoulders and went on squeezing paint
out of tubes.
“He must have softening of the brain.”
“Why?”
“First for wanting to have his portrait painted at all, and secondly
for thinking of coming to me. Go back and tell him I’m not a
caricaturist.”
Tommy planted a painting-stool in the middle of the floor and sat
upon it, with legs apart.
“Let us talk business, Clementina. In the first place, he has
nothing to do with it. He doesn’t want his portrait painted, bless you.
It’s the other prehistoric fossils he foregathers with. I met chunks of
them at dinner last night. They belong to the Anthropological
Society, you know, they fool around with antediluvian stones and
bones and bits of iron—and my uncle’s president. They want to have
his portrait to hang up in the cave where they meet. They were
talking about it at my end of the table. They didn’t know what
painter to go to, so they consulted me. My uncle had introduced me
as an artist, you know, and they looked on me as a sort of young
prophet. I asked them how much they were prepared to give. They
said about five hundred pounds—they evidently have a lot of money
to throw about—one of them, all over gold chains and rings, seemed
to perspire money, looked like a bucket-shop keeper. I think it’s he
who is presenting the Society with the portrait. Anyway that’s about
your figure, so I said there was only one person to paint my uncle
and that was Clementina Wing. It struck them as a brilliant idea, and
the end of it was that they told my uncle and requested me to sound
you on the matter. I’ve sounded.”
She looked at his confident boyish face, and uttered a grim
sound, halfway between a laugh and a sniff, which was her nearest
approach to exhibition of mirth, and might have betokened
amusement or pity or contempt or any two of these taken together
or the three combined. Then she turned away and, screwing up her
eyes, looked out for a few moments into the sodden back garden.
“Did you ever hear of a barber refusing to shave a man because
he didn’t like the shape of his whiskers?”
“Only one,” said Tommy, “and he cut the man’s throat from ear to
ear with the razor.”
He laughed loud at his own jest, and, going up to the window
where Clementina stood with her back to him, laid a hand on her
shoulder.
“That means you’ll do it.”
“Guineas, not pounds,” said Clementina, facing him. “Five
hundred guineas. I couldn’t endure Ephraim Quixtus for less.”
“Leave it to me, I’ll fix it up. So long.” He ran up the spiral
staircase, in high good-humour. On the gallery he paused and leaned
over the balustrade.
“I say, Clementina, if the ugly young man calls to-day for that
pretty Miss Etta, and you want any murdering done, send for me.”
She looked up at him smiling down upon her, gay and handsome,
so rich in his springtide, and she obeyed a sudden impulse.
 “Come down, Tommy.”
When he had descended she unhooked from the wall over the
fireplace a Della Robbia plaque—a child’s white head against a
background of yellow and blue—a cherished possession—and thrust
it into Tommy’s arms. He stared at her, but clutched the precious
thing tight for fear of dropping it.
“Take it. You can give it as a wedding present to your wife when
you have one. I want you to have it.”
He stammered, overwhelmed by her magnificent and
unprecedented generosity. He could not accept the plaque. It was
too priceless a gift.
“That’s why I give it to you, you silly young idiot,” she cried
impatiently. “Do you think I’d give you a pair of embroidered braces
or a hymn-book? Take it and go.”
What Tommy did then, nine hundred and ninety-nine young men
out of a thousand would not have done. He held out his hand
—“Rubbish,” said Clementina; but she held out hers—he gripped it,
swung her to him and gave her a good, full, sounding, honest kiss.
Then, holding the thing of beauty against his heart he leaped up the
stairs and disappeared, with an exultant “Good-bye,” through the
door.
A dark flush rose on the kissed spot on Clementina’s cheek.
Softness crept into her hard eyes. She looked at the vacant place on
the wall where the cherished thing of beauty had hung. By some
queer optical illusion it appeared even brighter than before.
Tommy, being a young man of energy and enthusiasm with
modern notions as to the reckoning of time, rushed the
Anthropologists, who were accustomed to reckon time by epochs
instead of minutes, off their leisurely feet. His uncle had said words
of protest at this indecent haste; “My dear Tommy, if you were more
of a reflective human being and less of a whirlwind, it would
frequently add to your peace and comfort.” But Tommy triumphed.
Within a very short period everything was settled, the formal letters
had been exchanged, and Ephraim Quixtus found himself paying a
visit, in a new character, to Clementina Wing.
She received him in her prim little drawing-room—as prim and
old-maidish as Romney Place itself—a striking contrast to the
chaotically equipped studio which, as Tommy declared, resembled
nothing so much as a show-room after a bargain-sale. The furniture
was the stiffest of Sheraton, the innocent colour engravings of
Tomkins, Cipriani, and Bartolozzi hung round the walls, and in a
corner stood a spinning-wheel with a bunch of flax on the distaff.
The room afforded Clementina perpetual grim amusement. Except
when she received puzzled visitors she rarely sat in it from one
year’s end to the other.
“I haven’t seen you since the Deluge, Ephraim,” she said, as he
bent over her hand in an old-fashioned un-English way. “How’s
prehistoric man getting on?”
“As well,” said he, gravely, “as can be expected.”
Ephraim Quixtus, Ph.D., was a tall gaunt man of forty, with a
sallow complexion, raven black hair thinning at the temples and on
the crown of his head, and great, mild, china-blue eyes. A reluctant
moustache gave his face a certain lack of finish. Clementina’s quick
eye noted it at once. She screwed up her face and watched him.
“I could make a much more presentable thing of you if you were
clean shaven,” she said brusquely.
“I couldn’t shave off my moustache.”
“Why not?”
He started in alarm.
“I think the Society would prefer to have their President in the
guise in which he presided over them.”
“Umph!” said Clementina. She looked at him again, and with a
touch of irony; “Perhaps it’s just as well. Sit down.”
“Thank you,” said Quixtus, seating himself on one of the stiff
Sheraton chairs. And then, courteously; “You have travelled far since
we last met, Clementina. You are famous. I wonder what it feels like
to be a celebrity.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “In my case it feels like leading
apes in hell. By the way, when did I last see you?”
“It was at poor Angela’s funeral, five years ago.”
“So it was,” said Clementina.
There was a short silence. Angela was his dead wife and her
distant relation.
“What has become of Will Hammersley?” she asked suddenly.
“He has given up writing to me.”
“Still in Shanghai, I think. He went out, you know, to take over
the China branch of his firm—just before Angela’s death, wasn’t it?
It’s a couple of years or more since I have heard from him.”
“That’s strange; he was an intimate friend of yours,” said
Clementina.
“The only intimate friend I’ve ever had in my life. We were at
school and at Cambridge together. Somehow, although I have many
acquaintances and, so to speak, friends, yet I’ve never formed the
intimacies that most men have. I suppose,” he added, with a sweet
smile, “it’s because I’m rather a dry stick.”
“You’re ten years older than your age,” said Clementina, frankly.
“You want shaking up. It’s a pity Will Hammersley isn’t here. He
used to do you a lot of good.”
“I’m glad you think so much of Hammersley,” said Quixtus.
“I don’t think much of most people, do I?” she said. “But
Hammersley was a friend in need. He was to me, at any rate.”
“Are you still fond of Sterne?” he asked. “I think you are the only
woman who ever was.”
She nodded. “Why do you ask?”
“I was thinking,” he said, in his quiet, courtly way, “that we have
many bonds of sympathy, after all; Angela, Hammersley, Sterne, and
my scapegrace nephew, Tommy.”
 “Tommy is a good boy,” said Clementina, “and he’ll learn to paint
some day.”
“I must thank you for your very great kindness to him.”
“Bosh!” said Clementina.
“It’s a great thing for a young fellow—wild and impulsive like
Tommy—to have a good friend in a woman older than himself.”
“If you think, my good man,” snapped Clementina, reverting to
her ordinary manner, “that I look after his morals, you are very much
mistaken. What has it got to do with me if he kisses models and
takes them out to dinner in Soho?”
The lingering Eve in her resented the suggestion of a maternal
attitude towards the boy. After all, she was not five-and-fifty; she
was younger, five years younger than the stick of an uncle who was
talking to her as if he had stepped out of the pages of a Sunday-
school prize.
“He never tells me of the models,” replied Quixtus, “and I’m very
glad he tells you. It shows there is no harm in it.”
“Let us talk sense,” said Clementina, “and not waste time. You’ve
come to me to have your portrait painted. I’ve been looking at you. I
think a half-length, sitting down, would be the best—unless you
want to stand up in evening-dress behind a table, with presidential
gold chains and badges of office and hammers and water-bottles
——”
“Heaven forbid!” cried Quixtus, who was as modest a man as
ever stepped. “What you suggest will quite do.”
“I suppose you will wear that frock-coat and turn-down collar?
Don’t you ever wear a narrow black tie?”
“My dear Clementina,” he cried horrified, “I may not be the latest
thing in dandyism, but I’ve no desire to look like a Scotch deacon in
his Sunday clothes.”
“Vanity again,” said Clementina. “I could have got something
much better out of you in a narrow black tie. Still, I daresay I’ll
manage—though what your bone-digging friends want with a
portrait of you at all for, I’m blest if I can understand.”
With which gracious remark she dismissed him, after having
arranged a date for the first sitting.
“A poor creature,” muttered Clementina, when the door closed
behind him.
The poor creature, however, walked smartly homewards through
the murky November evening, perfectly contented with God and
man—even with Clementina herself. In this well-ordered world, even
the tongue of an eccentric woman must serve some divine purpose.
He mused whimsically on the purpose. Well, at any rate, she
belonged to a dear and regretted past, which without throwing an
absolute glamour around Clementina still shed upon her its softening
rays. His thoughts were peculiarly retrospective this evening. It was
a Tuesday, and his Tuesday nights for some years had been devoted
to a secret and sacred gathering of pale ghosts. His Tuesday nights
were mysteries to all his friends. When pressed for the reason of this
perennial weekly engagement, he would say vaguely; “It’s a club to
which I belong.” But what was the nature of the club, what the grim
and ghastly penalty if he skipped a meeting, those were questions
which he left, with a certain innocent mirth, to the conjecture of the
curious.
The evening was fine, with a touch of shrewdness in the air. He
found himself in the exhilarated frame of mind which is consonant
with brisk walking. He looked at his watch. He could easily reach
Russell Square by seven o’clock. He timed his walk exactly. It was
five minutes to seven when he let himself in by his latchkey. The
parlour-maid, emerging from the dining-room, met him in the hall
and helped him off with his coat.
“The gentlemen have come, sir.”
“Dear, dear,” said Quixtus, self-reproachfully.
“They’re before their time. It isn’t seven yet, sir,” said the parlour-
maid, flinging the blame upon the gentlemen. In speaking of them
she had just the slightest little supercilious tilt of the nose.
 Quixtus waited until she had retired, then, drawing something
from his own pocket, he put something into the pocket of each of
three greatcoats that hung in the hall. After that he ran upstairs into
the drawing-room. Three men rose to receive him.
“How do you do, Huckaby? So glad to see you, Vandermeer. My
dear Billiter.”
He apologised for being late. They murmured excuses for being
early. Quixtus asked leave to wash his hands, went out and returned
rubbing them, as though in anticipation of enjoyment. Two of the
men standing in front of the fire made way for him. He thrust them
back courteously.
“No, no, I’m warm. Been walking for miles. I’ve not seen an
evening paper. What’s the news?”
Quixtus never saw an evening paper on Tuesdays. The question
was a time-honoured opening to the kindly game he played with his
guests.
Now there is a reason for most things, even for a parlour-maid’s
tilt of the nose. The personal appearance of the guests would have
tilted the nose of any self-respecting parlour-maid in Russell Square.
They were a strange trio. All were shabby and out-at-elbows. All
wore the insecure, apologetic collar which is one of the most curious
badges of the down-at-heel. All bore on their faces the signs of
privation and suffering; Huckaby, lantern-jawed, black-bearded and
watery-eyed; Vandermeer, small, decrepit, pinched of feature, with
crisp, sparse red hair and the bright eyes of a hungry wolf; Billiter,
the flabby remains of a heavily built florid man, with a black
moustache turning grey. They were ghosts of the past, who once a
week came back to the plentiful earth, lived for a few brief hours in
the land that had been their heritage, talked of the things they had
once loved, and went forth (so Quixtus hoped) cheered and
comforted for their next week’s wandering on the banks of Acheron.
Once a week they sat at a friend’s table and ate generous food,
drank generous wine, and accepted help from a friend’s generous
hand. Help they all needed, and like desperate men would snatch it
from any hand held out to them. Huckaby had been a successful
coach at Cambridge; Vandermeer, who had forsaken early in life a
banking office for the Temple of Literary Fame, had starved for years
on free-lance journalism; Billiter, of Rugby and Oxford, had run
through a fortune. All waste products of the world’s factory. Among
the many things they had in common was an unquenchable thirst,
which they dissimulated in Russell Square; but they made up for it
by patronising their host. When a beneficiary is humble he is either
deserving or has touched the lowest depths of degradation.
Quixtus presided happily at the meal. With strangers he was shy
and diffident; but here he was at his ease, among old friends none
the less valued because they had fallen by the wayside. Into the
reason of their fall it did not concern him to inquire. All that
mattered was their obvious affection and the obvious brightness that
fortune had enabled him to shed on their lives.
“I wonder,” said he, with one of his sudden smiles, “I wonder if
you fellows know how I prize these evenings of ours.”
“They’re Attic Symposia,” said Huckaby.
“I’ve been thinking of a series of articles on them, after the
manner of the Noctes Ambrosianæ,” said Vandermeer.
“They would quite bear it,” Huckaby agreed. “I think we get
better talk here than anywhere else I know. I’m a sometime Fellow
of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,”—he rolled out the alliterative
phrase with great sonority—“and I know the talk in the Combination
Room; but it’s pedantic—pedantic. Not ripe and mellow like ours.”
“I’m not a brainy chap like you others,” said Billiter, wiping his
dragoon’s moustache, “but I like to have my mind improved, now
and then.”
“Do you know the Noctes, Huckaby?” asked Quixtus. “Of course
you do. What do you think of them?”
“I suppose you like them,” replied Huckaby, “because you are an
essentially scientific and not a literary man. But I think them dull.”
“I don’t call them dull,” Quixtus argued, “but to my mind they’re
pretentious. I don’t like their sham heartiness, their slap-on-the-
back-and-how-are-you-old-fellow tone, their impossible
Pantagruelian banquets——”
The hungry wolf’s face of Vandermeer lit up. “That’s what I like
about them—the capons—the pies—the cockaleeky—the haggises
——”
“I remember a supper-party at Oxford,” said Billiter, “when there
was a haggis, and one chap who was awfully tight insisted that a
haggis ought to be turned like an omelette or tossed like a pancake.
He tossed it. My God! You never saw such a thing in your life!”
So they all talked according to the several necessities of their
natures, and at last Quixtus informed his guests that he was to sit
for his portrait to Miss Clementina Wing.
“I believe she is really quite capable,” said Huckaby, judicially,
stroking his straggling beard.
“I know her,” cried Vandermeer. “A most charming woman.”
Quixtus raised his eyebrows.
“I’m glad to hear you say so,” said he. “She is a sort of distant
connection of mine by marriage.”
“I interviewed her,” said Vandermeer.
“Good Lord!” The exclamation on the part of Quixtus was
inaudible.
“I was doing a series of articles—very important articles,” said
Vandermeer, with an assertive glance around the table, “on Women
Workers of To-day, and of course Miss Clementina Wing came into it.
I called and put the matter before her.”
He paused dramatically.
“And then?” asked Quixtus amused.
“We went out to lunch in a restaurant and she gave me all the
material necessary for my article. A most charming woman, who I
think will do you justice, Quixtus.”
When his friends had gone, each, by the way, diving furtive and
searching hands into their great-coat pockets, as soon as they had
been helped into these garments by the butler—and here, by the
way also, be it stated that, no matter how sultry the breath of
summer or how frigid that of fortune, they never failed to bring
overcoats to hang, for all the world like children’s stockings for Santa
Claus, on the familiar pegs—when his friends were gone, Quixtus,
who had an elementary sense of humour, failed entirely to see an
expansive and notoriety-seeking Clementina lunching tête-à-tête at
the Carlton or the Savoy with Theodore Vandermeer. In point of fact,
he fell asleep smiling at the picture.
The next day, while he was at breakfast—he breakfasted rather
late—Tommy Burgrave was announced. Tommy, who had already
eaten with the appetite of youth, immediately after his cold bath,
declined to join his uncle in a meal, but for the sake of sociability
trifled with porridge, kidneys, cold ham, hot rolls and marmalade,
while Quixtus feasted on a soft-boiled egg and a piece of dry toast.
When his barmecide meal was over, Tommy came to the business of
the day. For some inexplicable, unconjecturable reason his monthly
allowance had gone, disappeared, vanished into the Ewigkeit. What
in the world was he to do?
Now it must be explained that Tommy Burgrave was an orphan,
the son of Ephraim Quixtus’s only sister, and his whole personal
estate a sum of money invested in a mortgage which brought him in
fifty pounds a year. On fifty pounds a year a young man cannot lead
the plenteous life as far as food and raiment are concerned, rent a
studio (even though it be a converted first-floor back, as Tommy’s
was) and a bedroom in Romney Place, travel (even on a bicycle, as
Tommy did) about England, and entertain ladies to dinner at
restaurants—even though the ladies may be only models, and the
restaurants in Soho. He must have other financial support. This
other financial support came to him in the guise of a generous
allowance from his uncle. But as the generosity of his instincts—and
who in the world would be a cynic, animated blight, curmudgeon
enough to check the generous instincts of youth?—as, I say, the
generosity of his instincts outran the generosity of his allowance,
towards the end of every month Tommy found himself in a most
naturally inexplicable position. At the end of the month, therefore,
Tommy came to Russell Square and trifled with porridge, kidneys,
cold ham, hot rolls and marmalade, while his uncle feasted on a
soft-boiled egg and a piece of dried toast, and, at the end of his
barmecide feast, came to business.
On the satisfactory conclusion thereof (and it had never been
known to be otherwise) Tommy lit a cigar—he liked his uncle’s
cigars.
“Well,” said he, “what do you think of Clementina?”
“I think,” said Quixtus, with a faint luminosity lighting his china-
blue eyes, “I think that Clementina, being an artist, is a problem. But
if she weren’t an artist and in a different class of life, she would be a
model old family servant in a great house in which the family, by no
chance whatever, resided.”
Tommy laughed. “It seemed tremendously funny to bring you
two together.”
Quixtus smiled indulgently. “So it was a practical joke on your
part?”
“Oh no!” cried Tommy, flaring up. “You mustn’t think that. There’s
only one painter living who has, her power—and I’m one of the
people who know it—and I wanted her to paint you. Besides, she is
a thorough good sort—through and through.”
“My dear boy, I was only jesting,” said Quixtus, touched by his
earnestness. “I know that not only are you a devotee—and very
rightly so—of Clementina—but that she is a very great painter.”
“All the same,” said Tommy, with a twinkle in his eyes, “I’m afraid
that you’re in for an awful time.”
“I’m afraid so, too,” said Quixtus, whimsically, “but I’ll get
through it somehow.”
He did get through it; but it was only “somehow.” This quiet,
courtly, dreamy gentleman irritated Clementina as he had irritated
her years ago. He was a learned man; that went without saying; but
he was a fool all the same, and Clementina had not trained herself
to suffer fools gladly. The portrait became her despair. The man had
no character. There was nothing beneath the surface of those china-
blue eyes. She was afraid, she said, of getting on the canvas the
portrait of a congenital idiot. His attitude towards life—the dilettante
attitude which she as a worker despised—made her impatient. By
profession he was a solicitor, head of the old-fashioned firm of
Quixtus and Son; but, on his open avowal, he neglected the
business, leaving it all in the hands of his partner.
“He’ll do you, sure as a gun,” said Clementina.
Quixtus smiled. “My father trusted him implicitly, and so do I.”
“A man or a woman’s a fool to trust anybody,” said Clementina.
“I’ve trusted everybody around me all my life, and no one has
done me any harm, and therefore I’m a happy man.”
“Rubbish,” said Clementina. “Any fraud gets the better of you.
What about your German friend Tommy was telling me of?”
This was a sore point. A most innocent, spectacled, bearded, but
obviously poverty-stricken German had called on him a few weeks
before with a collection of flint instruments for sale, which he alleged
to have come from the valley of the Weser, near Hameln. They were
of shapes and peculiarities which he had not met with before, and,
after a cursory and admiring examination, he had given the starving
Teuton twice as much as he had asked for the collection, and sent
him on his way rejoicing. With a brother palæontologist summoned
in haste he had proceeded to a minute scrutiny of his treasures.
They were impudent forgeries.
“I told Tommy in confidence. He ought not to have repeated the
story,” he said, with dignity.
“Which shows,” said Clementina, pausing so as to make her point
and an important brush-stroke—“which shows that you can’t even
trust Tommy.”
On another occasion he referred to Vandermeer’s famous
interview.
“You know a friend of mine, Vandermeer,” said he.
Clementina shook her head.
 “Never heard the name.”
He explained. Vandermeer was a journalist. He had interviewed
her and lunched with her at a restaurant.
Clementina could not remember. At last her knitted brow cleared.
“Good lord, do you mean a half-starved, foxy-faced man with his
toes through his boots?”
“The portrait is unflattering,” said he, “but I’m afraid there’s a
kind of resemblance.”
“He looked so hungry and was so hungry—he told me—that I
took him to the ham-and-beef shop round the corner and stuffed his
head with copy while he stuffed himself with ham and beef. To say
that he lunched with me at a restaurant is infernal impudence.”
“Poor fellow,” said Quixtus. “He has to live rather fatly in
imagination so as to make up for the meagreness of his living in
reality. It’s only human nature.”
“Bah,” said Clementina, “I believe you’d find human nature in the
devil.”
Quixtus smiled one of his sweet smiles.
“I find it in you, Clementina,” he said.
Thus it may be perceived that the sittings were not marked by
the usual amenities of the studio. The natures of the two were
antagonistic. He shrank from her downrightness; she disdained his
ineffectuality. Each bore with the other for the sake of past
associations; but each drew a breath of relief when freed from the
presence of the other. Although he was a man of wide culture
beyond the bounds of his own particular subject, and could talk well
in a half-humorous, half-pedantic manner, her influence often kept
him as dumb as a mummy. This irritated Clementina still further. She
wanted him to talk, to show some animation, so that she could seize
upon something to put upon the dismaying canvas. She talked
nonsense, in order to stimulate him.
“To live in the past as you do without any regard for the present
is as worthless as to go to bed in a darkened room and stay there
for the rest of your life. It’s the existence of a mole, not of a man.”
He indicated, with a wave of the hand, a Siennese predella on
the wall. “You go to the past.”
“For its lessons,” said Clementina. “Because the Old Masters can
teach me things. How on earth do you think I should be able to
paint you if it hadn’t been for Velasquez? To say nothing of the
æsthetic side. But you only go to the past to satisfy an idle curiosity.”
“Perhaps I do, perhaps I do,” he assented, mildly. “A knowledge
of the process by which a prehistoric lady fashioned her petticoat out
of skins by means of a flint needle and reindeer sinews would be of
no value to Worth or Paquin. But it soothes me personally to
contemplate the intimacies of the toilette of the prehistoric lady.”
“I call that abnormal,” said Clementina, “and you ought to be
ashamed of yourself.”
And that was the end of that conversation.
Meanwhile, in spite of her half-comic despair, the portrait
progressed. She had seized, at any rate, the man’s air of
intellectuality, of aloofness from the practical affairs of life.
Unconsciously she had invested the face with a spirituality which had
eluded her conscious analysis. The artist had worked with the inner
vision, as the artist always does when he produces a great work. For
the great work of an artist is not that before which he stands, and,
sighing, says; “This is fair, but how far away from my dreams!” That
is the popular fallacy. The great work is that which, when he regards
it on completion, causes him to say in humble admiration and
modest stupefaction: “How on earth did the dull clod that is I
manage to do it?” For he does not know how he accomplished it.
When a man is conscious of every step he takes in the execution of
a work of art, he is obeying the letter and not the spirit; he is a
juggler with formulas; and formulas, being mere analytical results,
have no place in that glorious synthesis which is creation—either of
a world or a flower or a poem. Clementina, to her astonishment,
regarded the portrait of Ephraim Quixtus, and, like the First Creator
regarding His work, saw that it was good.
“I should never have believed it,” she said.
“What?” asked Quixtus.
“That I should have got all this out of you,” said Clementina.
 CHAPTER III

W
e have heard much of a man in the land of Uz whose name
was Job. We know that he was perfect and upright, feared
God, and eschewed evil; and we are told how, on a
disastrous afternoon, messenger after messenger came to him to
announce one calamity after the other, culminating in the
annihilation of his entire family, and how the final scorbutic affliction
came shortly afterwards, the anti-climax, it must be confessed, of his
woes, which drove the patient man to open his mouth and curse his
day. Between Job and Dr. Quixtus I doubt whether the like avalanche
of disasters, Pelion on Ossa and Kinchinjunga on Pelion of
misfortunes, ever came thundering down on the head of an upright
and evil-eschewing human creature.
The tale of these successive misfortunes can only be briefly
narrated; for to examine in detail the train of circumstances which
led up to them, and the intricate nexus of human motive in which
they were complicated would be foreign to the purpose of this
chronicle. Except passively or negatively, perhaps, Quixtus had no
hand in their happening. As in the case of Job the thunderbolts fell
from a cloudless sky. His moral character was blameless, his position
as assured, his life as happy as the patriarch’s. He had done no man
harm all his days, and he had no cause to fear evil from any quarter.
A tithe or more of his goods he gave in generous charity; and not
only did he not proclaim the fact aloud like the Pharisee, but never
mentioned the matter to himself—for the simple reason that keeping
no accounts of his expenditure he had not the remotest notion of
the amount of his eleemosynary expenses. You would have far to go
to meet a man more free from petty-mindedness or vanity than
Ephraim Quixtus. He was mild, urbane, and for all his scholarly
reading, palæolithic knowledge, and wide travel, singularly modest.
If you contradicted him, instead of asserting himself, as most men
do, with increased vigour, he forthwith put back to find, if possible,
the flaw in his own argument. When complimented on his
undoubted attainments, he always sought to depreciate them. The
achievement of others, even in his own special department of
learning, moved his generous admiration. Yet he had one
extraordinary vanity—which made him fall short of the perfection of
his prototype in the land of Uz—the doctorial title which he
possessed by virtue of his Ph.D. degree from the University of
Heidelberg. Through signing his articles in learned publications
“Ephraim Quixtus, Ph.D.,” his brethren among the learned who rent
him respectfully to pieces in other learned publications, invariably
alluded to him as Dr. Quixtus. Through being thus styled by his
brethren both in print and conversation, he began to give his name
as Dr. Quixtus to the stentorian functionary at the doors of banquets
and receptions of the learned, and derived infinite gratification from
hearing it loudly proclaimed to all assembled. From that to
announcing himself as “Dr. Quixtus” to the parlour-maid or butler in
the homes of the worldly was but a step.
Now it may be questioned whether on the rolls kept by the
Incorporated Law Society there is a solicitor who would style himself
Doctor. It would be as foreign to the ordinary solicitor’s notions of
professional propriety as to interview his clients in a surplice. The
title does not suggest a solicitor—any more than Quixtus himself did
in person. He was a stranger, an anomaly, a changeling in the
Corporation. He ought never to have been a solicitor. He was a very
bad solicitor—and that was what the judge said, among other things
of a devastating nature, when he was giving evidence at a certain
memorable trial, which took place not long after he had re-entered
the stormy horizon of Clementina Wing, and his portrait had been
hung above the presidential chair of the Anthropological Society.
It is but justice to say that Quixtus was a solicitor not by choice
but by inheritance and filial affection. His father had an old-
fashioned lucrative family practice, into which, as it was his father’s
earnest desire, his kindly nature allowed him to drift. When his
father died suddenly, almost as soon as his articles were completed
and he was admitted into partnership, he stared in dismay at the
prospect before him. He could no more draw up a conveyance of
land, or administer a bankrupt estate, or prepare a brief for a
barrister, than he could have steered an Atlantic liner into New York
Harbour. And he had not the faintest desire to know how to draw up
a conveyance or administer an estate. Beyond acquiring from text-
books the bare information requisite for the passing of his
examinations, he had never attempted to probe deeper into the
machinery of the law. His mind attributed far greater importance to
the sharp flint instruments wherewith primitive men settled their
quarrels by whanging each other over the head than to the
miserable instruments on parchment which adjusted the sordid
wrangles of the present generation. By entering the profession he
had merely gratified a paternal whim. There had been a “Quixtus
and Son” in Lincoln’s Inn for a hundred years, and it was the dearest
wish of the old man’s heart that “Quixtus and Son” should remain
there in sæcula sæculorum. While his father was alive Ephraim had
scarcely thought of this desirable continuity. But his father dead, it
behoved him to see piously to its establishment.
The irksome part of the matter was that he had no financial
reason for proceeding with an abominated profession. As hunger
drives the wolves abroad, according to François Villon, so might
hunger have driven him from his palæolithic forest. But there was no
chance of his being hungry. Not only did his father and his mother
each leave him a comfortable fortune, but he was the declared heir
of an uncle, his father’s elder brother, who possessed large estates in
Devonshire, and had impressed Ephraim from his boyhood up as one
in advanced and palsied old age.
Yet “Quixtus and Son” had to be carried on. How? He consulted
the confidential clerk, Marrable, who had been in the office since
boyhood. Marrable at once suggested a solution of the difficulty
which almost caused Ephraim to throw himself into his arms for joy.
It was wonderful! It was immense! Quixtus welcomed it as Henry
VIII. welcomed Cromwell’s suggestion for getting rid of Queen
Katherine. The solution was nothing less than that Ephraim should
take him into partnership on generous terms. The deed of
partnership was drawn up and signed, and Quixtus entered upon a
series of happy and prosperous years. He attended the office
occasionally, signed letters and interviewed old family clients, whom
he entertained with instructive though irrelevant gossip until they
went away comforted. When they insisted on business advice
instead of comfort, he rang the bell, and Marrable appeared like a
djinn out of a bottle. Nothing could be simpler, nothing could work
more satisfactorily. Not only did clients find their affairs thoroughly
looked after, but they were flattered at having bestowed upon them
the concentrated legal acumen and experience of the firm. You may
say that, as a solicitor, Quixtus was a humbug; that he ought never
to have accepted the position. But show me a man who has never
done that which he ought not to have done, and you will show me
either an irresponsible idiot or an angel masquerading in mortal
vesture. I have my doubts whether Job himself before his trials was
quite as perfect as he is made out to be. Quixtus was neither idiot
nor angel. At the most he was a scholarly ineffectual gentleman of
comfortable means, forced by filial tenderness into a distasteful and
bewildering pursuit. He had neither the hard-heartedness to kill the
one, nor the strength of will to devote himself to the mastery of the
other. He compromised, you may say, with the devil. Well, the devil
is notoriously insidious, and Quixtus was entirely unconscious of
subscribing to a bargain. At any rate, the devil had a hand in his
undoing and appointed a zealous agent of iniquity in the person of
Mr. Samuel Marrable.
When Quixtus went to Lincoln’s Inn Fields one morning and
found, instead of his partner, a letter from him stating that he had
gone abroad and would remain there without an address for an
indefinite time, Quixtus was surprised. When he had summoned the
managing clerk and together they had opened Marrable’s safe, both
he and the clerk were bewildered; and after he had spent an hour or
two with a chartered accountant, for whom he had hurriedly
telephoned, he grew sick from horror and amazement. Later in the
day he heard through the police that a warrant was out for Samuel
Marrable’s arrest. In the course of time he learned that Samuel
Marrable had done everything that a solicitor should not do. He had
misappropriated trust-funds; he had made away with bearer-bonds;
he had falsified accounts; he had forged transfers; he had
speculated in wild-cat concerns; he had become the dupe of a gang
of company promoters known throughout the City as “Gehenna
Unlimited.” He had robbed the widow; he had robbed the orphan; he
had robbed the firm; he had robbed with impunity for many years;
but when, in desperation, he had tried to rob “Gehenna Unlimited,”
they were too much for him. So Samuel Marrable had fled the
country.
Thus fell the first thunderbolt. Quixtus saw the fair repute of
“Quixtus and Son” shattered in an instant, his own name tarnished,
himself—and this was the most cruel part of the matter—betrayed
and fooled by the man in whom he had placed his boundless trust.
Marrable, whom he had known since he was a child of five; with
whom he had gone to pantomimes, exhibitions, and such like
junketings when he was a boy; who had first guided his reluctant
feet through the mazes of the law; who had stood with him by his
father’s death-bed; who was bound to him by all the intimacies of a
lifetime; on whose devotion he had counted as unquestioningly as a
child on his mother’s love—Marrable to be a rogue and a rascal, not
a man at his wits’ end yielding to a sudden temptation, but a
deliberate, systematic villain—it was all but unthinkable. Yet here
were irrefragable proofs, as the law took its course. And all through
the nightmare time that followed until the trial—for the poor fugitive
was soon hunted down and haled back to London—when his days
were spent in helpless examination of confusing figures and
bewildering transactions, the insoluble human problem was
uppermost in his mind. How could the man have done these things?
Marrable had sobbed over his father’s grave and had put his arm
affectionately round his shoulders and led him away to the mourning
coach. Marrable had stood with him by another open grave, that of
his dead wife, and had comforted him with affectionate sympathy. To
the very end not a sinister look had appeared in his honest, capable
eyes. On the very day of his flight he had lunched with Quixtus in
the Savoy grill-room. He had laughed and jested and told Quixtus a
funny story or two. When they parted:
 “Shall I see you at the office this afternoon? No? Well good-bye,
Ephraim. God bless you.”
He had smiled and waved a cheery hand. How could a man
shower upon another his tears, his sympathy, his laughter, his
implied loyalty, his blessings, and all the time be a treacherous
scoundrel working his ruin? All his knowledge of Prehistoric Man
would not answer the question.
“I wonder whether there are many people in the world like
Marrable?” he questioned.
And from that moment he began to look at all clear-eyed honest
folk and speculate, in a dreary way, whether they were like Marrable.
The family honour being imperilled, duty summoned him to an
interview with Matthew Quixtus, his father’s elder brother, the head
of the family, and owner of a large estate at Croxton, in Devonshire,
and other vast possessions. He paid him a week-end visit. The old
man, nearly ninety, received him with every mark of courtesy. He
went out of his way to pay deference to him as a man of high
position in the learned world. Instead of the “Mr. Ephraim,” which
had been his designation in the house ever since the “Master
Ephraim” had been dropped in the dim past, it was pointedly as “Dr.
Quixtus” that butler and coachman and the rest of the household
heard him referred to. Quixtus, who had always regarded his uncle
as a fiery ancient, hot with family pride and quick to quarrel on the
point of honour, was greatly relieved by his unexpected suavity of
demeanour. He listened to his nephew’s account of the great
betrayal with a kindly smile, and wasted upon him bottles of the
precious ‘54 port which the butler, with appropriate ritual, only
brought up for the Inner Brotherhood of Dionysus. On all previous
occasions, Ephraim, at whose deplorably uncultivated palate the old
man had shrugged pitying shoulders, had been treated to an
unconsidered vintage put upon the table after dinner rather as a
convention than (in the host’s opinion) as a liquid fit for human
throttle. He was sympathetic over the disaster and alluded to
Marrable in picturesquely old-world terms of depreciation.
 “It’ll cost you a pretty penny, one way or the other,” said he.
“I shall have to make good the losses. I dare say I can make
arrangements extending over a period of years.”
“Fly kites, eh? Well, I shan’t live for ever. But I’m not dead yet.
By George, sir, no!” and his poor old hand shook pitifully as he raised
his glass to his lips. “My grandfather—your great grandfather lived to
be a hundred and four.”
“It will be a matter of pride and delight to all who know you,”
said Quixtus smiling and bowing, glass in hand, across the table, “if
you champion the modern world and surpass him in longevity.”
“The property will come in very handy though, won’t it?” asked
the old man.
“I confess,” said Quixtus, “that, if I pay the liabilities out of my
own resources, I may be somewhat embarrassed.”
“And what will you do with yourself when you’ve shut up the
shop?”
“I shall devote myself more closely to my favourite pursuits.”
The old man nodded and finished his glass of port.
“A damned gentlemanly occupation,” said he, “without any
confounded modern commercialism about it.”
Quixtus was pleased. Hitherto his uncle had not regarded his
anthropological studies with too sympathetic an eye. He had lived,
all his life, a country gentleman, looking shrewdly after his estates,
building cottages, draining fields, riding to hounds and shooting all
things that were to be shot in their season. In science and
scholarship he took no interest. It was therefore all the more
gratifying to Quixtus to hear his studious scheme of life so heartily
commended. The end of the visit was marked by the same amenity
as the beginning, and Quixtus returned to town somewhat
strengthened for the ordeal that lay before him.
Up to the time of the trial he had met with nothing but the kindly
sympathy of friends and the courteous addressing of those with
whom he came into business relations. His first battering against the
sharp and merciless edges of the world took place in open court. He
stood in the witness-box a lone, piteous spectacle, a Saint Sebastian
among witnesses, unsaved by miraculous interposition, like the lucky
Sebastian, from personal discomfort. That he was an upright
sensitive gentleman mattered nothing to judge and counsel; just as
the fact of Sebastian’s being a goodly and gallant youth did not
affect his would-be executioners. At every barb shot at him by judge
and counsel he quivered visibly. They were within their rights. In
their opinion, he deserved to quiver. At the back of their legal minds
they were all kindly gentlemen, and out of court had human minds
like yours and mine—but in their legal minds, Judge, Counsel for the
Prosecution, Counsel for the Defence, all considered Quixtus a
fortunate man in being in the witness-box at all; he ought to have
been in the dock. There had never been such fantastically culpable
negligence. He did not know this; he had not inquired into that; such
a transaction he had just been aware of but never understood; he
had not examined the documents in question. Everything brought
him by Marrable for signature, he signed as a matter of course,
without looking at it.
“If Mr. Marrable had brought you a cheque for £20,000 drawn in
his favour on your own private bankers, would you have signed it?”
asked Counsel.
“Certainly,” said Quixtus.
“Why?”
“I should not have looked at it.”
“But supposing the writing on the cheque had, as it were, leaped
to your eyes?”
“I should have taken it for granted that it had to do with the
legitimate business of the firm.”
“If that is the case,” remarked the judge, “I don’t think that men
like you ought to be allowed to go about loose.”
Whereat there arose laughter in court, and sudden, hellish hatred
of judges in the heart of Quixtus.
 “Can you give the court any reason why you drifted into such
criminal carelessness?” asked Counsel.
“It never entered my head to doubt my partner’s integrity.”
“Do you carry this childlike faith in human nature into all
departments of life?”
“Up to now I have had no reason to distrust my fellow creatures.”
“I congratulate you as a solicitor on having had a unique
experience,” said the judge acidly.
Counsel continued. “I put it to you—suppose two or three
plausible strangers told you a glittering tale, and one asked you to
entrust him with a hundred pounds to show your confidence in him
—would you do it?”
“I am not in the habit of consorting with vulgar strangers,”
retorted Quixtus, with twitching lip.
“Which means that you are too learned and lofty a person to deal
with the common clay of this low world?”
“I cannot deal with you,” said Quixtus.
Counsel grew red and angry, as there was laughter in which the
judge joined.
“The witness,” said the latter, “is not quite such a fool as he
would give us to imagine, Mr. Smithers.”
Thus the only blow that Quixtus could give was turned against
him. Also, Counsel, smarting under the hit, mishandled him severely,
so that at the end of his examination he stepped down from the
witness-box, less a man than a sentient bruise. He remained in court
till the very end, deathly pale, pain in his eyes, and his mouth drawn
into the lines of that of a child about to cry. The trial proceeded.
There was no doubt of the guilt of the miserable wretch in the dock.
The judge summed up, and it was then that he said the devastating
things about Quixtus that inflamed his newly born hatred of judges
to such an extent that it thenceforth blackened his candid and
benevolent soul. The jury gave their verdict without retiring, and
Marrable, at the age of sixty, was condemned to seven years’ penal
servitude.
Quixtus left the court dazed and broken. He was met in the
corridor by Tommy, who gripped him by the arm, led him down into
the street and put him into a cab. He had not been in court, being a
boy of delicate feelings.
“You must buck up, you know,” he said to the silent, grey-faced
man beside him. “It will all come right. What you want now is a jolly
stiff brandy-and-soda.”
Quixtus smiled faintly. “I think I do,” said he.
A few minutes later Tommy superintended the taking of his
prescription in the dining-room in Russell Square, and eyed Quixtus
triumphantly as he set down the empty glass.
“There! That’ll set you straight. There’s nothing like it.”
Quixtus held out his hand. “You’re a good boy, Tommy. Thanks
for taking care of me. I’ll be all right now.”
“Don’t you think I might be of some use if I stayed? It’s a bit
lonesome here.”
“I have a big box of stuff from the valley of the Dordogne, which
I haven’t opened yet,” said Quixtus. “I was saving it up for this
evening, so I shan’t be lonesome.”
“Well be sure to have a good dinner and a bottle of fizz,” said
Tommy. After which sage counsel he went reluctantly away.
Just as Clementina was sitting down to dinner Tommy rushed in
with a crumpled evening newspaper in his hand, incoherent with
rage. Had she seen the full report? What did she think of it? How
dared they say such things of a high-minded honourable gentleman?
Counsel on both sides were a disgrace to the bar, the judge a blot on
the bench. They ought not to be allowed to cumber the earth. They
ought to be shot on sight. Out West they would never have left the
court alive. Had he lived in a simpler age, or in a more primitive
society, the young Paladin would have gone forth and slaughtered
them in the bosom of their families. Fortunately, all he could do by
way of wreaking his vengeance was to tear the newspaper in half,
throw it on the floor, and stamp on it.
“Feel better?” asked Clementina, who had listened to his heroics
rather sourly. “If so, sit down and have some food.”
But Tommy declined nourishment. He was too sore to eat. His
young spirit revolted against the injustice of the world. It clamoured
for sympathy.
“Say you think it damnable.”
“Anything to do with the law is always damnable,” said
Clementina. “You shouldn’t put yourself within its clutches. Please
pass me the potatoes.”
Tommy handed her the dish. “I believe you’re as hard as nails,
Clementina.”
“All right, believe it,” she replied grimly. And she would not say
more, for in what she thought was her heart she agreed with the
judge.
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