? 
 
 d 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 THE OTHER HOUSE 
 THE SPOILS OF POYNTON 
 WHAT MAISIE KNEW 
 THE Two MAGICS 
 THE AWKWARD AGE 
 TERMINATIONS 
 EMBARRASSMENTS 
 THE PRIVATE LIFE 
 IN THE CAGE 
 THE SOFT SIDE 
 THE SACRED FOUNT 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 METHUEN & CO. 
 
 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 1903 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 BROKEN WINGS . . . . i 
 
 THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN . . . . 18 
 
 THE Two FACES . . ... 37 
 
 THE TONE OF TIME . . ... 50 
 
 THE SPECIAL TYPE . . ... 68 
 
 MRS. MEDWIN . . . ... 85 
 
 FLICKERBRIDGE . . . ... 105 
 
 THE STORY IN IT . . . . . 123 
 
 THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE . . . 139 
 
 THE BIRTHPLACE . . ... 179 
 
 THE PAPERS . . 228 
 
THE BETTEE SOKT 
 
 BROKEN WINGS 
 
 i 
 
 /"CONSCIOUS as he was of what was between them, though 
 V^/ perhaps less conscious than ever of why there should at 
 that time of day be anything, he would yet scarce have supposed 
 they could be so long in a house together without some word or 
 some look. It had been since the Saturday afternoon, and that 
 made twenty-four hours. The party five-and-thirty people, and 
 some of them great was one in which words and looks might 
 more or less have gone astray. The effect, none the less, he 
 judged, would have been, for her quite as for himself, that no 
 sound and no sign from the other had been picked up by either. 
 They had happened, both at dinner and at luncheon, to be so 
 placed as not to have to glare or to grin across ; and for the 
 rest they could each, in such a crowd, as freely help the general 
 ease to keep them apart as assist it to bring them together. One 
 chance there was, of course, that might be beyond their control. 
 He had been the night before half surprised at not finding her 
 his " fate " when the long procession to the dining-room solemnly 
 hooked itself together. He would have said in advance recog- 
 nising it as one of the sharp " notes " of Mundham that, should 
 the gathering contain a literary lady, the literary lady would, for 
 congruity, be apportioned to the arm, when there was a question 
 of arms, of the gentleman present who represented the nearest 
 thing to literature. Poor Straith represented " art," and that, no 
 doubt, would have been near enough had not the party offered 
 for choice a slight excess of men. The representative of art had 
 been of the two or three who went in alone, whereas Mrs. Harvey 
 had gone in with one of the representatives of banking. 
 
 It was certain, however, that she would not again be consigned 
 to Lord Belgrove, and it was just possible that he himself should 
 
2 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 not be again alone. She would be, on the whole, the most 
 probable remedy to that state, on his part, of disgrace ; and this 
 precisely was the great interest of their situation they were the 
 only persons present without some advantage over somebody 
 else. They hadn't a single advantage ; they could be named for 
 nothing but their cleverness; they were at the bottom of the 
 social ladder. The social ladder, even at Mundham, had as 
 they might properly have been told, as indeed practically they were 
 told to end somewhere ; which is no more than to say that, as 
 he strolled about and thought of many things, Stuart Straith had, 
 after all, a good deal the sense of helping to hold it up. Another 
 of the things he thought of was the special oddity for it was 
 nothing else of his being there at all, and being there in par- 
 ticular so out of his order and his turn. He couldn't answer for 
 Mrs. Harvey's turn. It might well be that she was in hers ; but 
 these Saturday-to-Monday occasions had hitherto mostly struck 
 him as great gilded cages as to which care was taken that the 
 birds should be birds of a feather. 
 
 There had been a wonderful walk in the afternoon, within the 
 limits of the place, to a far-away tea-house ; and, in spite of the 
 combinations and changes of this episode, he had still escaped 
 the necessity of putting either his old friend or himself to the 
 test. Also it had been all, he flattered himself, without the 
 pusillanimity of his avoiding her. Life was, indeed, well under- 
 stood in these great conditions; the conditions constituted in 
 their greatness a kind of fundamental facility, provided a general 
 exemption, bathed the hour, whatever it was, in a universal 
 blandness, that were all a happy solvent for awkward relations. 
 It was beautiful, for instance, that if their failure to meet amid so 
 much meeting had been of Mrs. Harvey's own contrivance he 
 couldn't be in the least vulgarly sure of it. There were places in 
 which he would have had no doubt, places different enough from 
 Mundham. He felt all the same and without anguish that these 
 were much more his places even if she didn't feel that they 
 were much more hers. The day had been warm and splendid, 
 and this moment of its wane with dinner in sight, but as across 
 a field of polished pink marble which seemed to say that wherever 
 in such a house there was space there was also, benignantly, 
 time formed, of the whole procession of the hours, the one 
 dearest to our friend, who on such occasions interposed it, when- 
 ever he could, between the set of impressions that ended and the 
 set that began with "dressing." The great terraces and gardens 
 were almost void; people had scattered, though not altogether 
 even yet to dress. The air of the place, with the immense house 
 
BROKEN WINGS 3 
 
 all seated aloft in strength, robed with summer and crowned with 
 success, was such as to contribute something of its own to the 
 poetry of early evening. This visitor, at any rate, saw and felt it 
 all through one of those fine hazes of August that remind you at 
 least, they reminded him of the artful gauze stretched across 
 the stage of a theatre when an effect of mystery or some particular 
 pantomimic ravishment is desired. 
 
 Should he, in fact, have to pair with Mrs. Harvey for dinner it 
 would be a shame to him not to have addressed her sooner ; and 
 should she, on the contrary, be put with someone else the loss 
 of so much of the time would have but the greater ugliness. 
 Didn't he meanwhile make out that there were ladies in the lower 
 garden, from which the sound of voices, faint, but, as always in 
 the upper air of Mundham, exceedingly sweet, was just now borne 
 to him ? She might be among them, and if he should find her 
 he would let her know he had sought her. He would treat it 
 frankly as an occasion for declaring that what had happened 
 between them or rather what had not happened was too 
 absurd. What at present occurred, however, was that in his 
 quest of her he suddenly, at the turn of an alley, perceived her, 
 not far off, seated in a sort of bower with the Ambassador. With 
 this he pulled up, going another way and pretending not to see 
 them. Three times already that afternoon he had observed her 
 in different situations with the Ambassador. He was the more 
 struck accordingly when, upward of an hour later, again alone 
 and with his state unremedied, he saw her placed for dinner next 
 his Excellency. It was not at all what would have been at 
 Mundham her right seat, so that it could only be explained by 
 his Excellency's direct request. She was a success ! This time 
 Straith was well in her view and could see that in the candle- 
 light of the wonderful room, where the lustres were, like the table, 
 all crystal and silver, she was as handsome as anyone, taking the 
 women of her age, and also as " smart " as the evening before, 
 and as true as any of the others to the law of a marked difference 
 in her smartness. If the beautiful way she held herself for 
 decidedly it was beautiful came in a great measure from the 
 good thing she professionally made of it all, our observer could 
 reflect that the poor thing he professionally made of it probably 
 affected his attitude in just the opposite way ; but they communi- 
 cated neither in the glare nor in the grin that he had dreaded. 
 Still, their eyes did now meet, and then it seemed to him that her 
 own were strange. 
 
4 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 II 
 
 SHE, on her side, had her private consciousness, and quite as full 
 a one, doubtless, as he, but with the advantage that, when the 
 company separated for the night, she was not, like her friend, 
 reduced to a vigil unalloyed. Lady Claude, at the top of the 
 stairs, had said, " May I look in in five minutes if you don't 
 mind ? " and then had arrived in due course and in a wonderful 
 new beribboned gown, the thing just launched for such occasions. 
 Lady Claude was young and earnest and delightfully bewildered 
 and bewildering, and however interesting she might, through 
 certain elements in her situation, have seemed to a literary lady, 
 her own admirations and curiosities were such as from the first 
 promised to rule the hour. She had already expressed to Mrs. 
 Harvey a really informed enthusiasm. She not only delighted in 
 her numerous books, which was a tribute the author had not 
 infrequently met, but she even appeared to have read them an 
 appearance with which her interlocutress was much less acquainted. 
 The great thing was that she also yearned to write, and that she 
 had turned up in her fresh furbelows not only to reveal this 
 secret and to ask for direction and comfort, but literally to make 
 a stranger confidence, for which the mystery of midnight seemed 
 propitious. Midnight was, indeed, as the situation developed, 
 well over before her confidence was spent, for it had ended by 
 gathering such a current as floated forth, with everything in 
 Lady Claude's own life, many things more in that of her adviser. 
 Mrs. Harvey was, at all events, amused, touched, and effectually 
 kept awake ; and at the end of half an hour they had quite got 
 what might have been called their second wind of frankness and 
 were using it for a discussion of the people in the house. Their 
 primary communion had been simply on the question of the 
 pecuniary profits of literature as the producer of so many admired 
 volumes was prepared to present them to an aspirant. Lady 
 Claude was in financial difficulties and desired the literary issue. 
 This was the breathless revelation she had rustled over a mile of 
 crimson velvet corridor to make. 
 
 " Nothing ? " she had three minutes later incredulously gasped. 
 " I can make nothing at all ? " But the gasp was slight compared 
 with the stupefaction produced in her by a brief further parley, 
 in the course of which Mrs. Harvey had, after a hesitation, taken 
 her own plunge. " You make so little wonderful you /" And 
 then, as the producer of the admired volumes simply sat there in 
 her dressing-gown, with the saddest of slow head-shakes, looking 
 suddenly too wan even to care that it was at last all out : " What, 
 
BROKEN WINGS 5 
 
 in that case, is the use of success and celebrity and genius ? You 
 have no success ? " She had looked almost awestruck at this 
 further confession of her friend. They were face to face in a 
 poor human crudity, which transformed itself quickly into an 
 effusive embrace. " You've had it and lost it ? Then when it 
 has been as great as yours one can lose it ? " 
 
 " More easily than one can get it." 
 
 Lady Claude continued to marvel. " But you do so much 
 and it's so beautiful ! " On which Mrs. Harvey simply smiled 
 again in her handsome despair, and after a moment found herself 
 again in the arms of her visitor. The younger woman had 
 remained for a little a good deal arrested and hushed, and had, 
 at any rate, sensitive and charming, immediately dropped, in the 
 presence of this almost august unveiling, the question of her own 
 thin troubles. But there are short cuts at that hour of night that 
 morning scarce knows, and it took but little more of the breath 
 of the real to suggest to Lady Claude more questions in such a 
 connection than she could answer for herself. " How, then, if 
 you haven't private means, do you get on ? " 
 
 " Ah ! I don't get on." ' 
 
 Lady Claude looked about. There were objects scattered in 
 the fine old French room. " You have lovely things." 
 
 " Two." 
 
 "Two?" 
 
 " Two frocks. I couldn't stay another day." 
 
 "Ah, what is that? I couldn't either," said Lady Claude 
 soothingly. " And you have," she continued, in the same spirit, 
 " your nice maid " 
 
 " Who's indeed a charming woman, but my cook in disguise ! " 
 Mrs. Harvey dropped. 
 
 " Ah, you are clever ! " her friend cried, with a laugh that was 
 as a climax of reassurance. 
 
 " Extraordinarily. But don't think," Mrs. Harvey hastened to 
 add, " that I mean that that's why I'm here." 
 
 Her companion candidly thought. " Then why are you ? " 
 
 " I haven't the least idea. I've been wondering all the while, 
 as I've wondered so often before on such occasions, and without 
 arriving at any other reason than that London is so wild." 
 
 Lady Claude wondered. " Wild ? " 
 
 " Wild ! " said her friend, with some impatience. " That's the 
 way London strikes." 
 
 " But do you call such an invitation a blow ? " 
 
 "Yes crushing. No one else, at all events, either," Mrs. 
 Harvey added, "could tell you why I'm here." 
 
6 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 Lady Claude's power to receive and it was perhaps her most 
 attaching quality was greater still, when she felt strongly, than 
 her power to protest. " Why, how can you say that when you've 
 only to see how everyone likes and admires you ? Just look at 
 the Ambassador," she had earnestly insisted. And this was what 
 had precisely, as I have mentioned, carried the stream of their 
 talk a good deal away from its source. It had therefore not 
 much further to go before setting in motion the name of Stuart 
 Straith, as to whom Lady Claude confessed to an interest good- 
 looking, distinguished, " sympathetic," as he was that she could 
 really almost hate him for having done nothing whatever to 
 encourage. He had not spoken to her once. 
 
 "But, my dear, if he hasn't spoken to me/" 
 
 Lady Claude appeared to regret this not too much for a hint 
 that, after all, there might be a difference. " Oh, but could he ? " 
 
 "Without my having spoken to him first?" Mrs. Harvey 
 turned it over. " Perhaps not ; but I couldn't have done that." 
 Then, to explain, and not only because Lady Claude was naturally 
 vague, but because what was still visibly most vivid to her was 
 her independent right to have been "made up" to: "And yet 
 not because we're not acquainted." 
 
 " You know him, then ? " 
 
 "But too well." 
 
 " You mean you don't like him ? " 
 
 " On the contrary, I like him to distraction." 
 
 "Then what's the matter?" Lady Claude asked with some 
 impatience. 
 
 Her friend hesitated but a moment. "Well, he wouldn't 
 have me." 
 
 "'Have 'you?" 
 
 "Ten years ago, after Mr. Harvey's death, when, if he had 
 lifted a finger, I would have married him." 
 
 "But he didn't lift it?" 
 
 " He was too grand. I was too small by his measure. He 
 wanted to keep himself; he saw his future." 
 
 Lady Claude earnestly followed. " His present position ? " 
 
 " Yes everything that was to come to him ; his steady rise 
 in value." 
 
 '" Has it been so great ? " 
 
 " Surely his situation and name. Don't you know his lovely 
 work and what's thought of it ? " 
 
 "Oh yes, I know. That's why " But Lady Claude 
 
 stopped. After which: "But if he's still keeping himself?" 
 
 " Oh, it's not for me," said Mrs. Harvey. 
 
BROKEN WINGS 7 
 
 " And evidently not for me. Whom then," her visitor asked, 
 " does he think good enough ? " 
 
 " Oh, these great people ! " Mrs. Harvey smiled. 
 
 " But we're great people you and I ! " And Lady Claude 
 kissed her good night. 
 
 " You mustn't, all the same," the elder woman said, " betray 
 the secret of my greatnesss, which I've told you, please remember, 
 only in the deepest confidence." 
 
 Her tone had a quiet purity of bitterness that for a moment 
 longer held her friend, after which Lady Claude had the happy 
 inspiration of meeting it with graceful gaiety. " It's quite for the 
 best, I'm sure, that Mr. Straith wouldn't have you. You've kept 
 yourself too ; you'll marry yet an ambassador ! " And with 
 another good night she reached the door. " You say you don't 
 get on, but you do." 
 
 " Ah ! " said Mrs. Harvey with vague attenuation. 
 
 "Oh yes, you do," Lady Claude insisted, while the door 
 emphasised it with a little clap that sounded through the still 
 house. 
 
 Ill 
 
 THE first night of The New Girl occurred, as everyone re- 
 members, three years ago, and the play is running yet, a fact 
 that may render strange the failure to be widely conscious of 
 which two persons in the audience were guilty. It was not till 
 afterward present either to Krs. Harvey or to Stuart Straith 
 that The New Girl was one of the greatest successes of modern 
 times. Indeed if the question had been put to them on the 
 spot they might have appeared much at sea. But this, I may 
 as well immediately say, was the result of their having found 
 themselves side by side in the stalls and thereby given most 
 of their attention to their own predicament. Straith showed 
 that he felt the importance of meeting it promptly, for he turned 
 to his neighbour, who was already in her place, as soon as her 
 identity had come distinct through his own arrival and subsidence. 
 . " I don't quite see how you can help speaking to me now." 
 
 Her face could only show him how long she had been aware 
 of his approach. "The sound of your voice, coming to me 
 straight, makes it indeed as easy for me as I could possibly 
 desire." 
 
 He looked about at the serried rows, the loaded galleries and 
 the stuffed boxes, with recognitions and nods; and this made 
 between them another pause, during which, while the music 
 
8 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 seemed perfunctory and the bustle that, in a London audience, 
 represents concentration increased, they felt how effectually, in 
 the thick, preoccupied medium, how extraordinarily, they were 
 together. 
 
 "Well, that second afternoon at Mundham, just before dinner, 
 I was very near forcing your hand. But something put me off. 
 You're really too grand." 
 
 " Oh ! " she murmured. 
 
 "Ambassadors," said Stuart Straith. 
 
 " Oh ! " she again sounded. And before anything more could 
 pass the curtain was up. It came down in due course and 
 achieved, after various intervals, the rest of its movements with- 
 out interrupting, for our friends, the sense of an evening of talk. 
 They said when it was down almost nothing about the play, and 
 when one of them toward the end put to the other, vaguely, 
 " Is a this thing going ? " the question had scarce the effect 
 of being even relevant. What was clearest to them was that the 
 people about were somehow enough taken up to leave them 
 at their ease but what taken up with they but half made out. 
 Mrs. Harvey had, none the less, mentioned early that her presence 
 had a reason and that she ought to attend, and her companion 
 had asked her what she thought of a certain picture made at 
 a given moment by the stage, in the reception of which he was 
 so interested that it was really what had brought him. These 
 were glances, however, that quickly strayed strayed, for instance 
 (as this could carry them far), in its coming to one of them 
 to say that, whatever the piece might be, the real thing, as they 
 had seen it at Mundham, was more than a match for any piece. 
 For it was Mundham that was, theatrically, the real thing ; better 
 for scenery, dresses, music, pretty women, bare shoulders, every- 
 thingeven incoherent dialogue ; a much bigger and braver 
 show, and got up, as it were, infinitely more " regardless." By 
 Mundham they were held long enough to find themselves, though 
 with an equal surprise, quite at one as to the special oddity 
 of their having caught each other in such a plight. Straith said 
 that he supposed what his friend meant was that it was odd he 
 should have been there ; to which she returned that she had been 
 imputing to him exactly that judgment of her own presence. 
 
 "But why shouldn't you be ? " he asked. " Isn't that just what 
 you are ? Aren't you, in your way like those people a child of 
 fortune and fashion ? " 
 
 He got no more answer to this for some time than if he had 
 fairly wounded her; he indeed that evening got no answer at 
 all that was direct. But in the next interval she brought out 
 
BROKEN WINGS 9 
 
 with abruptness, taking no account of some other matter he had 
 just touched, " Don't you really know ?" 
 
 She had paused. 
 
 "Know what?" 
 
 Again she went on without heeding. " A place like Mundham 
 is, for me, a survival, though poor Mundham in particular won't, 
 for me, have survived that visit for which it's to be pitied, isn't 
 it ? It was a glittering ghost since laid ! of my old time." 
 
 Straith at this almost gave a start. " Have you got a new 
 time?" 
 
 " Do you mean that you have ? " 
 
 " Well," said Straith, " mine may now be called middle-aged. 
 It seems so long, I mean, since I set my watch to it." 
 
 " Oh, I haven't even a watch ! " she returned with a laugh. 
 " I'm beyond watches." After which she added : " We might 
 have met more or, I should say perhaps, have got more out 
 of it when we have met." 
 
 " Yes, it has been too little. But I've always explained it by 
 our living in such different worlds." 
 
 Mrs. Harvey had an occasional incoherence. "Are you 
 unhappy ? " 
 
 He gave her a singular smile. " You said just now that you're 
 beyond watches. I'm beyond unhappiness." 
 
 She turned from him and presently brought out : " I ought 
 absolutely to take away something of the play." 
 
 "By all means. There's certainly something /shall take." 
 
 "Ah, then you must help me give it me." 
 
 " With all my heart," said Straith, " if it can help you. It's 
 my feeling of our renewal." 
 
 She had one of the sad, slow head-shakes that at Mundham 
 had been impressive to Lady Claude. " That won't help me." 
 
 " Then you must let me put to you now what I should have 
 tried to get near enough to you there to put if I hadn't been so 
 afraid of the Ambassador. What has it been so long our 
 impossibility ? " 
 
 " Well, I can only answer for my own vision of it, which is 
 which always was that you were sorry for me, but felt a sort 
 of scruple of showing me that you had nothing better than pity 
 to give." 
 
 " May I come to see you ? " Straith asked some minutes 
 after this. 
 
 Her words, for which he had also awhile to wait, had, in truth, 
 as little as his own the appearance of a reply. "Arc you un- 
 happy really ? Haven't you everything ? " 
 
io THE BETTER SORT 
 
 "You're beautiful!" he said for all answer. "Mayn't I 
 come?" 
 
 She hesitated. 
 
 " Where is your studio ? " 
 
 " Oh, not too far to reach from it. Don't be anxious ; I can 
 walk, or even take the bus." 
 
 Mrs. Harvey once more delayed. Then she answered : "Mayn't 
 I rather come there ? " 
 
 " I shall be but too delighted." 
 
 It was said with promptness, even precipitation ; yet the under- 
 standing, shortly after, appeared to have left between them a 
 certain awkwardness, and it was almost as if to change the subject 
 and relieve them equally that she suddenly reminded him of 
 something he had spoken earlier. "You were to tell me why 
 in particular you had to be here." 
 
 " Oh yes. To see my dresses." 
 
 "Yours!" She wondered. 
 
 " The second act. I made them out for them drew them." 
 
 Before she could check it her tone escaped. " You ? " 
 
 "I." He looked straight before him. "For the fee. And 
 we didn't even notice them." 
 
 "/didn't," she confessed. But it offered the fact as a sign of 
 her kindness for him, and this kindness was traceably what 
 inspired something she said in the draughty porch, after the 
 performance, while the footman of the friend, a fat, rich, im- 
 mensely pleased lady, who had given her a lift and then rejoined 
 her from a seat in the balcony, went off to make sure of the 
 brougham. "May I do something about your things?" 
 
 "'Do something'?" 
 
 " When I've paid you my visit. W>ite something about your 
 pictures. I do a correspondence," said Mrs. Harvey. 
 
 He wondered as she had done in the stalls. "For a paper?" 
 
 "The Blackport Banner. A 'London Letter.' The new 
 books, the new plays, the new twaddle of any sort a little 
 music, a little gossip, a little 'art.' You'll help me I need it 
 awfully with the art. I do three a month." 
 
 " You wonderful you ? " He spoke as I^dy Claude had done, 
 and could no more help it again than Mrs. Harvey had been able 
 to help it in the stalls. 
 
 " Oh, as you say, for the fee ! " On which, as the footman 
 signalled, her old lady began to plunge through the crowd. 
 
BROKEN WINGS n 
 
 IV 
 
 AT the studio, where she came to him within the week, her first 
 movement had been to exclaim on the splendid abundance of 
 his work. She had looked round charmed so struck as to be, 
 as she called it, crushed. "You've such a wonderful lot to 
 show." 
 
 " Indeed I have ! " said Stuart Straith. 
 
 " That's where you beat us" 
 
 "I think it may very well be," he went on, "where I beat 
 almost everyone." 
 
 "And is much of it new?" 
 
 He looked about with her. "Some of it is pretty old. But 
 my things have a way, I admit, of growing old extraordinarily 
 fast. They seem to me in fact, nowadays, quite ' born old.' " 
 
 She had the manner, after a little, of coming back to some- 
 thing. " You are unhappy. You're not beyond it. You're just 
 nicely, just fairly and squarely, in the middle of it." 
 
 " Well," said Straith, " if it surrounds me like a desert, so that 
 I'm lost in it, that comes to the same thing. But I want you to 
 tell me about yourself." 
 
 She had continued at first to move about, and had taken out 
 a pocket-book, which she held up at him. "This time I shall 
 insist on notes. You made my mind a blank about that play, 
 which is the sort of thing we can't afford. If it hadn't been for 
 my fat old lady and the next day's papers ! " She kept looking, 
 going up to things, saying, " How wonderful ! " and " Oh, your 
 way /" and then stopping for a general impression, something in 
 the whole charm. The place, high, handsome, neat, with two or 
 three pale tapestries and several rare old pieces of furniture, 
 showed a perfection of order, an absence of loose objects, as if 
 it had been swept and squared for the occasion and made almost 
 too immaculate. It was polished and cold rather cold for the 
 season and the weather ; and Stuart Straith himself, buttoned 
 and brushed, as fine and as clean as his room, might at her 
 arrival have reminded her of the master of a neat, bare ship on 
 his deck awaiting a cargo. "May I see everything? May I 
 'use' everything?" 
 
 " Oh no ; you mayn't by any means use everything. You 
 mayn't use half. Did I spoil your 'London Letter'?" he con- 
 tinued after a moment. 
 
 " No one can spoil them as I spoil them myself. I can't do 
 them I don't know how, and don't want to. I do them wrong, 
 and the people want such trash. Of course they'll sack me." 
 
12 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 She was in the centre, and he had the effect of going round 
 her, restless and vague, in large, slow circles. " Have you done 
 them long?" 
 
 " Two or three months this lot. But I've done others, and 
 I know what happens. Oh, my dear, I've done strange things ! " 
 
 "And is it a good job?" 
 
 She hesitated, then puffed, prettily enough, an indifferent sigh. 
 " Three-and-ninepence. Is that good ? " He had stopped before 
 her, looking at her up and down. " What do you get," she went 
 on, " for what you do for a play ? " 
 
 "A little more, it would seem, than you. Four-and-sixpence. 
 But I've only done, as yet, that one. Nothing else has offered." 
 
 " I see. But something will> eh ? " 
 
 Poor Straith took a turn again. " Did you like them for 
 colour?" But again he pulled up. "Oh, I forgot; we didn't 
 notice them ! " 
 
 For a moment they could laugh about it. "I noticed them, 
 I assure you, in the Banner. ' The costumes in the second act 
 are of the most marvellous beauty.' That's what I said." 
 
 " Oh, that will fetch the managers ! " But before her again 
 he seemed to take her in from head to foot. "You speak of 
 'using' things. If you'd only use yourself for my enlighten- 
 ment. Tell me all." 
 
 "You look at me," said Mrs. Harvey, "as with the wonder of 
 who designs my costumes. How I dress on it, how I do even 
 what I still do on it, is that what you want to know ? " 
 
 " What has happened to you ? " Straith asked. 
 
 " How do I keep it up ? " she continued, as if she had not 
 heard him. " But I don't keep it up. You do," she declared as 
 she again looked round her. 
 
 Once more it set him off, but for a pause once more almost as 
 quick. " How long have you been ? " 
 
 " Been what ? " she asked as he faltered. 
 
 " Unhappy." 
 
 She smiled at him from a depth of indulgence. " As long as 
 you've been ignorant that what I've been wanting is your pity. 
 Ah, to have to know, as I believed I did, that you supposed it 
 would wound me, and not to have been able to make you see 
 that it was the one thing left to me that would help me ! Give 
 me your pity now. It's all I want. I don't care for anything 
 else. But give me that." 
 
 He had, as it happened at the moment, to do a smaller and 
 a usual thing before he could do one so great and so strange. 
 The youth whom he kept for service arrived with a tea-tray, in 
 
BROKEN WINGS 13 
 
 arranging a place for which, with the sequel of serving Mrs. 
 Harvey, seating her and seeing the youth again out of the room, 
 some minutes passed. 
 
 "What pity could I dream of for you," he demanded as he 
 at last dropped near her, "when I was myself so miserably 
 sore?" 
 
 " Sore ? " she wondered. " But you were happy then." 
 
 " Happy not to have struck you as good enough ? For I 
 didn't, you know," he insisted. "You had your success, which 
 was so immense. You had your high value, your future, your 
 big possibilities; and I perfectly understood that, given those 
 things, and given also my very much smaller situation, you 
 should wish to keep yourself." 
 
 " Oh, oh ! " She gasped as if hurt. 
 
 " I understand it ; but how could it really make me ' happy ' ? " 
 he asked. 
 
 She turned at him as with her hand on the old scar she could 
 now carry. "You mean that all these years you've really not 
 known ? " 
 
 " But not known what ? " 
 
 His voice was so blank that at the sound of it, and at some- 
 thing that looked out from him, she only found another "Oh, 
 oh ! " which became the next instant a burst of tears. 
 
 SHE had appeared at first unwilling to receive him at home ; but 
 he understood it after she had left him, turning over more and 
 more everything their meeting had shaken to the surface, and 
 piecing together memories that at last, however darkly, made 
 a sense. He was to call on her, it was finally agreed, but not 
 till the end of the week, when she should have finished 
 "moving" she had but just changed quarters; and meanwhile, 
 as he came and went, mainly in the cold chamber of his own 
 past endeavour, which looked even to himself as studios look 
 when artists are dead and the public, in the arranged place, are 
 admitted to stare, he had plenty to think about. What had 
 come out he could see it now was that each, ten years before, 
 had miserably misunderstood and then had turned for relief 
 from pain to a perversity of pride. But it was himself above all 
 that he now sharply judged, since women, he felt, have to get 
 on as they can, and for the mistake of this woman there were 
 reasons he had, with a sore heart, to acknowledge. She had 
 
i 4 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 really found in the pomp of his early success, at the time they 
 used to meet, and to care to, exactly the ground for her sense 
 of failure with him that he had found in the vision of her gross 
 popularity for his conviction that she judged him as compara- 
 tively small. Each had blundered, as sensitive souls of the 
 "artistic temperament" blunder, into a conception not only of 
 the other's attitude, but of the other's material situation at the 
 moment, that had thrown them back on stupid secrecy, where 
 their estrangement had grown like an evil plant in the shade. 
 He had positively believed her to have gone on all the while 
 making the five thousand a year that the first eight or ten of her 
 so supremely happy novels had brought her in, just as she, on 
 her side, had read into the felicity of his first new hits, his 
 pictures "of the year" at three or four Academies, the absurdest 
 theory of the sort of career that, thanks to big dealers and intelli- 
 gent buyers, his gains would have built up for him. It looked 
 vulgar enough now, but it had been grave enough then. His long, 
 detached delusion about her "prices," at any rate, appeared to 
 have been more than matched by the strange stories occasionally 
 floated to her and all to make her but draw more closely in 
 on the subject of his own. 
 
 It was with each equally that everything had changed every- 
 thing but the stiff consciousness in either of the need to conceal 
 changes from the other. If she had cherished for long years the 
 soreness of her not being "good" enough, so this was what had 
 counted most in her sustained effort to appear at least as good 
 as he. London, meanwhile, was big; London was blind and 
 benighted ; and nothing had ever occurred to undermine for him 
 the fiction of her prosperity. Before his eyes there, while she 
 sat with him, she had pulled off one by one those vain coverings 
 of her state that she confessed she had hitherto done her best 
 and so always with an eye on himself deceptively to draw about 
 it. He had felt frozen, as he listened, at such likenesses to things 
 he knew. He recognised as she talked, and he groaned as he 
 understood. He understood oh, at last, whatever he had not 
 done before ! And yet he could well have smiled, out of their 
 common abyss, at such odd identities and recurrences. Truly 
 the arts were sisters, as was so often said ; for what apparently 
 co.uld be more like the experience of one than the experience 
 of another? And she spared him things with it all. He 
 felt that too, just as, even while showing her how he fol- 
 lowed, he had bethought himself of closing his lips for the 
 hour, none too soon, on his own stale story. There had 
 been a beautiful intelligence, for that matter, in her having 
 
BROKEN WINGS 15 
 
 asked him nothing more. She had overflowed because shaken 
 by not finding him happy, and her surrender had somehow 
 offered itself to him as her way the first that sprang up of 
 considering his trouble. She had left him, at all events, in full 
 possession of all the phases through which in " literary circles " 
 acclaimed states may pass on their regular march to eclipse and 
 extinction. One had but one's hour, and if one had it soon it 
 was really almost a case of choice one didn't have it late. It 
 might, moreover, never even remotely have approached, at its 
 best, things ridiculously rumoured. Straith felt, on the whole, 
 how little he had known of literary circles or of any mystery but 
 his own, indeed ; on which, up to actual impending collapse, he 
 had mounted such anxious guard. 
 
 It was when he went on the Friday to see her that he took 
 in the latest of the phases in question, which might very well be 
 almost the final one ; there was at least that comfort in it. She 
 had just settled in a small flat, where he recognised in the steady 
 disposal, for the best, of various objects she had not yet parted 
 with, her reason for having made him wait. Here they had 
 together these two worn and baffled workers a wonderful 
 hour of gladness in their lost battle and of freshness in their 
 lost youth; for it was not till Stuart Straith had also raised 
 the heavy mask and laid it beside her own on the table, 
 that they began really to feel themselves recover something 
 of that possibility of each other they had so wearily wasted. 
 Only she couldn't get over it that he was like herself, and that 
 what she had shrunken to in her three or four simplified rooms 
 had its perfect image in the hollow show of his ordered studio 
 and his accumulated work. He told her everything now, kept as 
 little back as she had kept at their previous meeting, while 
 she repeated over and over, "You wonderful you?" as if the 
 knowledge made a deeper darkness of fate, as if the pain of his 
 having come down at all almost quenched the joy of his having 
 come so much nearer. When she learned that he had not for 
 three years sold a picture " You, beautiful you ? " it seemed 
 a new cold breath out of the dusk of her own outlook. Dis- 
 appointment and despair were in such relations contagious, and 
 there was clearly as much less again left to her as the little 
 that was left to him. He showed her, laughing at the long 
 queerness of it, how awfully little, as they called it, this was. 
 He let it all come, but with more mirth than misery, and with 
 a final abandonment of pride that was like changing at the end 
 of a dreadful day from tight boots to slippers. There were 
 moments when they might have resembled a couple united by 
 
16 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 some misdeed and meeting to decide on some desperate course ; 
 they gave themselves so to the great irony the vision of the 
 comic in contrasts that precedes surrenders and extinctions. 
 
 They went s over the whole thing, remounted the dwindling 
 stream, reconstructed, explained, understood recognised, in 
 short, the particular example they gave, and how, without mutual 
 suspicion, they had been giving it side by side. " We're simply 
 the case," Straith familiarly put it, " of having been had enough 
 of. No case is perhaps more common, save that, for you and for 
 me, each in our line, it did look in the good time didn't it ? as 
 if nobody could have enough." With which they counted back- 
 ward, gruesome as it was, the symptoms of satiety up to the first 
 dawn, and lived again together the unforgettable hours distant 
 now out of which it had begun to glimmer that the truth had 
 to be faced and the right names given to the wrong facts. They 
 laughed at their original explanations and the minor scale, even, 
 of their early fears ; compared notes on the fallibility of remedies 
 and hopes, and, more and more united in the identity of their 
 lesson, made out perfectly that, though there appeared to be 
 many kinds of success, there was only one kind of failure. And 
 yet what had been hardest had not been to have to shrink, 
 but the long game of bluff, as Straith called it to have to keep 
 up. It fairly swept them away at present, however, the hugeness 
 of the relief of no longer keeping up as against each other. 
 This gave them all the measure of the motive their courage, on 
 either side, in silence and gloom, had forced into its service. 
 
 " Only what shall we do now for a motive ? " Straith went on. 
 
 She thought. " A motive for courage ? " 
 
 11 Yes to keep up." 
 
 "And go again, for instance, do you mean, to Mundham? 
 We shall, thank heaven, never go again to Mundham. The 
 Mundhams are over." 
 
 " Nous n'irons plus au bois ; 
 Les lauriers sont coupes," 
 
 sang Straith. " It does cost." 
 
 " As everything costs that one does for the rich. It's not our 
 poor relations who make us pay." 
 
 " No ; one must have means to acknowledge the others. We 
 can't afford the opulent. But it isn't only the money they 
 take." 
 
 "It's the imagination," said Mrs. Harvey. "As they have 
 none themselves " 
 
 " It's an article we have to supply ? We have certainly to use 
 
BROKEN WINGS 17 
 
 a lot to protect ourselves," Straith agreed. " And the strange 
 thing is that they like us." 
 
 She thought again. " That's what makes it easy to cut them. 
 They forgive." 
 
 " Yes," her companion laughed ; " once they really don't know 
 you enough ! " 
 
 "They treat you as old friends. But what do we want now 
 of courage ? " she went on. 
 
 He wondered. " Yes, after all, what ? " 
 
 " To keep up, I mean. Why should we keep up ? " 
 
 It seemed to strike him. "I see. After all, why? The 
 courage not to keep up " 
 
 " We have that, at least," she declared, " haven't we ? " Stand- 
 ing there at her little high-perched window, which overhung grey 
 housetops, they let the consideration of this pass between them 
 in a deep look, as well as in a hush of which the intensity had 
 something commensurate. " If we're beaten ! " she then con- 
 tinued. 
 
 " Let us at least be beaten together ! " He took her in his 
 arms ; she let herself go, and he held her long and close for 
 the compact. But when they had recovered themselves enough 
 to handle their agreement more responsibly, the words in which 
 they confirmed it broke in sweetness as well as sadness from 
 both together : "And now to work ! " 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 
 
 MRS. MUNDEN had not yet been to my studio on so 
 good a pretext as when she first put it to me that it 
 would be quite open to me should I only care, as she called 
 it, to throw the handkerchief to paint her beautiful sister-in-law. 
 I needn't go here, more than is essential, into the question of 
 Mrs. Munden, who would really, by the way, be a story in herself. 
 She has a manner of her own of putting things, and some of 
 
 those she has put to me ! Her implication was that Lady 
 
 Beldonald had not only seen and admired certain examples of 
 my work, but had literally been prepossessed in favour of the 
 painter's "personality." Had I been struck with this sketch 
 I might easily have imagined that Lady Beldonald was throwing 
 me the handkerchief. "She hasn't done," my visitor said, " what 
 she ought." 
 
 " Do you mean she has done what she oughtn't ? " 
 
 "Nothing horrid oh dear, no." And something in Mrs. 
 Munden's tone, with the way she appeared to muse a moment, 
 even suggested to me that what she " oughtn't " was perhaps 
 what Lady Beldonald had too much neglected. "She hasn't 
 got on." 
 
 " What's the matter with her ? " 
 
 "Well, to begin with, she's American." 
 
 " But I thought that was the way of ways to get on." 
 
 " It's one of them. But it's one of the ways of being awfully 
 out of it too. There are so many ! " 
 
 " So many Americans ? " I asked. 
 
 "Yes, plenty of them" Mrs. Munden sighed. "So many 
 ways, I mean, of being one." 
 . " But if your sister-in-law's way is to be beautiful ? " 
 
 " Oh, there are different ways of that too." 
 
 "And she hasn't taken the right way ? " 
 
 "Well," my friend returned, as if it were rather difficult to 
 express, " she hasn't done with it " 
 
 " I see," I laughed ; " what she oughtn't ! " 
 
 18 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 19 
 
 Mrs. Munden in a manner corrected me, but it was difficult 
 to express. " My brother, at all events, was certainly selfish. 
 Till he died she was almost never in London ; they wintered, 
 year after year, for what he supposed to be his health which 
 it didn't help, since he was so much too soon to meet his end 
 in the south of France and in the dullest holes he could pick 
 out, and when they came back to England he always kept her 
 in the country. I must say for her that she always behaved 
 beautifully. Since his death she has been more in London, 
 but on a stupidly unsuccessful footing. I don't think she quite 
 understands. She hasn't what / should call a life. It may be, 
 of course, that she doesn't want one. That's just what I can't 
 exactly find out. I can't make out how much she knows." 
 
 " I can easily make out," I returned with hilarity, " how much 
 you do ! " 
 
 " Well, you're very horrid. Perhaps she's too old." 
 
 " Too old for what ? " I persisted. 
 
 "For anything. Of course she's no longer even a little 
 young; only preserved oh, but preserved, like bottled fruit, 
 in syrup ! I want to help her, if only because she gets on 
 my nerves, and I really think the way of it would be just the 
 right thing of yours at the Academy and on the line." 
 
 " But suppose," I threw out, " she should give on my nerves ? " 
 
 " Oh, she will. But isn't that all in the day's work, and don't 
 great beauties always ? " 
 
 " You don't," I interrupted ; but I at any rate saw Lady 
 Beldonald later on the day came when her kinswoman brought 
 her, and then I understood that her life had its centre in her 
 own idea of her appearance. Nothing else about her mattered 
 one knew her all when one knew that. She is indeed in one 
 particular, I think, sole of her kind a person whom vanity has 
 had the odd effect of keeping positively safe and sound. This 
 passion is supposed surely, for the most part, to be a principle 
 of perversion and injury, leading astray those who listen to it 
 and landing them, sooner or later, in this or that complication ; 
 but it has landed her ladyship nowhere whatever it has kept 
 her from the first moment of full consciousness, one feels, exactly 
 in the same place. It has protected her from every danger, has 
 made her absolutely proper and prim. If she is "preserved," 
 as Mrs. Munden originally described her to me, it is her vanity 
 that has beautifully done it putting her years ago in a plate- 
 glass case and closing up the receptacle against every breath 
 of air. How shouldn't she be preserved, when you might smash 
 your knuckles on this transparency before you could crack it? 
 
20 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 And she is oh, amazingly ! Preservation is scarce the word for 
 the rare condition of her surface. She looks naturally new, as 
 if she took out every night her large, lovely, varnished eyes and 
 put them in water. The thing was to paint her, I perceived, 
 in the glass case a most tempting, attaching feat ; render to the 
 full the shining, interposing plate and the general show-window 
 effect. 
 
 It was agreed, though it was not quite arranged, that she 
 should sit to me. If it was not quite arranged, this was because, 
 as I was made to understand from an early stage, the conditions 
 for our start must be such as should exclude all elements of 
 disturbance, such, in a word, as she herself should judge abso- 
 lutely favourable. And it seemed that these conditions were 
 easily imperilled. Suddenly, for instance, at a moment when 
 I was expecting her to meet an appointment the first that 
 I had proposed, I received a hurried visit from Mrs. Munden, 
 who came on her behalf to let me know that the season 
 happened just not to be propitious and that our friend couldn't 
 be quite sure, to the hour, when it would again become so. 
 Nothing, she felt, would make it so but a total absence of 
 worry. 
 
 "Oh, a 'total absence,'" I said, "is a large order! We live 
 in a worrying world." 
 
 "Yes; and she feels exactly that more than you'd think. 
 It's in fact just why she mustn't have, as she has now, a par- 
 ticular distress on at the very moment. She wants to look, of 
 course, her best, and such things tell on her appearance." 
 
 I shook my head. " Nothing tells on her appearance. Nothing 
 reaches it in any way; nothing gets at it. However, I can under- 
 stand her anxiety. But what's her particular distress ? " 
 
 " Why, the illness of Miss Dadd." 
 
 " And who in the world's Miss Dadd ? " 
 
 " Her most intimate friend and constant companion the lady 
 who was with us here that first day." 
 
 "Oh, the little round, black woman who gurgled with ad- 
 miration ? " 
 
 " None other. But she was taken ill last week, and it may very 
 well be that she'll gurgle no more. She was very bad yesterday 
 and is no better to-day, and Nina is much upset. If anything 
 happens to Miss Dadd she'll have to get another, and, though 
 she has had two or three before, that won't be so easy." 
 
 "Two or three Miss Dadds? Is it possible? And still 
 wanting another!" I recalled the poor lady completely now. 
 " No ; I shouldn't indeed think it would be easy to get another. 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 21 
 
 But why is a succession of them necessary to Lady Beldonald's 
 existence ? " 
 
 "Can't you guess?" Mrs. Munden looked deep, yet im- 
 patient "They help." 
 
 " Help what ? Help whom ? " 
 
 " Why, every one. You and me for instance. To do what ? 
 Why, to think Nina beautiful. She has them for that purpose ; 
 they serve as foils, as accents serve on syllables, as terms of 
 comparison. They make her * stand out.' It's an effect of con- 
 trast that must be familiar to you artists ; it's what a woman does 
 when she puts a band of black velvet under a pearl ornament 
 that may require, as she thinks, a little showing off." 
 
 I wondered. " Do you mean she always has them black ? " 
 
 "Dear no; I've seen them blue, green, yellow. They may 
 be what they like, so long as they're always one other thing." 
 
 "Hideous?" 
 
 Mrs. Munden hesitated. " Hideous is too much to say ; she 
 doesn't really require them as bad as that. But consistently, 
 cheerfully, loyally plain. It's really a most happy relation. She 
 loves them for it." 
 
 " And for what do they love her 1 " 
 
 " Why, just for the amiability that they produce in her. Then, 
 also, for their ' home.' It's a career for them." 
 
 "I see. But if that's the case," I asked, "why are they so 
 difficult to find?" 
 
 " Oh, they must be safe ; it's all in that : her being able to 
 depend on them to keep to the terms of the bargain and never 
 have moments of rising as even the ugliest woman will now and 
 then (say when she's in love) superior to themselves." 
 
 I turned it over. "Then if they can't inspire passions the 
 poor things mayn't even at least feel them ? " 
 
 " She distinctly deprecates it. That's why such a man as you 
 may be, after all, a complication." 
 
 I continued to muse. " You're very sure Miss Dadd's ailment 
 isn't an affection that, being smothered, has struck in?" My 
 joke, however, was not well timed, for I afterwards learned that 
 the unfortunate lady's state had been, even while I spoke, such 
 as to forbid all hope. The worst symptoms had appeared ; she 
 was not destined to recover ; and a week later I heard from Mrs. 
 Munden that she would in fact " gurgle " no more. 
 
22 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 II 
 
 ALL this, for Lady Beldonald, had been an agitation so great 
 that access to her apartment was denied for a time even to her 
 sister-in-law. It was much more out of the question, of course, 
 that she should unveil her face to a person of my special 
 business with it ; so that the question of the portrait was, by 
 common consent, postponed to that of the installation of a 
 successor to her late companion. Such a successor, I gathered 
 from Mrs. Munden, widowed, childless, and lonely, as well as 
 inapt for the minor offices, she had absolutely to have ; a more 
 or less humble alter ego to deal with the servants, keep the 
 accounts, make the tea and arrange the light. Nothing seemed 
 more natural than that she should marry again, and obviously 
 that might come ; yet the predecessors of Miss Dadd had been 
 contemporaneous with a first husband, and others formed in her 
 image might be contemporaneous with a second. I was much 
 occupied in those months, at any rate, so that these questions 
 and their ramifications lost themselves for a while to my view, 
 and I was only brought back to them by Mrs. Munden's coming 
 to me one day with the news that we were all right again 
 her sister-in-law was once more " suited." A certain Mrs. Brash, 
 an American relative whom she had not seen for years, but with 
 whom she had continued to communicate, was to come out to 
 her immediately; and this person, it appeared, could be quite 
 trusted to meet the conditions. She was ugly ugly enough, 
 without abuse of it, and she was uniimitedly good. The position 
 offered her by Lady Beldonald was, moreover, exactly what she 
 needed ; widowed also, after many troubles and reverses, with 
 her fortune of the smallest and her various children either 
 buried or placed about, she had never had time or means to 
 come to England, and would really be grateful in her declining 
 years for the new experience and the pleasant light work involved 
 in her cousin's hospitality. They had been much together early 
 in life, and Lady Beldonald was immensely fond of her would 
 have in fact tried to get hold of her before had not Mrs. Brash 
 been always in bondage to family duties, to the variety of her 
 tribulations. I dare say I laughed at my friend's use of the term 
 "position" the position, one might call it, of a candlestick or 
 a sign-post, and I dare say I must have asked if the special 
 service the poor lady was to render had been made clear to 
 her. Mrs. Munden left me, at all events, with the rather droll 
 image of her faring forth, across the sea, quite consciously and 
 resignedly to perform it. 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 23 
 
 The point of the communication had, however, been that 
 my sitter was again looking up and would doubtless, on the 
 arrival and due initiation of Mrs. Brash, be in form really to wait 
 on me. The situation must, further, to my knowledge, have 
 developed happily, for I arranged with Mrs. Munden that our 
 friend, now all ready to begin, but wanting first just to see the 
 things I had most recently done, should come once more, as a 
 final preliminary, to my studio. A good foreign friend of mine, 
 a French painter, Paul Outreau, was at the moment in London, 
 and I had proposed, as he was much interested in types, to get 
 together for his amusement a small afternoon party. Everyone 
 came, my big room was full, there was music and a modest 
 spread; and I have not forgotten the light of admiration in 
 Outreau's expressive face as, at the end of half an hour, he came 
 up to me in his enthusiasm. 
 
 " Bonte divine, mon cher que cette vieille est done belle! " 
 
 I had tried to collect all the beauty I could, and also all the 
 youth, so that for a moment I was at a loss. I had talked to 
 many people and provided for the music, and there were figures 
 in the crowd that were still lost to me. " What old woman do 
 you mean ? " 
 
 "I don't know her name she was over by the door a 
 moment ago. I asked somebody and was told, I think, that 
 she's American." 
 
 I looked about and saw one of my guests attach a pair of fine 
 eyes to Outreau very much as if she knew he must be talking of 
 her. " Oh, Lady Beldonald ! Yes, she's handsome but the 
 great point about her is that she has been * put up,' to keep, and 
 that she wouldn't be flattered if she knew you spoke of her as 
 old. A box of sardines is only ' old ' after it has been opened. 
 Lady Beldonald never has yet been but I'm going to do it." 
 I joked, but I was somehow disappointed. It was a type that, 
 with his unerring sense for the banal, I shouldn't have expected 
 Outreau to pick out. 
 
 " You're going to paint her ? But, my dear man, she is painted 
 and as neither you nor I can do it Oil est-elle done?" He 
 had lost her, and I saw I had made a mistake. " She's the 
 greatest of all the great Holbeins." 
 
 I was relieved. " Ah, then, not Lady Beldonald ! But do 
 I possess a Holbein, of any price, unawares ? " 
 
 "There she is there she is ! Dear, dear, dear, what a head!" 
 And I saw whom he meant and what : a small old lady in a 
 black dress and a black bonnet, both relieved with a little white, 
 who had evidently just changed her place to reach a corner 
 
24 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 from which more of the room and of the scene was presented 
 to her. She appeared unnoticed and unknown, and I immedi- 
 ately recognised that some other guest must have brought her 
 and, for want of opportunity, had as yet to call my attention to 
 her. But two things, simultaneously with this and with each 
 other, struck me with force ; one of them the truth of Outreau's 
 description of her, the other the fact that the person bringing 
 her could only have been Lady Beldonald. She was a Holbein 
 of the first water ; yet she was also Mrs. Brash, the imported 
 "foil," the indispensable "accent," the successor to the dreary 
 Miss Dadd ! By the time I had put these things together 
 Outreau's "American" having helped me I was in just such 
 full possession of her face as I had found myself, on the other 
 first occasion, of that of her patroness. Only with so different 
 a consequence. I couldn't look at her enough, and I stared and 
 stared till I became aware she might have fancied me challenging 
 her as a person unpresented. "All the same," Outreau went on, 
 equally held, "test une tete a fair e. If I were only staying long 
 enough for a crack at her ! But I tell you what " and he seized 
 my arm " bring her over ! " 
 
 "Over?" 
 
 " To Paris. She'd have a succesfou? 
 
 "Ah, thanks, my dear fellow," I was now quite in a position to 
 say; "she's the handsomest thing in London, and" for what 
 I might do with her was already before me with intensity " I 
 propose to keep her to myself." It was before me with intensity, in 
 the light of Mrs. Brash's distant perfection of a little white old 
 face, in which every wrinkle was the touch of a master; but 
 something else, I suddenly felt, was not less so, for Lady Bel- 
 donald, in the other quarter, and though she couldn't have made 
 out the subject of our notice, continued to fix us, and her eyes 
 had the challenge of those of the woman of consequence who 
 has missed something. A moment later I was close to her, 
 apologising first for not having been more on the spot at her 
 arrival, but saying in the next breath uncontrollably, " Why, my 
 dear lady, it's a Holbein ! " 
 
 "A Holbein? What?" 
 
 "Why, the wonderful sharp old face so extraordinarily, con- 
 summately drawn in the frame of black velvet. That of Mrs. 
 Brash, I mean isn't it her name? your companion." 
 
 This was the beginning of a most odd matter the essence of 
 my anecdote ; and I think the very first note of the oddity must 
 have sounded for me in the tone in which her ladyship spoke 
 after giving me a silent look. It seemed to come to me out of a 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 25 
 
 distance immeasurably removed from Holbein. " Mrs. Brash is 
 not my ' companion ' in the sense you appear to mean. She's 
 my rather near relation and a very dear old friend. I love her 
 and you must know her." 
 
 "Know her? Rather! Why, to see her is to want, on the 
 spot, to * go ' for her. She also must sit for me." 
 
 11 She? Louisa Brash?" If Lady Beldonald had the theory 
 that her beauty directly showed it when things were not well with 
 her, this impression, which the fixed sweetness of her serenity 
 had hitherto struck me by no means as justifying, gave me now 
 my first glimpse of its grounds. It was as if I had never before 
 seen her face invaded by anything I should have called an ex- 
 pression. This expression, moreover, was of the faintest was 
 like the effect produced on a surface by an agitation both deep 
 within and as yet much confused. " Have you told her so ? " she 
 then quickly asked, as if to soften the sound of her surprise. 
 
 " Dear no, I've but just noticed her Outreau a moment ago 
 put me on her. But we're both so taken, and he also wants " 
 
 " To paint her ? " Lady Beldonald uncontrollably murmured. 
 
 "Don't be afraid we shall fight for her," I returned with a 
 laugh for this tone. Mrs. Brash was still where I could see her 
 without appearing to stare, and she mightn't have seen I was 
 looking at her, though her protectress, I am afraid, could scarce 
 have failed of this perception. " We must each take our turn, 
 and at any rate she's a wonderful thing, so that, if you'll take her 
 to Paris, Outreau promises her there " 
 
 " There ? " my companion gasped. 
 
 " A career bigger still than among us, as he considers that we 
 haven't half their eye. He guarantees her a succes fou" 
 
 She couldn't get over it. " Louisa Brash ? In Paris ? " 
 
 "They do see," I exclaimed, "more than we; and they live 
 extraordinarily, don't you know, in that. But she'll do some- 
 thing here too." 
 
 "And what will she do?" 
 
 If, frankly, now, I couldn't help giving Mrs. Brash a longer 
 look, so after it I could as little resist sounding my interlocutress. 
 "You'll see. Only give her time." 
 
 She said nothing during the moment in which she met my 
 eyes ; but then : " Time, it seems to me, is exactly what you and 
 your friend want. If you haven't talked with her " 
 
 " We haven't seen her? Oh, we see bang off with a click like 
 a steel spring. It's our trade ; it's our life \ and we should be 
 donkeys if we made mistakes. That's the way I saw you your- 
 self, my lady, if I may say so ; that's the way, with a long pin 
 
26 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 straight through your body, I've got you. And just so I've 
 got her? 
 
 All this, for reasons, had brought my guest to her feet ; but her 
 eyes, while we talked, had never once followed the direction of 
 mine. "You call her a Holbein?" 
 
 "Outreau did, and I of course immediately recognised it. 
 Don't you ? She brings the old boy to life ! It's just as I 
 should call you a Titian. You bring him to life." 
 
 She couldn't be said to relax, because she couldn't be said to 
 have hardened ; but something at any rate on this took place in 
 her something indeed quite disconnected from what I would 
 have called her. " Don't you understand that she has always 
 been supposed ? " It had the ring of impatience ; neverthe- 
 less, on a scruple, it stopped short. 
 
 I knew what it was, however, well enough to say it for her if 
 she preferred. "To be nothing whatever to look at? To be 
 unfortunately plain or even if you like repulsively ugly? Oh 
 yes, I understand it perfectly, just as I understand I have to as 
 a part of my trade many other forms of stupidity. It's nothing 
 new to one that ninety-nine people out of a hundred have no 
 eyes, no sense, no taste. There are whole communities im- 
 penetrably sealed. I don't say your friend is a person to make 
 the men turn round in Regent Street. But it adds to the joy of 
 the few who do see that they have it so much to themselves. 
 Where in the world can she have lived ? You must tell me all 
 about that or rather, if she'll be so good, she must." 
 
 " You mean then to speak to her ? " 
 
 I wondered as she pulled up again. " Of her beauty ? " 
 
 " Her beauty ! " cried Lady Beldonald so loud that two or 
 three persons looked round. 
 
 " Ah, with every precaution of respect ! " I declared in a much 
 lower tone. But her back was by this time turned to me, and 
 in the movement, as it were, one of the strangest little dramas I 
 have ever known was well launched. 
 
 Ill 
 
 IT was a drama of small, smothered intensely private things, and 
 I knew of but one other person in the secret ; yet that person 
 and I found it exquisitely susceptible of notation, followed it with 
 an interest the mutual communication of which did much for 
 our enjoyment, and were present with emotion at its touching 
 catastrophe. The small case for so small a case had made 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 27 
 
 a great stride even before my little party separated, and in fact 
 within the next ten minutes. 
 
 In that space of time two things had happened ; one of which 
 was that I made the acquaintance of Mrs. Brash, and the other 
 that Mrs. Munden reached me, cleaving the crowd, with one of 
 her usual pieces of news. What she had to impart was that, on 
 her having just before asked Nina if the conditions of our sitting 
 had been arranged with me, Nina had replied, with something 
 like perversity, that she didn't propose to arrange them, that the 
 whole affair was "off" again, and that she preferred not to be, 
 for the present, further pressed. The question for Mrs. Munden 
 was naturally what had happened and whether I understood. 
 Oh, I understood perfectly, and what I at first most understood 
 was that even when I had brought in the name of Mrs. Brash 
 intelligence was not yet in Mrs. Munden. She was quite as 
 surprised as Lady Beldonald had been on hearing of the esteem 
 in which I held Mrs. Brash's appearance. She was stupefied at 
 learning that I had just in my ardour proposed to the possessor 
 of it to sit to me. Only she came round promptly which Lady 
 Beldonald really never did. Mrs. Munden was in fact wonderful ; 
 for when I had given her quickly " Why, she's a Holbein, you 
 know," she took it up, after a first fine vacancy, with an immediate 
 abysmal u Oh, is she?" that, as a piece of social gymnastics, did 
 her the greatest honour ; and she was in fact the first in London 
 to spread the tidings. For a face-about it was magnificent. But 
 she was also the first, I must add, to see what would really 
 happen though this she put before me only a week or two 
 later. 
 
 " It will kill her, my dear that's what it will do ! " 
 She meant neither more nor less than that it would kill Lady 
 Beldonald if I were to paint Mrs. Brash ; for at this lurid light 
 had we arrived in so short a space of time. It was for me to 
 decide whether my aesthetic need of giving life to my idea was 
 such as to justify me in destroying it in a woman after all, in 
 most eyes, so beautiful. The situation was, after all, sufficiently 
 queer ; for it remained to be seen what I should positively gain 
 by giving up Mrs. Brash. I appeared to have in any case lost 
 Lady Beldonald, now too " upset " it was always Mrs. Munden's 
 word about her and, as I inferred, her own about herself to meet 
 me again on our previous footing. The only thing, I of course 
 soon saw, was to temporise to drop the whole question for the 
 present and yet so far as possible keep each of the pair in view. 
 I may as well say at once that this plan and this process gave 
 their principal interest to the next several months. Mrs. Brash 
 
28 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 had turned up, if I remember, early in the new year, and her 
 little wonderful career was in our particular circle one of the 
 features of the following season. It was at all events for myself 
 the most attaching ; it is not my fault if I am so put together as 
 often to find more life in situations obscure and subject to inter- 
 pretation than in the gross rattle of the foreground. And there 
 were all sorts of things, things touching, amusing, mystifying 
 and above all such an instance as I had never yet met in this 
 funny little fortune of the useful American cousin. Mrs. Munden 
 was promptly at one with me as to the rarity and, to a near and 
 human view, the beauty and interest of the position. We had 
 neither of us ever before seen that degree and that special sort 
 of personal success come to a woman for the first time so late in 
 life. I found it an example of poetic, of absolutely retributive, 
 justice ; so that my desire grew great to work it, as we say, on 
 those lines. I had seen it all from the original moment at my 
 studio ; the poor lady had never known an hour's appreciation 
 which, moreover, in perfect good faith, she had never missed. 
 The very first thing I did after producing so unintentionally the 
 resentful retreat of her protectress had been to go straight over 
 to her and say almost without preliminaries that I should hold 
 myself immeasurably obliged if she would give me a few sittings. 
 What I thus came face to face with was, on the instant, her 
 whole unenlightened past, and the full, if foreshortened, revela- 
 tion of what among us all was now unfailingly in store for her. 
 To turn the handle and start that tune came to me on the spot 
 as a temptation. Here was a poor lady who had waited for the 
 approach of old age to find out what she was worth. Here 
 was a benighted being to whom it was to be disclosed in her 
 fifty-seventh year (I was to make that out) that she had some- 
 thing that might pass for a face. She looked much more than 
 her age, and was fairly frightened as if I had been trying on her 
 some possibly heartless London trick when she had taken in 
 my appeal. That showed me in what an air she had lived and 
 as I should have been tempted to put it had I spoken out 
 among what children of darkness. Later on I did them more 
 justice; saw more that her wonderful points must have been 
 points largely the fruit of time, and even that possibly she might 
 never in all her life have looked so well as at this particular 
 moment. It might have been that if her hour had struck I just 
 happened to be present at the striking. What had occurred, all 
 the same, was at the worst a sufficient comedy. 
 
 The famous "irony of fate" takes many forms, but I had 
 never yet seen it take quite this one. She had been " had over " 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 29 
 
 on an understanding, and she was not playing fair. She had 
 broken the law of her ugliness and had turned beautiful on the 
 hands of her employer. More interesting even perhaps than a 
 view of the conscious triumph that this might prepare for her, 
 and of which, had I doubted of my own judgment, I could still 
 take Outreau's fine start as the full guarantee more interesting 
 was the question of the process by which such a history could 
 get itself enacted. The curious thing was that, all the while, the 
 reasons of her having passed for plain the reasons for Lady 
 Beldonald's fond calculation, which they quite justified were 
 written large in her face, so large that it was easy to understand 
 them as the only ones she herself had ever read. What was 
 it, then, that actually made the old stale sentence mean something 
 so different? into what new combinations, what extraordinary 
 language, unknown but understood at a glance, had time and 
 life translated it ? The only thing to be said was that time and 
 life were artists who beat us all, working with recipes and secrets 
 that we could never find out. I really ought to have, like 
 a lecturer or a showman, a chart or a blackboard to present 
 properly the relation, in the wonderful old tender, battered, 
 blanched face, between the original elements and the exquisite 
 final " style." I could do it with chalks, but I can scarcely do 
 it thus. However, the thing was, for any artist who respected 
 himself, to fee/ it which I abundantly did; and then not to con- 
 ceal from her that I felt it which I neglected as little. But she 
 was really, to do her complete justice, the last to understand ; 
 and I am not sure that, to the end for there was an end she 
 quite made it all out or knew where she was. When you have 
 been brought up for fifty years on black, it must be hard to 
 adjust your organism, at a day's notice, to gold -colour. Her 
 whole nature had been pitched in the key of her supposed 
 plainness. She had known how to be ugly it was the only 
 thing she had learnt save, if possible, how not to mind it. 
 Being beautiful, at any rate, took a new set of muscles. It was 
 on the prior theory, literally, that she had developed her admir- 
 able dress, instinctively felicitous, always either black or white, 
 and a matter of rather severe squareness and studied line. She 
 was magnificently neat ; everything she showed had a way of 
 looking both old and fresh ; and there was on every occasion 
 the same picture in her draped head draped in low-falling black 
 and the fine white plaits (of a painter's white, somehow) 
 disposed on her chest. What had happened was that these 
 arrangements, determined by certain considerations, lent them- 
 selves in effect much better to certain others. Adopted as a 
 
30 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 kind of refuge, they had really only deepened her accent. It 
 was singular, moreover, that, so constituted, there was nothing 
 in her aspect of the ascetic or the nun. She was a good, hard, 
 sixteenth-century figure, not withered with innocence, bleached 
 rather by life in the open. She was, in short, just what we had 
 made of her, a Holbein for a great museum ; and our position, 
 Mrs. Munden's and mine, rapidly became that of persons having 
 such a treasure to dispose of. The world I speak of course 
 mainly of the art-world flocked to see it. 
 
 \ 
 IV 
 
 " BUT has she any idea herself, poor thing ? " was the way I had 
 put it to Mrs. Munden on our next meeting after the incident 
 at my studio; with the effect, however, only of leaving my 
 friend at first to take me as alluding to Mrs. Brash's possible 
 prevision of the chatter she might create. I had my own sense 
 of that this prevision had been nil; the question was of her 
 consciousness of the office for which Lady Beldonald had 
 counted on her and for which we were so promptly proceeding 
 to spoil her altogether. 
 
 " Oh, I think she arrived with a goodish notion," Mrs. Munden 
 had replied when I had explained; "for she's clever too, you 
 know, as well as good-looking, and I don't see how, if she ever 
 really knew Nina, she could have supposed for a moment that 
 she was not wanted for whatever she might have left to give 
 up. Hasn't she moreover always been made to feel that she's 
 ugly enough for anything?" It was even at this point already 
 wonderful how my friend had mastered the case, and what lights, 
 alike for its past and its future, she was prepared to throw on it. 
 " If she has seen herself as ugly enough for anything, she has 
 seen herself and that was the only way as ugly enough for 
 Nina ; and she has had her own manner of showing that she 
 understands without making Nina commit herself to anything 
 vulgar. Women are never without ways for doing such things 
 both for communicating and receiving knowledge that I can't 
 explain to you, and that you wouldn't understand if I could, as 
 you must be a woman even to do that. I dare say they've ex- 
 pressed it all to each other simply in the language of kisses. But 
 doesn't it, at any rate, make something rather beautiful of the 
 relation between them as affected by our discovery?" 
 
 I had a laugh for her plural possessive. " The point is, of 
 course, that if there was a conscious bargain, and our action on 
 Mrs. Brash is to deprive her of the sense of keeping her side of 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 31 
 
 it, various things may happen that won't be good either for her 
 or for ourselves. She may conscientiously throw up the 
 position." 
 
 " Yes," my companion mused " for she is conscientious. Or 
 Nina, without waiting for that, may cast her forth." 
 
 I faced it all. " Then we should have to keep her." 
 
 "As a regular model?" Mrs. Munden was ready for any- 
 thing. " Oh, that would be lovely ! " 
 
 But I further worked it out. " The difficulty is that she's not 
 a model, hang it that she's too good for one, that she's the very 
 thing herself. When Outreau and I have each had our go, that 
 will be all; there'll be nothing left for anyone else. Therefore 
 it behoves us quite to understand that our attitude's a responsi- 
 bility. If we can't do for her positively more than Nina 
 does " 
 
 " We must let her alone ? " My companion continued to 
 muse. " I see ! " 
 
 "Yet don't," I returned, "see too much. We can do more." 
 
 "Than Nina?" She was again on the spot. "It wouldn't, 
 after all, be difficult. We only want the directly opposite thing 
 and which is the only one the poor dear can give. Unless, 
 indeed," she suggested, " we simply retract we back out." 
 
 I turned it over. "It's too late for that. Whether Mrs. 
 Brash's peace is gone, I can't say. But Nina's is." 
 
 " Yes, and there's no way to bring it back that won't sacrifice 
 her friend. We can't turn round and say Mrs. Brash is ugly, 
 can we? But fancy Nina's not having seen/" Mrs. Munden 
 exclaimed. 
 
 " She doesn't see now," I answered. " She can't, I'm certain, 
 make out what we mean. The woman, for her still, is just what 
 she always was. But she has, nevertheless, had her stroke, and 
 her blindness, while she wavers and gropes in the dark, only adds 
 to her discomfort. Her blow was to see the attention of the 
 world deviate." 
 
 "All the same, I don't think, you know," my interlocutress 
 said, "that Nina will have made her a scene, or that, whatever 
 we do, she'll ever make her one. That isn't the way it will 
 happen, for she's exactly as conscientious as Mrs. Brash." 
 
 " Then what is the way ? " I asked. 
 
 " It will just happen in silence." 
 
 " And what will ' it,' as you call it, be ? " 
 
 " Isn't that what we want really to see ? " 
 
 "Well," I replied after a turn or two about, "whether we want 
 it or not, it's exactly what we shall see; which is a reason the 
 
32 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 more for fancying, between the pair there in the quiet, exquisite 
 house, and full of superiorities and suppressions as they both are 
 the extraordinary situation. If I said just now that it's too 
 late to do anything but accept, it's because I've taken the full 
 measure of what happened at my studio. It took but a few 
 moments but she tasted of the tree." 
 
 My companion wondered. " Nina ? " 
 
 "Mrs. Brash." And to have to put it so ministered, while 
 I took yet another turn, to a sort of agitation. Our attitude was 
 a responsibility. 
 
 But I had suggested something else to my friend, who 
 appeared for a moment detached. " Should you say she'll hate 
 her worse if she doesrit see ? " 
 
 " Lady Beldonald ? Doesn't see what we see, you mean, than 
 if she does ? Ah, I give that up ! " I laughed. " But what I can 
 tell you is why I hold that, as I said just now, we can do most. 
 We can do this : we can give to a harmless and sensitive creature 
 hitherto practically disinherited and give with an unexpectedness 
 that will immensely add to its price the pure joy of a deep 
 draught of the very pride of life, of an acclaimed personal 
 triumph in our superior, sophisticated world." 
 
 Mrs. Munden had a glow of response for my sudden eloquence. 
 " Oh, it will be beautiful ! " 
 
 WELL, that is what, on the whole, and in spite of everything, it 
 really was. It has dropped into my memory a rich little gallery 
 of pictures, a regular panorama of those occasions that were the 
 proof of the privilege that had made me for a moment in the 
 words I have just recorded lyrical. I see Mrs. Brash on each 
 of these occasions practically enthroned and surrounded and more 
 or less mobbed ; see the hurrying and the nudging and the press- 
 ing and the staring ; see the people " making up " and introduced, 
 and catch the word when they have had their turn ; hear it above 
 all, the great one "Ah yes, the famous Holbein!" passed 
 about with that perfection of promptitude that makes the motions 
 of the London mind so happy a mixture of those of the parrot 
 and the sheep. Nothing would be easier, of course, than to tell 
 the whole little tale with an eye only for that silly side of it. Great 
 was the silliness, but great also as to this case of poor Mrs. Brash, 
 I will say for it, the good nature. Of course, furthermore, it took 
 in particular " our set," with its positive child-terror of the banal, 
 to be either so foolish or so wise ; though indeed I've never quite 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 33 
 
 known where our set begins and ends, and have had to content 
 myself on this score with the indication once given me by a lady 
 next whom I was placed at dinner : " Oh, it's bounded on the 
 north by Ibsen and on the south by Sargent ! " Mrs. Brash never 
 sat to me ; she absolutely declined ; and when she declared that 
 it was quite enough for her that I had with that fine precipitation 
 invited her, I quite took this as she meant it, for before we had 
 gone very far our understanding, hers and mine, was complete. 
 Her attitude was as happy as her success was prodigious. The 
 sacrifice of the portrait was a sacrifice to the true inwardness of 
 Lady Beldonald, and did much, for the time, I divined, toward 
 muffling their domestic tension. All that was thus in her power 
 to say and I heard of a few cases of her having said it was 
 that she was sure I would have painted her beautifully if she 
 hadn't prevented me. She couldn't even tell the truth, which was 
 that I certainly would have done so if Lady Beldonald hadn't ; 
 and she never could mention the subject at all before that person- 
 age. I can only describe the affair, naturally, from the outside, 
 and heaven forbid indeed that I should try too closely to recon- 
 struct the possible strange intercourse of these good friends at 
 home. 
 
 My anecdote, however, would lose half such point as it may 
 possess were I to omit all mention of the charming turn that her 
 ladyship appeared gradually to have found herself able to give to 
 her deportment. She had made it impossible I should myself 
 bring up our old, our original question, but there was real dis- 
 tinction in her manner of now accepting certain other possibilities. 
 Let me do her that justice ; her effort at magnanimity must have 
 been immense. There couldn't fail, of course, to be ways in 
 which poor Mrs. Brash paid for it. How much she had to pay 
 we were, in fact, soon enough to see ; and it is my intimate con- 
 viction that, as a climax, her life at last was the price. But while 
 she lived, at least and it was with an intensity, for those 
 wondrous weeks, of which she had never dreamed Lady 
 Beldonald herself faced the music. This is what I mean by the 
 possibilities, by the sharp actualities indeed, that she accepted. 
 She took our friend out, she showed her at home, never 
 attempted to hide or to betray her, played her no trick whatever 
 so long as the ordeal lasted. She drank deep, on her side too, 
 of the cup the cup that for her own lips could only be bitter- 
 ness. There was, I think, scarce a special success of her com- 
 panion's at which she was not personally present. Mrs. Munden's 
 theory of the silence in which all this would be muffled for them 
 was, none the less, and in abundance, confirmed by our observa- 
 
34 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 tions. The whole thing was to be the death of one or the other 
 of them, but they never spoke of it at tea. I remember even 
 that Nina went so far as to say to me once, looking me full in 
 the eyes, quite sublimely, " I've made out what you mean she 
 is a picture." The beauty of this, moreover, was that, as I am 
 persuaded, she hadn't really made it out at all the words were 
 the mere hypocrisy of her reflective endeavour for virtue. She 
 couldn't possibly have made it out; her friend was as much as 
 ever " dreadfully plain " to her ; she must have wondered to the 
 last what on earth possessed us. Wouldn't it in fact have been, 
 after all, just this failure of vision, this supreme stupidity in 
 short, that kept the catastrophe so long at bay? There was 
 a certain sense of greatness for her in seeing so many of us so 
 absurdly mistaken; and I recall that on various occasions, and 
 in particular when she uttered the words just quoted, this high 
 serenity, as a sign of the relief of her soreness, if not of the 
 effort of her conscience, did something quite visible to my eyes, 
 and also quite unprecedented, for the beauty of her face. She 
 got a real lift from it such a momentary discernible sublimity 
 that I recollect coming out on the spot with a queer, crude, 
 amused " Do you know I believe I could paint you now ? " 
 
 She was a fool not to have closed with me then and there; 
 for what has happened since has altered everything what was 
 to happen a little later was so much more than I could swallow. 
 This was the disappearance of the famous Holbein from one day 
 to the other producing a consternation among us all as great as 
 if the Venus of Milo had suddenly vanished from the Louvre. 
 "She has simply shipped her straight back" the explanation 
 was given in that form by Mrs. Munden, who added that any 
 cord pulled tight enough would end at last by snapping. At the 
 snap, in any case, we mightily jumped, for the masterpiece we 
 had for three or four months been living with had made us feel 
 its presence as a luminous lesson and a daily need. We recog- 
 nised more than ever that it had been, for high finish, the gem 
 of our collection we found what a blank it left on the wall. 
 Lady Beldonald might fill up the blank, but we couldn't. That 
 she did soon fill it up and, heaven help us, how? was put 
 before me after an interval of no great length, but during which 
 I had not seen her. I dined on the Christmas of last year 
 at Mrs. Munden's, and Nina, with a " scratch lot," as our hostess 
 said, was there, and, the preliminary wait being longish, ap- 
 proached me very sweetly. " I'll come to you to-morrow if you 
 like," she said ; and the effect of it, after a first stare at her, was 
 to make me look all round. I took in, in these two motions, 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 35 
 
 two things ; one of which was that, though now again so satisfied 
 herself of her high state, she could give me nothing comparable 
 to what I should have got had she taken me up at the moment 
 of my meeting her on her distinguished concession ; the other 
 that she was "suited" afresh, and that Mrs. Brash's successor 
 was fully installed. Mrs. Brash's successor was at the other side 
 of the room, and I became conscious that Mrs. Munden was 
 waiting to see my eyes seek her. I guessed the meaning of the 
 wait ; what was one, this time, to say ? Oh, first and foremost, 
 assuredly, that it was immensely droll, for this time, at least, 
 there was no mistake. The lady I looked upon, and as to whom 
 my friend, again quite at sea, appealed to me for a formula, was 
 as little a Holbein, or a specimen of any other school, as she 
 was, like Lady Beldonald herself, a Titian. The formula was 
 easy to give, for the amusement was that her prettiness yes, 
 literally, prodigiously, her prettiness was distinct. Lady Bel- 
 donald had been magnificent had been almost intelligent. 
 Miss What's-her-name continues pretty, continues even young, 
 and doesn't matter a straw ! She matters so ideally little that 
 Lady Beldonald is practically safer, I judge, than she has ever 
 been. There has not been a symptom of chatter about this 
 person, and I believe her protectress is much surprised that we 
 are not more struck. 
 
 It was, at any rate, strictly impossible to me to make an 
 appointment for the day as to which I have just recorded Nina's 
 proposal ; and the turn of events since then has not quickened 
 my eagerness. Mrs. Munden remained in correspondence with 
 Mrs. Brash to the extent, that is, of three letters, each of which 
 she showed me. They so told, to our imagination, her terrible 
 little story that we were quite prepared or thought we were 
 for her going out like a snuffed candle. She resisted, on her 
 return to her original conditions, less than a year ; the taste of 
 the tree, as I had called it, had been fatal to her ; what she had 
 contentedly enough lived without before for half a century she 
 couldn't now live without for a day^ I know nothing of her 
 original conditions some minor American city save that for 
 her to have gone back to them was clearly to have stepped out 
 of her frame. We performed, Mrs. Munden and I, a small 
 funeral service for her by talking it all over and making it all out. 
 It wasn't the minor American city a market for Holbeins, and 
 what had occurred was that the poor old picture, banished from 
 its museum and refreshed by the rise of no new movement to 
 hang it, was capable of the miracle of a silent revolution, of itself 
 turning, in its dire dishonour, its face to the wall. So it stood, 
 
36 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 without the intervention of the ghost of a critic, till they 
 happened to pull it round again and find it mere dead paint. 
 Well, it had had, if that is anything, its season of fame, its name 
 on a thousand tongues and printed in capitals in the catalogue. 
 We had not been at fault. I haven't, all the same, the least note 
 of her not a scratch. And I did her so in intention ! Mrs. 
 Munden continues to remind me, however, that this is not the 
 sort of rendering with which, on the other side, after all, Lady 
 Beldonald proposes to content herself. She has come back to 
 the question of her own portrait. Let me settle it then at last. 
 Since she will have the real thing well, hang it, she shall ! 
 
THE TWO FACES 
 
 THE servant, who, in spite of his sealed, stamped look, 
 appeared to have his reasons, stood there for instruction, 
 in a manner not quite usual, after announcing the name. Mrs. 
 Grantham, however, took it up " Lord Gwyther ? " with a 
 quick surprise that for an instant justified him even to the small 
 scintilla in the glance she gave her companion, which might 
 have had exactly the sense of the butler's hesitation. This com- 
 panion, a shortish, fairish, youngish man, clean-shaven and keen- 
 eyed, had, with a promptitude that would have struck an observer 
 which the butler indeed was sprung to his feet and moved to 
 the chimney-piece, though his hostess herself, meanwhile, man- 
 aged not otherwise to stir. " Well ? " she said, as for the visitor 
 to advance; which she immediately followed with a sharper "He's 
 not there ? " 
 
 " Shall I show him up, ma'am ? " 
 
 " But of course ! " The point of his doubt made her at last 
 rise for impatience, and Bates, before leaving the room, might 
 still have caught the achieved irony of her appeal to the gentle- 
 man into whose communion with her he had broken. " Why in 
 
 the world not ? What a way !" she exclaimed, as 
 
 Sutton felt beside his cheek the passage of her eyes to the glass 
 behind him. 
 
 " He wasn't sure you'd see anyone." 
 "I don't see 'anyone,' but I see individuals." 
 "That's just it ; and sometimes you don't see them." 
 "Do you mean ever because of youV she asked as she 
 touched into place a tendril of hair. "That's just his imper- 
 tinence, as to which I shall speak to him." 
 
 " Don't," said Shirley Sutton. " Never notice anything." 
 "That's nice advice from you," she laughed, "who notice 
 everything ! " 
 
 " Ah, but I speak of nothing." 
 
 37 
 
38 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 She looked at him a moment. "You're still more impertinent 
 than Bates. You'll please not budge," she went on. 
 
 "Really? I must sit him out?" he continued as, after a 
 minute, she had not again spoken only glancing about, while 
 she changed her place, partly for another look at the glass and 
 partly to see if she could improve her seat. What she felt was 
 rather more than, clever and charming though she was, she 
 could hide. "If you're wondering how you seem, I can tell 
 you. Awfully cool and easy." 
 
 She gave him another stare. She was beautiful and conscious. 
 " And if you're wondering how you seem " 
 
 "Oh, I'm not!" he laughed from before the fire; "I always 
 perfectly know." 
 
 " How you seem," she retorted, " is as if you didn't ! " 
 
 Once more for a little he watched her. "You're looking 
 lovely for him extraordinarily lovely, within the marked limits 
 of your range. But that's enough. Don't be clever." 
 
 "Then who will be?" 
 
 " There you are ! " he sighed with amusement. 
 
 "Do you know him?" she asked as, through the door left 
 open by Bates, they heard steps on the landing. 
 
 Sutton had to think an instant, and produced a " No " just as 
 Lord Gwyther was again announced, which gave an unexpected- 
 ness to the greeting offered him a moment later by this person- 
 age a young man, stout and smooth and fresh, but not at all 
 shy, who, after the happiest rapid passage with Mrs. Grantham, 
 put out a hand with a frank, pleasant " How d'ye do ? " 
 
 " Mr. Shirley Sutton," Mrs. Grantham explained. 
 
 "Oh yes," said her second visitor, quite as if he knew; which, 
 as he couldn't have known, had for her first the interest of con- 
 firming a perception that his lordship would be no, not at all, in 
 general, embarrassed, only was now exceptionally and especially 
 agitated. As it is, for that matter, with Sutton's total impression 
 that we are particularly and almost exclusively concerned, it may 
 be further mentioned that he was not less clear as to the really 
 handsome way in which the young man kept himself together 
 and little by little though with all proper aid indeed finally 
 found his feet. All sorts of things, for the twenty minutes, 
 occurred to Sutton, though one of them was certainly not that it 
 would, after all, be better he should go. One of them was that 
 their hostess was doing it in perfection simply, easily, kindly, 
 yet with something the least bit queer in her wonderful eyes; 
 another was that if he had been recognised without the least 
 ground it was through a tension of nerves on the part of his 
 
THE TWO FACES 39 
 
 fellow-guest that produced inconsequent motions; still another 
 was that, even had departure been indicated, he would positively 
 have felt dissuasion in the rare promise of the scene. This was 
 in especial after Lord Gwyther not only had announced that he 
 was now married, but had mentioned that he wished to bring his 
 wife to Mrs. Grantham for the benefit so certain to be derived. 
 It was the passage immediately produced by that speech that 
 provoked in Sutton the intensity, as it were, of his arrest. He 
 already knew of the marriage as well as Mrs. Grantham herself, 
 and as well also as he knew of some other things ; and this gave 
 him, doubtless, the better measure of what took place before him 
 and the keener consciousness of the quick look that, at a marked 
 moment though it was not absolutely meant for him any more 
 than for his companion Mrs. Grantham let him catch. 
 
 She smiled, but it had a gravity. " I think, you know, you 
 ought to have told me before." 
 
 " Do you mean when I first got engaged ? Well, it all took 
 place so far away, and we really told, at home, so few people." 
 
 Oh, there might have been reasons ; but it had not been quite 
 right. "You were married at Stuttgart? That wasn't too far 
 for my interest, at least, to reach." 
 
 " Awfully kind of you and of course one knew you would be 
 kind. But it wasn't at Stuttgart ; it was over there, but quite in 
 the country. We should have managed it in England but that 
 her mother naturally wished to be present, yet was not in health 
 to come. So it was really, you see, a sort of little hole-and- 
 corner German affair." 
 
 This didn't in the least check Mrs. Grantham's claim, but it 
 started a slight anxiety. " Will she be a, then, German ? " 
 
 Sutton knew her to know perfectly what Lady Gwyther would 
 "be," but he had by this time, while their friend explained, his 
 independent interest. " Oh dear, no ! My father-in-law has 
 never parted with the proud birthright of a Briton. But his 
 wife, you see, holds an estate in Wiirtemberg from her mother, 
 Countess Kremnitz, on which, with the awful condition of his 
 English property, you know, they've found it for years a 
 tremendous saving to live. So that though Valda was luckily 
 born at home she has practically spent her life over there." 
 
 "Oh, I see." Then, after a slight pause, "Is Valda her 
 pretty name?" Mrs. Grantham asked. 
 
 " Well," said the young man, only wishing, in his candour, it 
 was clear, to be drawn out "well, she has, in the manner of her 
 mother's people, about thirteen ; but that's the one we generally 
 
40 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 Mrs. Grantham hesitated but an instant. "Then may / 
 generally use it ? " 
 
 " It would be too charming of you ; and nothing would give 
 her as, I assure you, nothing would give me, greater pleasure." 
 Lord Gwyther quite glowed with the thought. 
 
 " Then I think that instead of coming alone you might have 
 brought her to see me." 
 
 " It's exactly what," he instantly replied, " I came to ask your 
 leave to do." He explained that for the moment Lady Gwyther 
 was not in town, having as soon as she arrived gone down to 
 Torquay to put in a few days with one of her aunts, also her 
 godmother, to whom she was an object of great interest. She 
 had seen no one yet, and no one not that that mattered had 
 seen her ; she knew nothing whatever of London and was awfully 
 frightened at facing it and at what however little might be 
 expected of her. " She wants some one," he said, " some one 
 who knows the whole thing, don't you see? and who's thoroughly 
 kind and clever, as you would be, if I may say so, to take her by 
 the hand." It was at this point and on these words that the eyes 
 of Lord Gwyther's two auditors inevitably and wonderfully met. 
 But there was nothing in the way he kept it up to show that he 
 caught the encounter. " She wants, if I may tell you so, for the 
 great labyrinth, a real friend ; and asking myself what I could 
 do to make things ready for her, and who would be absolutely 
 the best woman in London " 
 
 "You thought, naturally, of met" Mrs. Grantham had 
 listened with no sign but the faint flash just noted ; now, 
 however, she gave him the full light of her expressive face 
 which immediately brought Shirley Sutton, looking at his watch, 
 once more to his feet. 
 
 "She is the best woman in London ! " He addressed himself 
 with a laugh to the other visitor, but offered his hand in farewell 
 to their hostess. 
 
 "You're going?" 
 
 " I must," he said without scruple. 
 
 " Then we do meet at dinner ? " 
 
 " I hope so." On which, to take leave, he returned with 
 interest to Lord Gwyther the friendly clutch he had a short time 
 before received. 
 
THE TWO FACES 41 
 
 II 
 
 THEY did meet at dinner, and if they were not, as it happened, 
 side by side, they made that up afterwards in the happiest angle 
 of a drawing-room that offered both shine and shadow and that 
 was positively much appreciated, in the circle in which they 
 moved, for the favourable "corners" created by its shrewd 
 mistress. Her face, charged with something produced in it by 
 Lord Gwyther's visit, had been with him so constantly for the 
 previous hours that, when she instantly challenged him on his 
 "treatment" of her in the afternoon, he was on the point of 
 naming it as his reason for not having remained with her. 
 Something new had quickly come into her beauty ; he couldn't 
 as yet have said what, nor whether on the whole to its advantage 
 or its loss. Till he could make up his mind about that, at any 
 rate, he would say nothing ; so that, with sufficient presence of 
 mind, he found a better excuse. If in short he had in defiance 
 of her particular request left her alone with Lord Gwyther, it was 
 simply because the situation had suddenly turned so exciting 
 that he had fairly feared the contagion of it the temptation of 
 its making him, most improperly, put in his word. 
 
 They could now talk of these things at their ease. Other 
 couples, ensconced and scattered, enjoyed the same privilege, 
 and Button had more and more the profit, such as it was, of 
 feeling that his interest in Mrs. Grantham had become what 
 was the luxury of so high a social code an acknowledged and 
 protected relation. He knew his London well enough to know 
 that he was on the way to be regarded as her main source of 
 consolation for the trick that, several months before, Lord 
 Gwyther had publicly played her. Many persons had not held 
 that, by the high social code in question, his lordship could 
 have "reserved the right" to turn up in that way, from one day 
 to another, engaged. For himself London took, with its short 
 cuts and its cheap psychology, an immense deal for granted. 
 To his own sense he was never could in the nature of things 
 never be any man's "successor." Just what had constituted 
 the predecessorship of other men was apparently that they had 
 been able to make up their mind. He, worse luck, was at the 
 mercy of her face, and more than ever at the mercy of it now, 
 which meant, moreover, not that it made a slave of him, but 
 that it made, disconcertingly, a sceptic. It was the absolute 
 perfection of the handsome; but things had a way of coming 
 into it. "I felt," he said, "that you were there together at a 
 point at which you had a right to the ease that the absence of 
 
42 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 a listener would give. I reflected that when you made me 
 promise to stay you hadn't guessed " 
 
 " That he could possibly have come to me on such an extra- 
 ordinary errand ? No, of course I hadn't guessed. Who would? 
 But didn't you see how little I was upset by it ? " 
 
 Sutton demurred. Then with a smile, "I think he saw how 
 little." 
 
 "You yourself didn't, then?" 
 
 He again held back, but not, after all, to answer. " He was 
 wonderful, wasn't he ? " 
 
 " I think he was," she replied after a moment. To which she 
 added: "Why did he pretend that way he knew you?" 
 
 " He didn't pretend. He felt on the spot as if we were 
 friends." Sutton had found this afterwards, and found truth in 
 it. " It was an effusion of cheer and hope. He was so glad to 
 see me there, and to find you happy." 
 
 "Happy?" 
 
 "Happy. Aren't you?" 
 
 "Because of you?" 
 
 " Well according to the impression he received as he came 
 in." 
 
 " That was sudden then," she asked, " and unexpected ? " 
 
 Her companion thought. "Prepared in some degree, but 
 confirmed by the sight of us, there together, so awfully jolly 
 and sociable over your fire." 
 
 Mrs. Grantham turned this round. "If he knew I was 
 ' happy ' then which, by the way, is none of his business, nor 
 of yours either why in the world did he come ? " 
 
 " Well, for good manners, and for his idea," said Sutton. 
 
 She took it in, appearing to have no hardness of rancour that 
 could bar discussion. " Do you mean by his idea his proposal 
 that I should grandmother his wife? And, if you do, is the 
 proposal your reason for calling him wonderful?" 
 
 Sutton laughed. " Pray, what's yours ? " As this was a ques- 
 tion, however, that she took her time to answer or not to answer 
 only appearing interested for a moment in a combination that 
 had formed itself on the other side of the room he presently 
 went on. " What's his ? that would seem to be the point. His, 
 I mean, for having decided on the extraordinary step of throwing 
 his little wife, bound hands and feet, into your arms. Intelligent 
 as you are, and with these three or four hours to have thought it 
 over, I yet don't see how that can fail still to mystify you." 
 
 She continued to watch their opposite neighbours. " ' Little,' 
 you call her. Is she so very small ? >J 
 
THE TWO FACES 43 
 
 "Tiny, tiny she must be; as different as possible in every 
 way of necessity from you. They always are the opposite 
 pole, you know," said Shirley Sutton. 
 
 She glanced at him now. "You strike me as of an impu- 
 dence !" 
 
 " No, no. I only like to make it out with you." 
 
 She looked away again and, after a little, went on. " I'm sure 
 she's charming, and only hope one isn't to gather that he's 
 already tired of her." 
 
 " Not a bit ! He's tremendously in love, and he'll remain so." 
 
 "So much the better. And if it's a question," said Mrs. 
 Grantham, " of one's doing what one can for her, he has only, as 
 I told him when you had gone, to give me the chance." 
 
 " Good ! So he is to commit her to you ? " 
 
 "You use extraordinary expressions, but it's settled that he 
 brings her." 
 
 " And you'll really and truly help her ? " 
 
 " Really and truly ? " said Mrs. Grantham, with her eyes again 
 upon him. " Why not ? For what do you take me ? " 
 
 " Ah, isn't that just what I still have the discomfort, every day 
 I live, of asking myself?" 
 
 She had made, as she spoke, a movement to rise, which, as 
 if she was tired of his tone, his last words appeared to determine. 
 But, also getting up, he held her, when they were on their feet, 
 long enough to hear the rest of what he had to say. "If you do 
 help her, you know, you'll show him that you've understood." 
 
 "Understood what?" 
 
 "Why, his idea the deep, acute train of reasoning that has 
 led him to take, as one may say, the bull by the horns ; to reflect 
 that as you might, as you probably would^ in any case, get at 
 her, he plays the wise game, as well as the bold one, by assuming 
 your generosity and placing himself publicly under an obligation 
 to you." 
 
 Mrs. Grantham showed not only that she had listened, but 
 that she had for an instant considered. " What is it you elegantly 
 describe as my getting * at ' her ? " 
 
 " He takes his risk, but puts you, you see, on your honour." 
 
 She thought a moment more. "What profundities indeed 
 then over the simplest of matters ! And if your idea is," she 
 went on, "that if I do help her I shall show him I've understood 
 them, so it will be that if I don't " 
 
 "You'll show him" Sutton took her up "that you haven't? 
 Precisely. But in spite of not wanting to appear to have under- 
 stood too much " 
 
44 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " I may still be depended on to do what I can ? Quite 
 certainly. You'll see what I may still be depended on to do." 
 And she moved away. 
 
 Ill 
 
 IT was not, doubtless, that there had been anything in their 
 rather sharp separation at that moment to sustain or prolong the 
 interruption ; yet it definitely befell that, circumstances aiding, 
 they practically failed to meet again before the great party at 
 Burbeck. This occasion was to gather in some thirty persons 
 from a certain Friday to the following Monday, and it was on the 
 Friday that Sutton went down. He had known in advance that 
 Mrs. Grantham was to be there, and this perhaps, during the 
 interval of hindrance, had helped him a little to be patient. He 
 had before him the certitude of a real full cup two days 
 brimming over with the sight of her. He found, however, on 
 his arrival that she was not yet in the field, and presently learned 
 that her place would be in a small contingent that was to join 
 the party on the morrow. This knowledge he extracted from 
 Miss Banker, who was always the first to present herself at any 
 gathering that was to enjoy her, and whom, moreover partly on 
 that very account the wary not less than the speculative were 
 apt to hold themselves well-advised to engage with at as early as 
 possible a stage of the business. She was stout, red, rich, 
 mature, universal a massive, much-fingered volume, alphabeti- 
 cal, wonderful, indexed, that opened of itself at the right place. 
 
 She opened for Sutton instinctively at G , which happened to 
 
 be remarkably convenient. " What she's really waiting over for 
 is to bring down Lady Gwyther." 
 
 " Ah, the Gwythers are coming ? " 
 
 "Yes; caught, through Mrs. Grantham, just in time. She'll 
 be the feature everyone wants to see her." 
 
 Speculation and wariness met and combined at this moment 
 in Shirley Sutton. " Do you mean a Mrs. Grantham ? " 
 
 " Dear no ! Poor little Lady Gwyther, who, but just arrived in 
 England, appears now literally for the first time in her life in any 
 society whatever, and whom (don't you know the extraordinary 
 story? you ought to you I) she, of all people, has so wonder- 
 fully taken up. It will be quite here as if she were ' present- 
 ing' her." 
 
 Sutton, of course, took in more things than even appeared. 
 " I never know what I ought to know ; I only know, inveterately, 
 what I oughtn't. So what is the extraordinary story ? " 
 
THE TWO FACES 45 
 
 " You really haven't heard ? " 
 
 " Really ! " he replied without winking. 
 
 " It happened, indeed, but the other day," said Miss Banker, 
 " yet everyone is already wondering. Gwyther has thrown his 
 wife on her mercy but I won't believe you if you pretend to me 
 you don't know why he shouldn't." 
 
 Sutton asked himself then what he could pretend. " Do you 
 mean because she's merciless ? " 
 
 She hesitated. " If you don't know, perhaps I oughtn't to 
 tell you." 
 
 He liked Miss Banker, and found just the right tone to plead. 
 "Do tell me." 
 
 "Well," she sighed, "it will be your own fault ! They 
 
 had been such friends that there could have been but one name 
 for the crudity of his original precede. When I was a girl we 
 used to call it throwing over. They call it in French to lacker. 
 But I refer not so much to the act itself as to the manner of it, 
 though you may say indeed, of course, that there is in such 
 cases, after all, only one manner. Least said, soonest mended." 
 
 Sutton seemed to wonder. " Oh, he said too much ? " 
 
 " He said nothing. That was it." 
 
 Sutton kept it up. " But was what?" 
 
 " Why, what she must, like any woman in her shoes, have felt 
 to be his perfidy. He simply went and did it took to himself 
 this child, that is, without the preliminary of a scandal or a rupture 
 before she could turn round." 
 
 " I follow you. But it would appear from what you say that 
 she has turned round now." 
 
 "Well," Miss Banker laughed, "we shall see for ourselves how 
 far. It will be what everyone will try to see." 
 
 " Oh, then we've work cut out ! " And Sutton certainly felt 
 that he himself had an impression that lost nothing from a 
 further talk with Miss Banker in the course of a short stroll in 
 the grounds with her the next day. He spoke as one who had 
 now considered many things. 
 
 " Did I understand from you yesterday that Lady Gwyther's a 
 'child'?" 
 
 " Nobody knows. It's prodigious the way she has managed." 
 
 " The way Lady Gwyther has ? " 
 
 " No ; the way May Grantham has kept her till this hour in 
 her pocket." 
 
 He was quick at his watch. "Do you mean by 'this hour' 
 that they're due now ? " 
 
 " Not till tea. All the others arrive together in time for that." 
 
46 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 Miss Banker had clearly, since the previous day, filled in gaps 
 and become, as it were, revised and enlarged. " She'll have kept 
 a cat from seeing her, so as to produce her entirely herself." 
 
 "Well," Sutton mused, " that will have been a very noble sort 
 of return " 
 
 " For Gwyther's behaviour? Very. Yet I feel creepy." 
 
 "Creepy?" 
 
 " Because so much depends for the girl in the way of the 
 right start or the wrong start on the signs and omens of this first 
 appearance. It's a great house and a great occasion, and we're 
 assembled here, it strikes me, very much as the Roman mob at 
 the circus used to be to see the next Christian maiden brought 
 out to the tigers." 
 
 " Oh, if she is a Christian maiden ! " Sutton murmured. 
 
 But he stopped at what his imagination called up. 
 
 It perhaps fed that faculty a little that Miss Banker had the 
 effect of making out that Mrs. Grantham might individually be, 
 in any case, something of a Roman matron. "She has kept her 
 in the dark so that we may only take her from her hand. She 
 will have formed her for us." 
 
 " In so few days ? " 
 
 " Well, she will have prepared her decked her for the sacrifice 
 with ribbons and flowers." 
 
 " Ah, if you only mean that she will have taken her to her 
 
 dressmaker !" And it came to Sutton, at once as a new light 
 
 and as a check, almost, to anxiety, that this was all poor Gwyther, 
 mistrustful probably of a taste formed by Stuttgart, might have 
 desired of their friend. 
 
 There were usually at Burbeck many things taking place at 
 once ; so that wherever else, on such occasions, tea might be 
 served, it went forward with matchless pomp, weather permitting, 
 on a shaded stretch of one of the terraces and in presence of 
 one of the prospects. Shirley Sutton, moving, as the afternoon 
 waned, more restlessly about and mingling in dispersed groups 
 only to find they had nothing to keep him quiet, came upon it as 
 he turned a corner of the house saw it seated there in all its 
 state. It might be said that at Burbeck it was, like everything 
 else, made the most of. It constituted immediately, with multi- 
 plied tables and glittering plate, with rugs and cushions and ices 
 and fruit and wonderful porcelain and beautiful women, a scene 
 of splendour, almost an incident of grand opera. One of the 
 beautiful women might quite have been expected to rise with a 
 gold cup and a celebrated song. 
 
 One of them did rise, as it happened, while Sutton drew near, 
 
THE TWO FACES 47 
 
 and he found himself a moment later seeing nothing and nobody 
 but Mrs. Grantham. They met on the terrace, just away from 
 the others, and the movement in which he had the effect of 
 arresting her might have been that of withdrawal. He quickly 
 saw, however, that if she had been about to pass into the house 
 it was only on some errand to get something or to call someone 
 that would immediately have restored her to the public. It 
 somehow struck him on the spot and more than ever yet, though 
 the impression was not wholly new to him that she felt herself a 
 figure for the forefront of the stage and indeed would have been 
 recognised by anyone at a glance as the prima donna assoluta. 
 She caused, in fact, during the few minutes he stood talking to 
 her, an extraordinary series of waves to roll extraordinarily fast 
 over his sense, not the least mark of the matter being that the 
 appearance with which it ended was again the one with which it 
 had begun. " The face the face," as he kept dumbly repeating ; 
 that was at last, as at first, all he could clearly see. She had a 
 perfection resplendent, but what in the world had it done, this 
 perfection, to her beauty? It was her beauty, doubtless, that 
 looked out at him, but it was into something else that, as their 
 eyes met, he strangely found himself looking. 
 
 It was as if something had happened in consequence of which 
 she had changed, and there was that in this swift perception that 
 made him glance eagerly about for Lady Gwyther. But as he 
 took in the recruited group identities of the hour added to 
 those of the previous twenty-four he saw, among his recogni- 
 tions, one of which was the husband of the person missing, 
 that Lady Gwyther was not there. Nothing in the whole busi- 
 ness was more singular than his consciousness that, as he came 
 back to his interlocutress after the nods and smiles and hand- 
 waves he had launched, she knew what had been his thought. 
 She knew for whom he had looked without success ; but why 
 should this knowledge visibly have hardened and sharpened her, 
 and precisely at a moment when she was unprecedentedly mag- 
 nificent ? The indefinable apprehension that had somewhat sunk 
 after his second talk with Miss Banker and then had perversely 
 risen again this nameless anxiety now produced on him, with a 
 sudden sharper pinch, the effect of a great suspense. The 
 action of that, in turn, was to show him that he had not yet fully 
 known how much he had at stake on a final view. It was re- 
 vealed to him for the first time that he " really cared " whether 
 Mrs. Grantham were a safe nature. It was too ridiculous by 
 what a thread it hung, but something was certainly in the air 
 that would definitely tell him. 
 
48 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 What was in the air descended the next moment to earth. He 
 turned round as he caught the expression with which her eyes 
 attached themselves to something that approached. A little 
 person, very young and very much dressed, had come out of the 
 house, and the expression in Mrs. Grantham's eyes was that of 
 the artist confronted with her work and interested, even to im- 
 patience, in the judgment of others. The little person drew 
 nearer, and though Button's companion, without looking at him 
 now, gave it a name and met it, he had jumped for himself at 
 certitude. He saw many things too many, and they appeared 
 to be feathers, frills, excrescences of silk and lace massed 
 together and conflicting, and after a moment also saw struggling 
 out of them a small face that struck him as either scared or sick. 
 Then, with his eyes again returning to Mrs. Grantham, he saw 
 another. 
 
 He had no more talk with Miss Banker till late that evening 
 an evening during which he had felt himself too noticeably 
 silent; but something had passed between this pair, across 
 dinner-table and drawing-room, without speech, and when they 
 at last found words it was in the needed ease of a quiet end of 
 the long, lighted gallery, where she opened again at the very 
 paragraph. 
 
 "You were right that was it. She did the only thing that, 
 at such short notice, she could do. She took her to her dress- 
 maker." 
 
 Sutton, with his back to the reach of the gallery, had, as if to 
 banish a vision, buried his eyes for a minute in his hands. "And 
 oh, the face the face ! " 
 
 " Which ? " Miss Banker asked. 
 
 " Whichever one looks at." 
 
 "But May Grantham's glorious. She has turned herself 
 out " 
 
 "With a splendour of taste and a sense of effect, eh? Yes." 
 Sutton showed he saw far. 
 
 " She has the sense of effect. The sense of effect as exhibited 
 
 in Lady Gwyther's clothes ! " was something Miss Banker 
 
 failed of words to express. " Everybody's overwhelmed. Here, 
 you know, that sort of thing's grave. The poor creature's lost." 
 
 "Lost?" 
 
 " Since on the first impression, as we said, so much depends. 
 The first impression's made oh, made ! I defy her now ever to 
 unmake it. Her husband, who's proud, won't like her the better 
 for it. And I don't see," Miss Banker went on, " that her pretti- 
 ness was enough a mere little feverish, frightened freshness; 
 
THE TWO FACES 49 
 
 what did he see in her? to be so blasted. It has been done 
 with an atrocity of art " 
 
 " That supposes the dressmaker then also a devil ? " 
 
 " Oh, your London women and their dressmakers ! " Miss 
 Banker laughed. 
 
 " But the face- the face ! " Sutton woefully repeated. 
 
 "May's?" 
 
 " The little girl's. It's exquisite." 
 
 " Exquisite ? " 
 
 " For unimaginable pathos." 
 
 "Oh!" Miss Banker dropped. 
 
 " She has at last begun to see." Sutton showed again how far 
 he saw. " It glimmers upon her innocence, she makes it dimly 
 out what has been done with her. She's even worse this evening 
 the way, my eye, she looked at dinner ! than when she came. 
 Yes " he was confident "it has dawned (how couldn't it, out of 
 all of you ?) and she knows." 
 
 " She ought to have known before ! " Miss Banker intelligently 
 sighed. 
 
 " No ; she wouldn't in that case have been so beautiful." 
 
 " Beautiful ? " cried Miss Banker ; " overloaded like a monkey 
 in a show ! " 
 
 "The face, yes ; which goes to the heart. It's that that makes 
 it," said Shirley Sutton. "And it's that" he thought it out 
 "that makes the other." 
 
 "I see. Conscious?" 
 
 " Horrible ! " 
 
 " You take it hard," said Miss Banker. 
 
 Lord Gwyther, just before she spoke, had come in sight and 
 now was near them. Sutton on this, appearing to wish to avoid 
 him, reached, before answering his companion's observation, a 
 door that opened close at hand. "So hard," he replied from that 
 point, " that I shall be off to-morrow morning." 
 
 " And not see the rest ? " she called after him. 
 
 But he had already gone, and Lord Gwyther, arriving, amiably 
 took up her question. " The rest of what ? " 
 
 Miss Banker looked him well in the eyes. " Of Mrs. Grant- 
 ham's clothes." 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 
 
 i 
 
 I WAS too pleased with what it struck me that, as an old, old 
 friend, I had done for her, not to go to her that very after- 
 noon with the news. I knew she worked late, as in general I also 
 did ; but I sacrificed for her sake a good hour of the February 
 daylight. She was in her studio, as I had believed she would be, 
 where her card (" Mary J. Tredick " not Mary Jane, but Mary 
 Juliana) was manfully on the door ; a little tired, a little old and 
 a good deal spotted, but with her ugly spectacles taken off, as 
 soon as I appeared, to greet me. She kept on, while she scraped 
 her palette and wiped her brushes, the big stained apron that 
 covered her from head to foot and that I have often enough 
 before seen her retain in conditions giving the measure of her 
 renunciation of her desire to dazzle. Every fresh reminder of 
 this brought home to me that she had given up everything but 
 her work, and that there had been in her history some reason. 
 But I was as far from the reason as ever. She had given up too 
 much ; this was just why one wanted to lend her a hand. I told 
 her, at any rate, that I had a lovely job for her. 
 
 " To copy something I do like ? " 
 
 Her complaint, I knew, was that people only gave orders, 
 if they gave them at all, for things she did not like. But this 
 wasn't a case of copying not at all, at least, in the common 
 sense. " It's for a portrait quite in the air." 
 
 " Ah, you do portraits yourself! " 
 
 "Yes, and you know how. My trick won't serve for this. 
 What's wanted is a pretty picture." 
 
 "Then of whom?" 
 ' " Of nobody. That is of anybody. Anybody you like." 
 
 She naturally wondered. " Do you mean I'm myself to choose 
 my sitter ? " 
 
 " Well, the oddity is that there is to be no sitter." 
 
 " Whom then is the picture to represent ? " 
 
 " Why, a handsome, distinguished, agreeable man, of not more 
 
 50 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 51 
 
 than forty, clean-shaven, thoroughly well-dressed, and a perfect 
 gentleman." 
 
 She continued to stare. "And I'm to find him myself?" 
 
 I laughed at the term she used. " Yes, as you ' find ' the 
 canvas, the colours and the frame." After which I immediately 
 explained. "I've just had the 'rummest' visit, the effect of 
 which was to make me think of you. A lady, unknown to me 
 and unintroduced, turned up at my place at three o'clock. She 
 had come straight, she let me know, without preliminaries, on 
 account of one's high reputation the usual thing and of her 
 having admired one's work. Of course I instantly saw I mean 
 I saw it as soon as she named her affair that she hadn't under- 
 stood my work at all. What am I good for in the world but just 
 the impression of the given, the presented case ? I can do but 
 the face I see." 
 
 " And do you think I can do the face I don't ? " 
 
 " No, but you see so many more. You see them in fancy and 
 memory, and they come out, for you, from all the museums you've 
 haunted and all the great things you've studied. I know you'll 
 be able to see the one my visitor wants and to give it what's 
 the crux of the business the tone of time." 
 
 She turned the question over. " What does she want it for ? " 
 
 "Just for that for the tone of time. And, except that it's 
 to hang over her chimney, she didn't tell me. I've only my idea 
 that it's to represent, to symbolise, as it were, her husband, who's 
 not alive and who perhaps never was. This is exactly what will 
 give you a free hand." 
 
 " With nothing to go by no photographs or other portraits ? " 
 
 " Nothing." 
 
 " She only proposes to describe him ? " 
 
 " Not even ; she wants the picture itself to do that. Her only 
 condition is that he be a tres-bel homme" 
 
 She had begun at last, a little thoughtfully, to remove her 
 apron. " Is she French ? " 
 
 " I don't know. I give it up. She calls herself Mrs. Bridge- 
 north." 
 
 Mary wondered. " Connais pas ! I never heard of her." 
 
 "You wouldn't." 
 
 " You mean it's not her real name ? " 
 
 I hesitated. " I mean that she's a very downright fact, full of 
 the implication that she'll pay a downright price. It's clear to 
 me that you can ask what you like ; and it's therefore a chance 
 that I can't consent to your missing." My friend gave no sign 
 either way, and I told my story. "She's a woman of fifty, 
 
52 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 perhaps of more, who has been pretty, and who still presents 
 herself, with her grey hair a good deal powdered, as I judge, to 
 carry it off, extraordinarily well. She was a little frightened and 
 a little free ; the latter because of the former. But she did 
 uncommonly well, I thought, considering the oddity of her wish. 
 This oddity she quite admits ; she began indeed by insisting 
 on it so in advance that I found myself expecting I didn't know 
 what. She broke at moments into French, which was perfect, 
 but no better than her English, which isn't vulgar ; not more at 
 least than that of everybody else. The things people do say, 
 and the way they say them, to artists ! She wanted immensely, 
 I could see, not to fail of her errand, not to be treated as 
 absurd ; and she was extremely grateful to me for meeting her 
 so far as I did. She was beautifully dressed and she came in 
 a brougham." 
 
 My listener took it in; then, very quietly, "Is she respect- 
 able?" she inquired. 
 
 "Ah, there you are!" I laughed; "and how you always pick 
 the point right out, even when one has endeavoured to diffuse 
 a specious glamour! She's extraordinary," I pursued after an 
 instant; "and just what she wants of the picture, I think, is to 
 make her a little less so." 
 
 "Who is she, then? What is she?" my companion simply 
 went on. 
 
 It threw me straightway back on one of my hobbies. " Ah, 
 my dear, what is so interesting as life? What is, above all, so 
 stupendous as London ? There's everything in it, everything in 
 the world, and nothing too amazing not some day to pop out at 
 you. What is a woman, faded, preserved, pretty, powdered, vague, 
 odd, dropping on one without credentials, but with a carnage 
 and very good lace ? What is such a person but a person who 
 may have had adventures, and have made them, in one way or 
 another, pay ? They're, however, none of one's business ; it's 
 scarcely on the cards that one should ask her. I should like, 
 with Mrs. Bridgenorth, to see a fellow ask ! She goes in for 
 propriety, the real thing. If I suspect her of being the creation 
 of her own talents, she has clearly, on the other hand, seen a 
 lot of life. Will you meet her ? " I next demanded. 
 
 My hostess waited. " No." 
 
 " Then you won't try ? " 
 
 " Need I meet her to try ? " And the question made me guess 
 that, so far as she had understood, she began to feel herself a 
 little taken. "It seems strange," she none the less mused, "to 
 attempt to please her on such a basis. To attempt," she pre- 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 53 
 
 sently added, " to please her at all It's your idea that she's not 
 married ? " she, with this, a trifle inconsequently asked. 
 
 "Well," I replied, "I've only had an hour to think of it, but 
 I somehow already see the scene. Not immediately, not the day 
 after, or even perhaps the year after the thing she desires is set 
 up there, but in due process of time and on convenient oppor- 
 tunity, the transfiguration will occur. 'Who is that awfully 
 handsome man ? ' ' That ? Oh, that's an old sketch of my dear 
 dead husband.' Because I told her insidiously sounding her 
 that she would want it to look old, and that the tone of time is 
 exactly what you're full of." 
 
 " I believe I am," Mary sighed at last. 
 
 "Then put on your hat." I had proposed to her on my 
 arrival to come out to tea with me, and it was when left alone in 
 the studio while she went to her room that I began to feel sure 
 of the success of my errand. The vision that had an hour 
 before determined me grew deeper and brighter for her while 
 I moved about and looked at her things. There were more of 
 them there on her hands than one liked to see ; but at least they 
 sharpened my confidence, which was pleasant for me in view of 
 that of my visitor, who had accepted without reserve my plea for 
 Miss Tredick. Four or five of her copies of famous portraits 
 ornaments of great public and private collections were on the 
 walls, and to see them again together was to feel at ease about 
 my guarantee. The mellow manner of them was what I had 
 had in my mind in saying, to excuse myself to Mrs. Bridgenorth, 
 " Oh, my things, you know, look as if they had been painted 
 to-morrow ! " It made no difference that Mary's Vandykes and 
 Gainsboroughs were reproductions and replicas, for I had known 
 her more than once to amuse herself with doing the thing quite, 
 as she called it, off her own bat. She had copied so bravely so 
 many brave things that she had at the end of her brush an extra- 
 ordinary bag of tricks. She had always replied to me that such 
 things were mere clever humbug, but mere clever humbug was 
 what our client happened to want. The thing was to let her 
 have it one could trust her for the rest. And at the same time 
 that I mused in this way I observed to myself that there was 
 already something more than, as the phrase is, met the eye in 
 such response as I felt my friend had made. I had touched, 
 without intention, more than one spring; I had set in motion 
 more than one impulse. I found myself indeed quite certain of 
 this after she had come back in her hat and her jacket. She 
 was different her idea had flowered ; and she smiled at me from 
 under her tense veil, while she drew over her firm, narrow hands 
 
54 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 a pair of fresh gloves, with a light distinctly new. " Please tell 
 your friend that I'm greatly obliged to both of you and that 
 I take the order." 
 
 "Good. And to give him all his good looks?" 
 
 " It's just to do that that I accept. I shall make him supremely 
 beautiful and supremely base." 
 
 "Base?" I just demurred. 
 
 "The finest gentleman you'll ever have seen, and the worst 
 friend." 
 
 I wondered, as I was startled ; but after an instant I laughed 
 for joy. "Ah well, so long as he's not mine ! I see we shall 
 have him," I said as we went, for truly I had touched a spring. 
 In fact I had touched the spring. 
 
 It rang, more or less, I was presently to find, all over the place. 
 I went, as I had promised, to report to Mrs. Bridgenorth on my 
 mission, and though she declared herself much gratified at the 
 success of it I could see she a little resented the apparent 
 absence of any desire on Miss Tredick's part for a preliminary 
 conference. "I only thought she might have liked just to see 
 me, and have imagined I might like to see her." 
 
 But I was full of comfort. " You'll see her when it's finished. 
 You'll see her in time to thank her." 
 
 "And to pay her, I suppose," my hostess laughed, with an 
 asperity that was, after all, not excessive. "Will she take 
 very long?" 
 
 I thought. " She's so full of it that my impression would be 
 that she'll do it off at a heat." 
 
 " She is full of it then ? " she asked ; and on hearing to what 
 tune, though I told her but half, she broke out with admiration. 
 " You artists are the most extraordinary people ! " It was almost 
 with a bad conscience that I confessed we indeed were, and 
 while she said that what she meant was that we seemed to under- 
 stand everything, and I rejoined that this was also what /meant, 
 she took me into another room to see the place for the picture 
 a proceeding of which the effect was singularly to confirm the 
 truth in question. The place for the picture in her own room, 
 as she called it, a boudoir at the back, overlooking the general 
 garden of the approved modern row and, as she said, only just 
 wanting that touch proved exactly the place (the space of a 
 large panel in the white woodwork over the mantel) that I had 
 spoken of to my friend. She put it quite candidly, " Don't you 
 see what it will do?" and looked at me, wonderfully, as for a 
 sign that I could sympathetically take from her what she didn't 
 literally say. She said it, poor woman, so very nearly that I had 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 55 
 
 no difficulty whatever. The portrait, tastefully enshrined there, 
 of the finest gentleman one should ever have seen, would do 
 even more for herself than it would do for the room. 
 
 I may as well mention at once that my observation of Mrs. 
 Bridgenorth was not in the least of a nature to unseat me from 
 the hobby I have already named. In the light of the impression 
 she made on me life seemed quite as prodigious and London 
 quite as amazing as I had ever contended, and nothing could 
 have been more in the key of that experience than the manner 
 in which everything was vivid between us and nothing expressed. 
 We remained on the surface with the tenacity of shipwrecked 
 persons clinging to a plank. Our plank was our concentrated 
 gaze at Mrs. Bridgenorth's mere present. We allowed her past 
 to exist for us only in the form of the prettiness that she had 
 gallantly rescued from it and to which a few scraps of its identity 
 still adhered. She was amiable, gentle, consistently proper. She 
 gave me more than anything else the sense, simply, of waiting. 
 She was like a house so freshly and successfully " done up " that 
 you were surprised it wasn't occupied. She was waiting for 
 something to happen for somebody to come. She was waiting, 
 above all, for Mary Tredick's work. She clearly counted that it 
 would help her. 
 
 I had foreseen the fact the picture was produced at a heat ; 
 rapidly, directly, at all events, for the sort of thing it proved to 
 be. I left my friend alone at first, left the ferment to work, 
 troubling her with no questions and asking her for no news; 
 two or three weeks passed, and I never went near her. Then 
 at last, one afternoon as the light was failing, I looked in. 
 She immediately knew what I wanted. "Oh yes, I'm doing 
 him." 
 
 "Well," I said, "I've respected your intensity, but I have felt 
 curious." 
 
 I may not perhaps say that she was never so sad as when she 
 laughed, but it's certain that she always laughed when she was 
 sad. When, however, poor dear, for that matter, was she, 
 secretly, not? Her little gasps of mirth were the mark of her 
 worst moments. But why should she have one of these just 
 now ? " Oh, I know your curiosity ! " she replied to me ; and the 
 small chill of her amusement scarcely met it. " He's coming 
 out, but I can't show him to you yet. I must muddle it through 
 in my own way. It has insisted on being, after all, a 'likeness,'" 
 she added. " But nobody will ever know." 
 
 "Nobody?" 
 
 " Nobody she sees." 
 
56 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 "Ah, she doesn't, poor thing," I returned, "seem to see 
 anybody ! " 
 
 " So much the better. I'll risk it," On which I felt I should 
 have to wait, though I had suddenly grown impatient. But I 
 still hung about, and while I did so she explained. " If what 
 I've done is really a portrait, the conditions itself prescribed it. 
 If I was to do the most beautiful man in the world I could do 
 but one." 
 
 We looked at each other ; then I laughed. " It can scarcely 
 be me! But you're getting," I asked, "the great thing?" 
 
 " The infamy ? Oh yes, please God." 
 
 It took away my breath a little, and I even for the moment 
 scarce felt at liberty to press. But one could always be cheerful. 
 " What I meant is the tone of time." 
 
 " Getting it, my dear man ? Didn't I get it long ago ? Don't 
 I show it the tone of time ? " she suddenly, strangely sighed at 
 me, with something in her face I had never yet seen. " I can't 
 give it to him more than for all these years he was to have 
 given it to me." 
 
 I scarce knew what smothered passion, what remembered 
 wrong, what mixture of joy and pain my words had accidentally 
 quickened. Such an effect of them could only become, for me, 
 an instant pity, which, however, I brought out but indirectly. 
 " It's the tone," I smiled, "in which you're speaking now." 
 
 This served, unfortunately, as something of a check. " I 
 didn't mean to speak now." Then with her eyes on the picture, 
 "I've said everything there. Come back," she added, "in three 
 days. He'll be all right." 
 
 He was indeed when at last I saw him. She had produced an 
 extraordinary thing a thing wonderful, ideal, for the part it was 
 to play. My only reserve, from the first, was that it was too fine 
 for its part, that something much less " sincere " would equally 
 have served Mrs. Bridgenorth's purpose, and that relegation to 
 that lady's " own room " whatever charm it was to work there 
 might only mean for it cruel obscurity. The picture is before 
 me now, so that I could describe it if description availed. It 
 represents a man of about five-and-thirty, seen only as to the head 
 and shoulders, but dressed, the observer gathers, in a fashion now 
 almost antique and which was far from contemporaneous with 
 the date of the work. His high, slightly narrow face, which 
 would be perhaps too aquiline but for the beauty of the forehead 
 and the sweetness of the mouth, has a charm that even, after all 
 these years, still stirs my imagination. His type has altogether 
 a distinction that you feel to have been firmly caught and yet not 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 57 
 
 vulgarly emphasised. The eyes are just too near together, but 
 they are, in a wondrous way, both careless and intense, while lip, 
 cheek, and chin, smooth and clear, are admirably drawn. Youth 
 is still, you see, in all his presence, the joy and pride of life, 
 the perfection of a high spirit and the expectation of a great 
 fortune, which he takes for granted with unconscious insolence. 
 Nothing has ever happened to humiliate or disappoint him, and 
 if my fancy doesn't run away with me the whole presentation of 
 him is a guarantee that he will die without having suffered. He 
 is so handsome, in short, that you can scarcely say what he 
 means, and so happy that you can scarcely guess what he feels. 
 
 It is of course, I hasten to add, an appreciably feminine 
 rendering, light, delicate, vague, imperfectly synthetic insistent 
 and evasive, above all, in the wrong places ; but the composition, 
 none the less, is beautiful and the suggestion infinite. The 
 grandest air of the thing struck me in fact, when first I saw it, 
 as coming from the high artistic impertinence with which it 
 offered itself as painted about 1850. It would have been a 
 rare flower of refinement for that dark day. The " tone " that 
 of such a past as it pretended to was there almost to excess, a 
 brown bloom into which the image seemed mysteriously to 
 retreat. The subject of it looks at me now across more years 
 and more knowledge, but what I felt at the moment was that he 
 managed to be at once a triumphant trick and a plausible 
 evocation. He hushed me, I remember, with so many kinds of 
 awe that I shouldn't have dreamt of asking who he was. All 
 I said, after my first incoherences of wonder at my friend's 
 practised skill, was: "And you've arrived at this truth without 
 documents ? " 
 
 " It depends on what you call documents." 
 
 "Without notes, sketches, studies?" 
 
 " I destroyed them years ago." 
 
 " Then you once had them ? " 
 
 She just hung fire. " I once had everything." 
 
 It told me both more and less then I had asked ; enough at 
 all events to make my next question, as I uttered it, sound even 
 to myself a little foolish. "So that it's all memory?" 
 
 From where she stood she looked once more at her work ; after 
 which she jerked away and, taking several steps, came back to 
 me with something new whatever it was I had already seen in 
 her air and answer. " It's all hate /" she threw at me, and then 
 went out of the room. It was not till she had gone that I quite 
 understood why. Extremely affected by the impression visibly 
 made on me, she had burst into tears but had wished me not to see 
 
58 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 them. She left me alone for some time with her wonderful sub- 
 ject, and I again, in her absence, made things out. He was dead 
 he had been dead for years ; the sole humiliation, as I have 
 called it, that he was to know had come to him in that form. 
 The canvas held and cherished him, in any case, as it only holds 
 the dead. She had suffered from him, it came to me, the worst 
 that a woman can suffer, and the wound he had dealt her, though 
 hidden, had never effectually healed. It had bled again while 
 she worked. Yet when she at last reappeared there was but one 
 thing to say. " The beauty, heaven knows, I see. But I don't 
 see what you call the infamy." 
 
 She gave him a last look again she turned away. " Oh, he 
 was like that." 
 
 "Well, whatever he was like," I remember replying, "I wonder 
 you can bear to part with him. Isn't it better to let her see the 
 picture first here ? " 
 
 As to this she doubted, " I don't think I want her to come." 
 
 I wondered. " You continue to object so to meet her ? " 
 
 " What good will it do ? It's quite impossible I should alter 
 him for her." 
 
 "Oh, she won't want that!" I laughed. "She'll adore him as 
 he is." 
 
 " Are you quite sure of your idea ? " 
 
 "That he's to figure as Mr. Bridgenorth? Well, if I hadn't 
 been from the first, my dear lady, I should be now. Fancy, with 
 the chance, her not jumping at him ! Yes, he'll figure as Mr. 
 Bridgenorth." 
 
 " Mr. Bridgenorth ! " she echoed, making the sound, with her 
 small, cold laugh, grotesquely poor for him. He might really 
 have been a prince, and I wondered if he hadn't been. She had, 
 at all events, a new notion. " Do you mind my having it taken 
 to your place and letting her come to see it there ? " Which as 
 I immediately embraced her proposal, deferring to her reasons, 
 whatever they were was what was speedily arranged. 
 
 II 
 
 THE next day therefore I had the picture in charge, and on the 
 following Mrs. Bridgenorth, whom I had notified, arrived. I had 
 placed it, framed and on an easel, well in evidence, and I have 
 never forgotten the look and the cry that, as she became aware 
 of it, leaped into her face and from her lips. It was an extra- 
 ordinary moment, all the more that it found me quite unprepared 
 so extraordinary that I scarce knew at first what had happened. 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 59 
 
 By the time I really perceived, moreover, more things had 
 happened than one, so that when I pulled myself together it was 
 to face the situation as a whole. She had recognised on the 
 instant the subject ; that came first and was irrepressibly vivid in 
 her. Her recognition had, for the length of a flash, lighted for 
 her the possibility that the stroke had been directed. That came 
 second, and she flushed with it as with a blow in the face. What 
 came third and it was what was really most wondrous was the 
 quick instinct of getting both her strange recognition and her 
 blind suspicion well in hand. She couldn't control, however, 
 poor woman, the strong colour in her face and the quick tears in 
 her eyes. She could only glare at the canvas, gasping, grimacing, 
 and try to gain time. Whether in surprise or in resentment she 
 intensely reflected, feeling more than anything else how little she 
 might prudently show ; and I was conscious even at the moment 
 that nothing of its kind could have been finer than her effort to 
 swallow her shock in ten seconds. 
 
 How many seconds she took I didn't measure ; enough, as- 
 suredly, for me also to profit. I gained more time than she, 
 and the greatest oddity doubtless was my own private manoeuvre 
 the quickest calculation that, acting from a mere confused 
 instinct, I had ever made. If she had known the great gentleman 
 represented there and yet had determined on the spot to carry 
 herself as ignorant, all my loyalty to Mary Tredick came to the 
 surface in a prompt counter-move. What gave me opportunity 
 was the red in her cheek. " Why, you've known him ! " 
 
 I saw her ask herself for an instant if she mightn't successfully 
 make her startled state pass as the mere glow of pleasure her 
 natural greeting to her acquisition. She was pathetically, yet at 
 the same time almost comically, divided. Her line was so to 
 cover her tracks that every avowal of a past connection was a 
 danger ; but it also concerned her safety to learn, in the light of 
 our astounding coincidence, how far she already stood exposed. 
 She meanwhile begged the question. She smiled through her 
 tears. " He's too magnificent ! " 
 
 But I gave her, as I say, all too little time. "Who is he? 
 Who was he ? " 
 
 It must have been my look still more than my words that 
 determined her. She wavered but an instant longer, panted, 
 laughed, cried again, and then, dropping into the nearest seat, 
 gave herself up so completely that I was almost ashamed. " Do 
 you think I'd tell you his name ? " The burden of the backward 
 years all the effaced and ignored lived again, almost like an 
 accent unlearned but freshly breaking out at a touch, in the very 
 
6o THE BETTER SORT 
 
 sound of the words. These perceptions she, however, the next 
 thing showed me, were a game at which two could play. She 
 had to look at me but an instant. " Why, you really don't 
 know it ! " 
 
 I judged best to be frank. "I don't know it." 
 
 "Then how does she?" 
 
 " How do you ? " I laughed. " I'm a different matter." 
 
 She sat a minute turning things round, staring at the picture. 
 "The likeness, the likeness ! " It was almost too much. 
 
 "It's so true?" 
 
 " Beyond everything." 
 
 I considered. " But a resemblance to a known individual 
 that wasn't what you wanted." 
 
 She sprang up at this in eager protest. "Ah, no one else 
 would see it." 
 
 I showed again, I fear, my amusement. "No one but you 
 and she ? " 
 
 " It's her doing him ! " She was held by her wonder. " Doesn't 
 she, on your honour, know ? " 
 
 " That his is the very head you would have liked if you had 
 dared ? Not a bit. How should she ? She knows nothing on 
 my honour." 
 
 Mrs. Bridgenorth continued to marvel. " She just painted him 
 for the kind of face ? " 
 
 " That corresponds with my description of what you wished ? 
 Precisely." 
 
 " But how after so long ? From memory ? As a friend ? " 
 
 "As a reminiscence yes. Visual memory, you see, in our 
 uncanny race, is wonderful. As the ideal thing, simply, for your 
 purpose. You are then suited ? " I after an instant added. 
 
 She had again been gazing, and at this turned her eyes on me ; 
 but I saw she couldn't speak, couldn't do more at least than 
 sound, unutterably, " Suited ! " so that I was positively not sur- 
 prised when suddenly just as Mary had done, the power to 
 produce this effect seeming a property of the model she burst 
 into tears. I feel no harsher in relating it, however I may appear, 
 than I did at the moment, but it is a fact that while she just 
 wept I literally had a fresh inspiration on behalf of Miss Tredick's 
 interests. I knew exactly, moreover, before my companion had 
 recovered herself, what she would next ask me ; and I consciously 
 brought this appeal on in order to have it over. I explained that 
 I had not the least idea of the identity of our artist's sitter, to 
 which she had given me no clue. I had nothing but my impres- 
 sion that she had known him known him well ; and, from what- 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 61 
 
 ever material she had worked, the fact of his having also been 
 known to Mrs. Bridgenorth was a coincidence pure and simple. 
 It partook of the nature of prodigy, but such prodigies did occur. 
 My visitor listened with avidity and credulity. She was so far 
 reassured. Then I saw her question come. " Well, if she 
 doesn't dream he was ever anything to me or what he will be 
 now I'm going to ask you, as a very particular favour, never to 
 tell her. She will want to know of course exactly how I've been 
 struck. You'll naturally say that I'm delighted, but may I exact 
 from you that you say nothing else ? " 
 
 There was supplication in her face, but I had to think. 
 " There are conditions I must put to you first, and one of them 
 is also a question, only more frank than yours. Was this 
 mysterious personage frustrated by death to have married 
 you ? " 
 
 She met it bravely. " Certainly, if he had lived." 
 
 I was only amused at an artlessness in her "certainly." " Very 
 good. But why do you wish the coincidence " 
 
 " Kept from her ? " She knew exactly why. " Because if she 
 suspects it she won't let me have the picture. Therefore," she 
 added with decision, "you must let me pay for it on the spot." 
 
 "What do you mean by on the spot?" 
 
 " I'll send you a cheque as soon as I get home." 
 
 " Oh," I laughed, " let us understand. Why do you consider 
 she won't let you have the picture ? " 
 
 She made me wait a little for this, but when it came it was 
 perfectly lucid. " Because she'll then see how much more I 
 must want it." 
 
 " How much less wouldn't it be rather, since the bargain was, 
 as the more convenient thing, not for a likeness ? " 
 
 "Oh," said Mrs. Bridgenorth with impatience, "the likeness 
 will take care of itself. She'll put this and that together." Then 
 she brought out her real apprehension. " She'll be jealous." 
 
 " Oh ! " I laughed. But I was startled. 
 
 " She'll hate me ! " 
 
 I wondered. " But I don't think she liked him." 
 
 " Don't think ?" She stared at me, with her echo, over all that 
 might be in it, then seemed to find little enough. " I say/" 
 
 It was almost comically the old Mrs. Bridgenorth. " But I 
 gather from her that he was bad." 
 
 "Then what was she?" 
 
 I barely hesitated. " What were you ? " 
 
 "That's my own business." And she turned again to the 
 picture. " He was good enough for her to do that of him." 
 
62 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 I took it in once more. "Artistically speaking, for the way 
 it's done, it's one of the most curious things I've ever seen." 
 
 " It's a grand treat ! " said poor Mrs. Bridgenorth more simply. 
 
 It was, it fs really ; which is exactly what made the case so 
 interesting. " Yet I feel somehow that, as I say, it wasn't done 
 with love." 
 
 It was wonderful how she understood. " It was done with 
 rage." 
 
 " Then what have you to fear ? " 
 
 She knew again perfectly. " What happened when he made 
 me jealous. So much," she declared, "that if you'll give me 
 your word for silence " 
 
 " Well ? " 
 
 " Why, I'll double the money." 
 
 "Oh," I replied, taking a turn about in the excitement of our 
 concurrence, " that's exactly what to do a still better stroke for 
 her it had just come to me to propose ! " 
 
 "It's understood then, on your oath as a gentleman?" She 
 was so eager that practically this settled it, though I moved to 
 and fro a little while she watched me in suspense. It vibrated 
 all round us that she had gone out to the thing in a stifled flare, 
 that a whole close relation had in the few minutes revived. We 
 know it of the truly amiable person that he will strain a point for 
 another that he wouldn't strain for himself. The stroke to put in 
 for Mary was positively prescribed. The work represented really 
 much more than had been covenanted, and if the purchaser 
 chose so to value it this was her own affair. I decided. " If it's 
 understood also on your word." 
 
 We were so at one that we shook hands on it. "And when 
 may I send ? " 
 
 " Well, I shall see her this evening. Say early to-morrow." 
 
 " Early to-morrow." And I went with her to her brougham, 
 into which, I remember, as she took leave, she expressed regret 
 that she mightn't then and there have introduced the canvas for 
 removal. I consoled her with remarking that she couldn't have 
 got it in which was not quite true. 
 
 I saw Mary Tredick before dinner, and though I was not quite 
 ideally sure of my present ground with her I instantly brought 
 out my news. " She's so delighted that I felt I must in conscience 
 do something still better for you. She's not to have it on the 
 original terms. I've put up the price." 
 
 Mary wondered. " But to what ? " 
 
 " Well, to four hundred. If you say so I'll try even for five." 
 
 " Oh, she'll never give that." 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 63 
 
 " I beg your pardon." 
 
 "After the agreement?" She looked grave. "I don't like 
 such leaps and bounds." 
 
 " But, my dear child, they're yours. You contracted for a 
 decorative trifle and you've produced a breathing masterpiece." 
 
 She thought. " Is that what she calls it ? " Then, as having 
 to think too, I hesitated, " What does she know ? " she pursued. 
 
 " She knows she wants it." 
 
 "So much as that?" 
 
 At this I had to brace myself a little. " So much that she'll 
 send me the cheque this afternoon, and that you'll have mine 
 by the first post in the morning." 
 
 " Before she has even received the picture ? " 
 
 ' Oh, she'll send for it to-morrow." And as I was dining out 
 and had still to dress, my time was up. Mary came with me to 
 the door, where I repeated my assurance. " You shall receive 
 my cheque by the first post." To which I added : " If it's little 
 enough for a lady so much in need to pay for any husband, it 
 isn't worth mentioning as the price of such a one as you've given 
 her!" 
 
 I was in a hurry, but she held me. " Then you've felt your 
 idea confirmed ? " 
 
 "My idea?" 
 
 " That that's what I have given her?" 
 
 I suddenly fancied I had perhaps gone too far ; but I had kept 
 my cab and was already in it. "Well, put it," I called with 
 excess of humour over the front, " that you've, at any rate, given 
 him a wife ! " 
 
 When on my return from dinner that night I let myself in, my 
 first care, in my dusky studio, was to make light for another look 
 at Mary's subject. I felt the impulse to bid him good night, but, 
 to my astonishment, he was no longer there. His place was a 
 void he had already disappeared. I saw, however, after my first 
 surprise, what had happened saw it moreover, frankly, with 
 some relief. As my servants were in bed I could ask no 
 questions, but it was clear that Mrs. Bridgenorth, whose note, 
 containing its cheque, lay on my table, had been after all 
 unable to wait. The note, I found, mentioned nothing but the 
 enclosure ; but it had come by hand, and it was her silence that 
 told the tale. Her messenger had been instructed to " act " ; he 
 had come with a vehicle, he had transferred to it canvas and frame. 
 The prize was now therefore landed and the incident closed. 
 I didn't altogether, the next morning, know why, but I had slept 
 the better for the sense of these things, and as soon as my 
 
64 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 attendant came in I asked for details. It was on this that his answer 
 surprised me. " No, sir, there was no man ; she came herself. 
 She had only a four-wheeler, but I helped her, and we got it in. 
 It was a squeeze, sir, but she mould take it." 
 
 I wondered. " She had a four-wheeler ? and not her servant ? " 
 
 " No, no, sir. She came, as you may say, single-handed." 
 
 "And not even in her brougham, which would have been 
 larger?" 
 
 My man, with his habit, weighed it. " But have she a 
 brougham, sir?" 
 
 " Why, the one she was here in yesterday." 
 
 Then light broke. " Oh, that lady ! It wasn't her, sir. It 
 was Miss Tredick." 
 
 Light broke, but darkness a little followed it a darkness that, 
 after breakfast, guided my steps back to my friend. There, in its 
 own first place, I met her creation ; but I saw it would be a 
 different thing meeting her. She immediately put down on a 
 table, as if she had expected me, the cheque I had sent her 
 overnight. "Yes, I've brought it away. And I can't take the 
 money." 
 
 I found myself in despair. " You want to keep him ? " 
 
 " I don't understand what has happened." 
 
 "You just back out?" 
 
 " I don't understand," she repeated, " what has happened." 
 But what I had already perceived was, on the contrary, that she 
 very nearly, that she in fact quite remarkably, did understand. It 
 was as if in my zeal I had given away my case, and I felt that 
 my test was coming. She had been thinking all night with 
 intensity, and Mrs. Bridgenorth's generosity, coupled with Mrs. 
 Bridgenorth's promptitude, had kept her awake. Thence, for a 
 woman nervous and critical, imaginations, visions, questions. 
 " Why, in writing me last night, did you take for granted it was 
 she who had swooped down ? Why," asked Mary Tredick, 
 " should she swoop ? " 
 
 Well, if I could drive a bargain for Mary I felt I could a 
 fortiori lie for her. " Because it's her way. She does swoop. 
 She's impatient and uncontrolled. And it's affectation for you 
 to pretend," I said with diplomacy, " that you see no reason for 
 her falling in love " 
 
 " Falling in love? " She took me straight up. 
 
 "With that gentleman. Certainly. What woman wouldn't? 
 What woman didn't ? I really don't see, you know, your right to 
 back out." 
 
 " I won't back out," she presently returned, " if you'll answer 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 65 
 
 me a question. Does she know the man represented ? " Then 
 as I hung fire : " It has come to me that she must. It would 
 account for so much. For the strange way I feel," she went on, 
 " and for the extraordinary sum you've been able to extract 
 from her." 
 
 It was a pity, and I flushed with it, besides wincing at the word 
 she used. But Mrs. Bridgenorth and I, between us, had clearly 
 made the figure too high. " You think that, if she had guessed, 
 I would naturally work it to ' extract ' more ? " 
 
 She turned away from me on this and, looking blank in her 
 trouble, moved vaguely about. Then she stopped. " I see him 
 set up there. I hear her say it. What you said she would make 
 him pass for." 
 
 I believe I foolishly tried though only for an instant to look 
 as if I didn't remember what I had said. " Her husband ? " 
 
 " He wasn't." 
 
 The next minute I had risked it. " Was he yours ? " 
 
 I don't know what I had expected, but I found myself surprised 
 at her mere pacific head-shake. " No." 
 
 " Then why mayn't he have been ? " 
 
 " Another woman's ? Because he died, to my absolute know- 
 ledge, unmarried." She spoke as quietly. "He had known 
 many women, and there was one in particular with whom he 
 became and too long remained ruinously intimate. She 
 tried to make him marry her, and he was very near it. Death, 
 however, saved him. But she was the reason " 
 
 "Yes?" I feared again from her a wave of pain, and I went 
 on while she kept it back. " Did you know her ? " 
 
 " She was one I wouldn't." Then she brought it out. " She 
 was the reason he failed me." Her successful detachment some- 
 how said all, reduced me to a flat, kind " Oh ! " that marked my 
 sense of her telling me, against my expectation, more than I 
 knew what to do with. But it was just while I wondered how 
 to turn her confidence that she repeated, in a changed voice, 
 her challenge of a moment before. "Does she know the man 
 represented ? " 
 
 "I haven't the least idea." And having so acquitted myself I 
 added, with what strikes me now as futility : " She certainly 
 yesterday didn't name him." 
 
 " Only recognised him ? " 
 
 " If she did she brilliantly concealed it." 
 
 " So that you got nothing from her ? " 
 
 It was a question that offered me a certain advantage. " I 
 thought you accused me of getting too much." 
 
66 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 She gave me a long look, and I now saw everything in her 
 face. " It's very nice what you're doing for me, and you do it 
 handsomely. It's beautiful beautiful, and I thank you with all 
 my heart. But I know." 
 
 " And what do you know ? " 
 
 She went about now preparing her usual work. "What he 
 must have been to her." 
 
 " You mean she was the person ? " 
 
 " Well," she said, putting on her old spectacles, " she was one 
 of them." 
 
 "And you accept so easily the astounding coincidence ?" 
 
 " Of my finding myself, after years, in so extraordinary a rela- 
 tion with her ? What do you call easily ? I've passed a night of 
 torment." 
 
 " But what put it into your head ? " 
 
 " That I had so blindly and strangely given him back to her ? 
 You put it yesterday." 
 
 "And how?" 
 
 " I can't tell you. You didn't in the least mean to on the 
 contrary. But you dropped the seed. The plant, after you had 
 gone," she said with a business-like pull at her easel, "the plant 
 began to grow. I saw them there in your studio face to face." 
 
 " You were jealous ? " I laughed. 
 
 She gave me through her glasses another look, and they 
 seemed, from this moment, in their queerness, to have placed 
 her quite on the other side of the gulf of time. She was firm 
 there ; she was settled ; I couldn't get at her now. " I see she 
 told you I would 'be." I doubtless kept down too little my start 
 at it, and she immediately pursued. "You say I accept the 
 coincidence, which is of course prodigious. But such things 
 happen. Why shouldn't I accept it if you do?" 
 
 " Do I?" I smiled. 
 
 She began her work in silence, but she presently exclaimed : 
 " I'm glad I didn't meet her ! " 
 
 " I don't yet see why you wouldn't." 
 
 " Neither do I. It was an instinct." 
 
 "Your instincts" I tried to be ironic "are miraculous." 
 
 "They have to be, to meet such accidents. I must ask you 
 kindly to tell her, when you return her gift, that now I have done 
 the picture I find I must after all keep it for myself." 
 
 " Giving no reason ? " 
 
 She painted away. "She'll know the reason." 
 
 Well, by this time I knew it too; I knew so many things 
 that I fear my resistance was weak. If our wonderful client 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 67 
 
 hadn't been his wife in fact, she was not to be helped to become 
 his wife in fiction. I knew almost more than I can say, more at 
 any rate than I could then betray. He had been bound in 
 common mercy to stand by my friend, and he had basely for- 
 saken her. This indeed brought up the obscure, into which I 
 shyly gazed. "Why, even granting your theory, should you 
 grudge her the portrait? It was painted in bitterness." 
 
 "Yes. Without that !" 
 
 " It wouldn't have come ? Precisely. Is it in bitterness, then, 
 you'll keep it ? " 
 
 She looked up from her canvas. "In what would you keep it?" 
 
 It made me jump. " Do you mean I may ? " Then I had my 
 idea. "I'd give you her price for it ! " 
 
 Her smile through her glasses was beautiful. " And afterwards 
 make it over to her? You shall have it when I die." With which 
 she came away from her easel, and I saw that I was staying her 
 work and should properly go. So I put out my hand to her. 
 "It took whatever you will ! to paint it," she said, "but I shall 
 keep it in joy." I could answer nothing now had to cease to 
 pretend ; the thing was in her hands. For a moment we stood 
 there, and I had again the sense, melancholy and final, of her 
 being, as it were, remotely glazed and fixed into what she had 
 done. " He's taken from me, and for all those years he's kept. 
 
 Then she herself, by a prodigy ! " She lost herself again in 
 
 the wonder of it. 
 
 " Unwittingly gives him back ? " 
 
 She fairly, for an instant over the marvel, closed her eyes. 
 "Gives him back." 
 
 Then it was I saw how he would be kept ! But it was the 
 end of my vision. I could only write, ruefully enough, to Mrs. 
 Bridgenorth, whom I never met again, but of whose death 
 preceding by a couple of years Mary Tredick's I happened to 
 hear. This is an old man's tale. I have inherited the picture, 
 in the deep beauty of which, however, darkness still lurks. No 
 one, strange to say, has ever recognised the model, but everyone 
 asks his name. I don't even know it. 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 
 
 I NOTE it as a wonderful case of its kind the finest of all 
 perhaps, in fact, that I have ever chanced to encounter. 
 The kind, moreover, is the greatest kind, the roll recruited, for 
 our high esteem and emulation, from history and fiction, legend 
 and song. In the way of service and sacrifice for love I've 
 really known nothing go beyond it. However, you can judge. 
 My own sense of it happens just now to be remarkably rounded 
 off by the sequel more or less looked for on her part of the 
 legal step taken by Mrs. Brivet. I hear from America that, a 
 decent interval being held to have elapsed since her gain of her 
 divorce, she is about to marry again an event that will, it would 
 seem, put an end to any question of the disclosure of the real 
 story. It's this that's the real story, or will be, with nothing 
 wanting, as soon as I shall have heard that her husband (who, on 
 his side, has only been waiting for her to move first) has sanctified 
 his union with Mrs. Cavenham. 
 
 I 
 
 SHE was, of course, often in and out, Mrs. Cavenham, three 
 years ago, when I was painting her portrait; and the more so 
 that I found her, I remember, one of those comparatively rare 
 sitters who present themselves at odd hours, turn up without 
 an appointment. The thing is to get most women to keep those 
 they do make; but she used to pop in, as she called it, on 
 the chance, letting me know that if I had a moment free she 
 was quite at my service. When I hadn't the moment free 
 she liked to stay to chatter, and she more than once expressed 
 to me, I recollect, her theory that an artist really, for the time, 
 could never see too much of his model. I must have shown her 
 rather frankly that I understood her as meaning that a model 
 could never see too much of her artist. I understood in fact 
 everything, and especially that she was, in Brivet's absence, so 
 unoccupied and restless that she didn't know what to do with 
 herself. I was conscious in short that it was he who would pay 
 
 68 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 69 
 
 for the picture, and that gives, I think, the measure of my 
 enlightenment. If I took such pains and bore so with her folly, 
 it was fundamentally for Brivet. 
 
 I was often at that time, as I had often been before, occupied 
 for various "subjects" with Mrs. Dundene, in connection 
 with which a certain occasion comes back to me as the first 
 slide in the lantern. If I had invented my story I couldn't 
 have made it begin better than with Mrs. Cavenham's irruption 
 during the presence one morning of that lady. My door, by 
 some chance, had been unguarded, and she was upon us without 
 a warning. This was the sort of thing my model hated the 
 one, I mean, who, after all, sat mainly to oblige ; but I remember 
 how well she behaved. She was not dressed for company, 
 though indeed a dress was never strictly necessary to her best 
 effect. I recall that I had a moment of uncertainty, but I 
 must have dropped the name of each for the other, as it was 
 Mrs. Cavenham's line always, later on, that I had made them 
 acquainted ; and inevitably, though I wished her not to stay and 
 got rid of her as soon as possible, the two women, of such 
 different places in the scale, but of such almost equal beauty, 
 were face to face for some minutes, of which I was not even 
 at the moment unaware that they made an extraordinary use for 
 mutual inspection. It was sufficient; they from that instant 
 knew each other. 
 
 "Isn't she lovely?" I remember asking and quite without 
 the spirit of mischief when I came back from restoring my 
 visitor to her cab. 
 
 " Yes, awfully pretty. But I hate her." 
 
 " Oh," I laughed, " she's not so bad as that." 
 
 "Not so handsome as I, you mean?" And my sitter pro- 
 tested. " It isn't fair of you to speak as if I were one of those 
 who can't bear even at the worst or the best another woman's 
 looks. I should hate her even if she were ugly." 
 
 "But what have you to do with her ? " 
 
 She hesitated ; then with characteristic looseness : " What have 
 I to do with anyone ? " 
 
 "Well, there's no one else I know of that you do hate." 
 
 " That shows," she replied, " how good a reason there must be, 
 even if I don't know it yet." 
 
 She knew it in the course of time, but I have never seen 
 a reason, I must say, operate so little for relief. As a history 
 of the hatred of Alice Dundene my anecdote becomes won- 
 drous indeed. Meanwhile, at any rate, I had Mrs. Cavenham 
 again with me for her regular sitting, and quite as curious 
 
70 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 as I had expected her to be about the person of the previous 
 time. 
 
 " Do you mean she isn't, so to speak, a lady ? " she asked after 
 I had, for reasons of my own, fenced a little. "Then if she's 
 not ' professional ' either, what is she ? " 
 
 "Well," I returned as I got at work, "she escapes, to my 
 mind, any classification save as one of the most beautiful and 
 good-natured of women." 
 
 "I see her beauty," Mrs. Cavenham said. "It's immense. 
 Do you mean that her good-nature's as great ? " 
 
 I had to think a little. " On the whole, yes." 
 
 " Then I understand. That represents a greater quantity than 
 /, I think, should ever have occasion for." 
 
 " Oh, the great thing's to be sure to have enough," I growled. 
 
 But she laughed it off. "Enough, certainly, is as good as 
 a feast ! " 
 
 It was I forget how long, some months after this that 
 Frank Brivet, whom I had not seen for two years, knocked 
 again at my door. I didn't at all object to him at my other 
 work as I did to Mrs. Cavenham, but it was not till he had 
 been in and out several times that Alice which is what most 
 people still really call her chanced to see him and received 
 in such an extraordinary way the impression that was to be 
 of such advantage to him. She had been obliged to leave 
 me that day before he went though he stayed but a few minutes 
 later ; and it was not till the next time we were alone together 
 that I was struck with her sudden interest, which became 
 frankly pressing. I had met her, to begin with, expansively 
 enough. 
 
 "An American? But what sort don't you know? There 
 are so many." 
 
 I didn't mean it as an offence, but in the matter of men, 
 and though her acquaintance with them is so large, I always 
 simplify with her. " The sort. He's rich." 
 
 " And how rich ? " 
 
 " Why, as an American. Disgustingly." 
 
 I told her on this occasion more about him, but it was on 
 that fact, I remember, that, after a short silence, she brought out 
 with a sigh : " Well, I'm sorry. I should have liked to love him 
 for himself." 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 71 
 
 II 
 
 QUITE apart from having been at school with him, I'm conscious 
 though at times he so puts me out that I've a taste for 
 Frank Brivet. I'm quite aware, by the same token and even 
 if when a man's so rich it's difficult to tell that he's not every- 
 one's affinity. I was struck, at all events, from the first of the 
 affair, with the way he clung to me and seemed inclined to haunt 
 my studio. He's fond of art, though he has some awful pictures, 
 and more or less understands mine; but it wasn't this that 
 brought him. Accustomed as I was to notice what his wealth 
 everywhere does for him, I was rather struck with his being 
 so much thrown upon me and not giving London the big 
 fish that rises so to the hook baited with gold more of a chance 
 to perform to him. I very soon, however, understood. He had 
 his reasons for wishing not to be seen much with Mrs. Cavenham, 
 and, as he was in love with her, felt the want of some machinery 
 for keeping temporarily away from her. I was his machinery, 
 and, when once I perceived this, was willing enough to turn 
 his wheel. His situation, moreover, became interesting from 
 the moment I fairly grasped it, which he soon enabled me to 
 do. His old reserve on the subject of Mrs. Brivet went to 
 the winds, and it's not my fault if I let him see how little I was 
 shocked by his confidence. His marriage had originally seemed 
 to me to require much more explanation than anyone could 
 give, and indeed in the matter of women in general, I confess, 
 I've never seized his point of view. His inclinations are strange, 
 and strange, too, perhaps, his indifferences. Still, I can enter 
 into some of his aversions, and I agreed with him that his 
 wife was odious. 
 
 " She has hitherto, since we began practically to live apart," 
 he said, " mortally hated the idea of doing anything so pleasant 
 for me as to divorce me. But I've reason to believe she has now 
 changed her mind. She'd like to get clear." 
 
 I waited a moment. " For a man ? " 
 
 " Oh, such a jolly good one ! Remson Sturch." 
 
 I wondered. " Do you call him good ? " 
 
 "Good for her. If she only can be got to be which it oughtn't 
 to be difficult to make her fool enough to marry him, he'll give 
 her the real size of his foot, and I shall be avenged in a manner 
 positively ideal." 
 
 "Then will she institute proceedings ? " 
 
 "She can't, as things stand. She has nothing to go upon. 
 I've been," said poor Brivet, " I positively have, so blameless." 
 
72 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 I thought of Mrs. Cavenham, and, though I said nothing, he 
 went on after an instant as if he knew it. "They can't put a 
 finger. I've been so d d particular." 
 
 I hesitated. "And your idea is now not to be particular any 
 more ? 
 
 "Oh, about her? he eagerly replied, "always!" On which 
 I laughed out and he coloured. "But my idea is nevertheless, 
 at present," he went on, " to pave the way ; that is, I mean, if 
 I can keep the person you're thinking of so totally out of it that 
 not a breath in the whole business can possibly touch her." 
 
 " I see," I reflected. " She isn't willing ? " 
 
 He stared. "To be compromised ? Why the devil should 
 she be?" 
 
 " Why shouldn't she for you ? Doesn't she love you ? " 
 
 "Yes, and it's because she does, dearly, that I don't feel the 
 right way to repay her is by spattering her over." 
 
 "Yet if she stands," I argued, "straight in the splash ! " 
 
 " She doesn't ! " he interrupted me, with some curtness. " She 
 stands a thousand miles out of it ; she stands on a pinnacle ; 
 she stands as she stands in your charming portrait lovely, lonely, 
 untouched. And so she must remain." 
 
 "It's beautiful, it's doubtless inevitable," I returned after a 
 little, " that you should feel so. Only, if your wife doesn't divorce 
 you for a woman you love, I don't quite see how she can do it 
 for the woman you don't." 
 
 "Nothing is more simple," he declared; on which I saw he 
 had figured it out rather more than I thought. " It will be quite 
 enough if she believes I love her." 
 
 " If the lady in question does or Mrs. Brivet ? " 
 
 " Mrs. Brivet confound her ! If she believes I love some- 
 body else. I must have the appearance, and the appearance must 
 of course be complete. All I've got to do is to take up " 
 
 " To take up ? " I asked, as he paused. 
 
 " Well, publicly, with someone or other ; someone who could 
 easily be squared. One would undertake, after all, to produce 
 the impression." 
 
 " On your wife naturally, you mean ? " 
 
 " On my wife, and on the person concerned." 
 
 I turned it over and did justice to his ingenuity. " But what 
 impression would you undertake to produce on ? " 
 
 "Well?" he inquired as I just faltered. 
 
 "On the person not concerned. How would the lady you 
 just accused me of having in mind be affected toward such a 
 proceeding ? " 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 73 
 
 He had to think a little, but he thought with success. " Oh, 
 I'd answer for her." 
 
 "To the other lady?" I laughed. 
 
 He remained quite grave. "To myself. She'd leave us 
 alone. As it would be for her good, she'd understand." 
 
 I was sorry for him, but he struck me as artless. "Under- 
 stand, in that interest, the ' spattering ' of another person ? " 
 
 He coloured again, but he was sturdy. " It must of course 
 be exactly the right person a special type. Someone who, in 
 the first place," he explained, " wouldn't mind, and of whom, 
 in the second, she wouldn't be jealous." 
 
 I followed perfectly, but it struck me as important all 
 round that we should be clear. "But wouldn't the danger 
 be great that any woman who shouldn't have that effect the 
 effect of jealousy upon her wouldn't have it either on your 
 wife ? " 
 
 "Ah," he acutely returned, "my wife wouldn't be warned. 
 She wouldn't be 'in the know.'" 
 
 " I see." I quite caught up. " The two other ladies distinctly 
 would." 
 
 But he seemed for an instant at a loss. "Wouldn't it be 
 indispensable only as regards one?" 
 
 " Then the other would be simply sacrificed ? " 
 
 " She would be," Brivet splendidly put it, " remunerated." 
 
 I was pleased even with the sense of financial power betrayed 
 by the way he said it, and I at any rate so took the measure 
 of his intention of generosity and his characteristically big view 
 of the matter that this quickly suggested to me what at least 
 might be his exposure. " But suppose that, in spite of 'remunera- 
 tion,' this secondary personage should perversely like you ? She 
 would have to be indeed, as you say, a special type, but even 
 special types may have general feelings. Suppose she should like 
 you too much." 
 
 Ii had pulled him up a little. " What do you mean by ' too 
 much'?" 
 
 " Well, more than enough to leave the case quite as simple as 
 you'd require it." 
 
 " Oh, money always simplifies. Besides, I should make a 
 point of being a brute." And on my laughing at this: "I should 
 pay her enough to keep her down, to make her easy. But the 
 thing," he went on with a drop back to the less mitigated real 
 " the thing, hang it ! is first to find her." 
 
 "Surely," I concurred; "for she should have to lack, you 
 see, no requirement whatever for plausibility. She must be, for 
 
74 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 instance, not only ' squareable,' but before anything else even 
 awfully handsome." 
 
 "Oh, < awfully'!" He could make light of that, which was 
 what Mrs. Cavenham was. 
 
 " It wouldn't do for her, at all events," I maintained, " to be a 
 bit less attractive than " 
 
 " Well, than who ? " he broke in, not only with a comic effect 
 of disputing my point, but also as if he knew whom I was think- 
 ing of. 
 
 Before I could answer him, however, the door opened, and we 
 were interrupted by a visitor a visitor who, on the spot, in a flash, 
 primed me with a reply. But I had of course for the moment 
 to keep it to myself. "Than Mrs. Dundene!" 
 
 Ill 
 
 I HAD nothing more than that to do with it, but before I could 
 turn round it was done ; by which I mean that Brivet, whose 
 previous impression of her had, for some sufficient reason, failed 
 of sharpness, now jumped straight to the perception that here to 
 his hand for the solution of his problem was the missing quantity 
 and the appointed aid. They were in presence on this occasion, 
 for the first time, half an hour, during which he sufficiently showed 
 me that he felt himself to have found the special type. He was 
 certainly to that extent right that nobody could in those days in 
 particular without a rapid sense that she was indeed " special," 
 spend any such time in the company of our extraordinary friend. 
 I couldn't quarrel with his recognising so quickly what I had 
 myself instantly recognised, yet if it did in truth appear almost 
 at a glance that she would, through the particular facts of situa- 
 tion, history, aspect, tone, temper, beautifully "do," I felt from 
 the first so affected by the business that I desired to wash my 
 hands of it. There was something I wished to say to him before 
 it went further, but after that I cared only to be out of it. I may 
 as well say at once, however, that I never was out of it ; for a man 
 habitually ridden by the twin demons of imagination and observa- 
 tion is never enough for his peace out of anything. But I 
 wanted to be able to apply to either, should anything happen, 
 " ' Thou canst not say / did it ! " What might in particular 
 happen was represented by what I said to Brivet the first time he 
 gave me a chance. It was what I had wished before the affair 
 went further, but it had then already gone so far that he had been 
 twice as he immediately let me know to see her at home. He 
 clearly desired me to keep up with him, which I was eager to 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 75 
 
 declare impossible; but he came again to see me only after he 
 had called. Then I instantly made my point, which was that she 
 was really, hang it ! too good for his fell purpose. 
 
 "But, my dear man, my purpose is a sacred one. And if, 
 moreover, she herself doesn't think she's too good " 
 
 " Ah," said I, "she's in love with you, and so it isn't fair." 
 
 He wondered. " Fair to me ?" 
 
 " Oh, I don't care a button for you ! What I'm thinking of 
 is her risk." 
 
 "And what do you mean by her risk?" 
 
 " Why, her finding, of course, before you've done with her, that 
 she can't do without you." 
 
 He met me as if he had quite thought of that. " Isn't it much 
 more my risk ? " 
 
 " Ah, but you take it deliberately, walk into it with your eyes 
 open. What I want to be sure of, liking her as I do, is that she 
 fully understands." 
 
 He had been moving about my place with his hands in his 
 pockets, and at this he stopped short. " How much do you like 
 her?" 
 
 "Oh, ten times more than she likes me ; so that needn't trouble 
 you. Does she understand that it can be only to help somebody 
 else?" 
 
 " Why, my dear chap, she's as sharp as a steam-whistle." 
 
 "So that she also already knows who the other person is?" 
 
 He took a turn again, then brought out, "There's no other 
 person for her but me. Of course, as yet, there are things one 
 doesn't say ; I haven't set straight to work to dot all my i's, and 
 the beauty of her, as she's really charming and would be charm- 
 ing in any relation is just exactly that I don't expect to have to. 
 We'll work it out all right, I think, so that what I most wanted 
 just to make sure of from you was what you've been good enough 
 to tell me. I mean that you don't object for yourself." 
 
 I could with philosophic mirth allay that scruple, but what I 
 couldn't do was to let him see what really most worried me. It 
 stuck, as they say, in my crop that a woman like yes, when all 
 was said and done Alice Dundene should simply minister to the 
 convenience of a woman like Rose Cavenham. "But there's 
 one thing more." This was as far as I could go. " I may take 
 from you then that she not only knows it's for your divorce and 
 remarriage, but can fit the shoe on the very person?" 
 
 He waited a moment. " Well, you may take from me that I 
 find her no more of a fool than, as I seem to see, many other 
 fellows have found her." 
 
76 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 I too was silent a little, but with a superior sense of being able 
 to think it all out further than he. " She's magnificent ! " 
 
 " Well, so am I ! " said Brivet. And for months afterward 
 there was much in fact everything in the whole picture to 
 justify his claim. I remember how it struck me as a lively sign 
 of this that Mrs. Cavenham, at an early day, gave up her pretty 
 house in Wilton Street and withdrew for a time to America. 
 That was palpable design and diplomacy, but I'm afraid that 
 I quite as much, and doubtless very vulgarly, read into it that she 
 had had money from Brivet to go. I even promised myself, 
 I confess, the entertainment of finally making out that, whether 
 or no the marriage should come off, she would not have been 
 the person to find the episode least lucrative. 
 
 She left the others, at all events, completely together, and so, 
 as the plot, with this, might be said definitely to thicken, it came 
 to me in all sorts of ways that the curtain had gone up on the 
 drama. It came to me, I hasten to add, much less from the two 
 actors themselves than from other quarters the usual sources, 
 which never fail, of chatter; for after my friends' direction was 
 fairly taken they had the good taste on either side to handle it, in 
 talk, with gloves, not to expose it to what I should have called 
 the danger of definition. I even seemed to divine that, allowing 
 for needful preliminaries, they dealt even with each other on this 
 same unformulated plane, and that it well might be that no 
 relation in London at that moment, between a remarkable man 
 and a beautiful woman, had more of the general air of good 
 manners. I saw for a long time, directly, but little of them, for 
 they were naturally much taken up, and Mrs. Dundene in par- 
 ticular intermitted, as she had never yet done in any complication 
 of her chequered career, her calls at my studio. As the months 
 went by I couldn't but feel partly, perhaps, for this very reason 
 that their undertaking announced itself as likely not to fall 
 short of its aim. I gathered from the voices of the air that 
 nothing whatever was neglected that could make it a success, and 
 just this vision it was that made me privately project wonders 
 into it, caused anxiety and curiosity often again to revisit me, and 
 led me in fine to say to myself that so rich an effect could be 
 arrived at on either side only by a great deal of heroism. As 
 the omens markedly developed I supposed the heroism had 
 likewise done so, and that the march of the matter was logical I 
 inferred from the fact that even though the ordeal, all round, was 
 more protracted than might have been feared, Mrs. Cavenham 
 made no fresh appearance. This I took as a sign that she knew 
 she was safe took indeed as the feature not the least striking of 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 77 
 
 the situation constituted in her interest. I held my tongue, 
 naturally, about her interest, but I watched it from a distance 
 with an attention that, had I been caught in the act, might have 
 led to a mistake about the direction of my sympathy. I had to 
 make it my proper secret that, while I lost as little as possible of 
 what was being done for her, I felt more and more that I myself 
 could never have begun to do it. 
 
 IV 
 
 SHE came back at last, however, and one of the first things she 
 did on her arrival was to knock at my door and let me know im- 
 mediately, to smooth the way, that she was there on particular 
 business. I was not to be surprised though even if I were she 
 shouldn't mind to hear that she wished to bespeak from me, on 
 the smallest possible delay, a portrait, full-length for preference, 
 of our delightful friend Mr. Brivet. She brought this out with 
 a light perfection of assurance of which the first effect I 
 couldn't help it was to make me show myself almost too much 
 amused for good manners. She first stared at my laughter, then 
 wonderfully joined in it, looking meanwhile extraordinarily pretty 
 and elegant more completely handsome in fact, as well as more 
 completely happy, than I had ever yet seen her. She was 
 distinctly the better, I quickly saw, for what was being done for 
 her, and it was an odd spectacle indeed that while, out of her 
 sight and to the exclusion of her very name, the good work went 
 on, it put roses in her cheeks and rings on her fingers and the 
 sense of success in her heart. What had made me laugh, at all 
 events, was the number of other ideas suddenly evoked by her 
 request, two of which, the next moment, had disengaged them- 
 selves with particular brightness. She wanted, for all her confi- 
 dence, to omit no precaution, to close up every issue, and she 
 had acutely conceived that the possession of Brivet's picture 
 full-lsngth, above all ! would constitute for her the strongest 
 possible appearance of holding his supreme pledge. If that had 
 been her foremost thought her second then had been that if 
 I should paint him he would have to sit, and that in order to sit 
 he would have to return. He had been at this time, as I knew, 
 for many weeks in foreign cities which helped moreover to 
 explain to me that Mrs. Cavenham had thought it compatible 
 with her safety to reopen her London house. Everything 
 accordingly seemed to make for a victory, but there was such 
 a thing, her proceeding implied, as one's at least as her 
 susceptibility and her nerves. This question of his return I 
 
78 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 of course immediately put to her; on which she immediately 
 answered that it was expressed in her very proposal, inasmuch as 
 this proposal was nothing but the offer that Brivet had himself 
 made her. The thing was to be his gift ; she had only, he had 
 assured her, to choose her artist and arrange the time ; and she 
 had amiably chosen me chosen me for the dates, as she called 
 them, immediately before us. I doubtless but I don't care 
 give the measure of my native cynicism in confessing that I 
 didn't the least avoid showing her that I saw through her game. 
 "Well, I'll do him," I said, "if he'll come himself and ask 
 me." 
 
 She wanted to know, at this, of course, if I impugned her 
 veracity. "You don't believe what I tell you? You're afraid 
 for your money ? " 
 
 I took it in high good-humour. " For my money not a bit." 
 
 " For what then ? " 
 
 I had to think first how much I could say, which seemed to 
 me, naturally, as yet but little. " I know perfectly that what- 
 ever happens Brivet always pays. But let him come ; then we'll 
 talk." 
 
 "Ah, well," she returned, " you'll see if he doesn't come." And 
 come he did in fact though without a word from myself directly 
 at the end of ten days ; on which we immediately got to work, 
 an idea highly favourable to it having meanwhile shaped itself in 
 my own breast. Meanwhile too, however, before his arrival, Mrs. 
 Cavenham had been again to see me, and this it was precisely, 
 I think, that determined my idea. My present explanation of 
 what afresh passed between us is that she really felt the need 
 to build up her security a little higher by borrowing from my 
 own vision of what had been happening. I had not, she saw, 
 been very near to that, but I had been at least, during her time 
 in America, nearer than she. And I had doubtless somehow 
 "aggravated" her by appearing to disbelieve in the guarantee 
 she had come in such pride to parade to me. It had in any case 
 befallen that, on the occasion of her second visit, what I least 
 expected or desired her avowal of being "in the know" 
 suddenly went too far to stop. When she did speak she spoke 
 with elation. " Mrs. Brivet has filed her petition." 
 
 " For getting rid of him ? " 
 
 "Yes, in order to marry again ; which is exactly what he wants 
 her to do. It's wonderful and, in a manner, I think, quite 
 splendid the way he has made it easy for her. He has met her 
 wishes handsomely obliged her in every particular." 
 
 As she preferred, subtly enough, to put it all as if it were for 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 79 
 
 the sole benefit of his wife, I was quite ready for this tone ; but 
 I privately defied her to keep it up. "Well, then, he hasn't 
 laboured in vain." 
 
 " Oh, it couldn't have been in vain. What has happened has 
 been the sort of thing that she couldn't possibly fail to act upon." 
 
 " Too great a scandal, eh ? " 
 
 She but just paused at it. "Nothing neglected, certainly, 
 or omitted. He was not the man to undertake it " 
 
 "And not put it through? No, I should say he wasn't the 
 man. In any case he apparently hasn't been. But he must 
 have found the job " 
 
 " Rather a bore?" she asked as I had hesitated. 
 
 " Well, not so much a bore as a delicate matter." 
 
 She seemed to demur. " Delicate ? " 
 
 " Why, your sex likes him so." 
 
 " But isn't just that what has made it easy ? " 
 
 " Easy for him yes," I after a moment admitted. 
 
 But it wasn't what she meant. " And not difficult, also, for 
 them." 
 
 This was the nearest approach I was to have heard her make, 
 since the day of the meeting of the two women at my studio, 
 to naming Mrs. Dundene. She never, to the end of the affair, 
 came any closer to her in speech than by the collective and 
 promiscuous plural pronoun. There might have been a dozen 
 of them, and she took cognizance, in respect to them, only of 
 quantity. It was as if it had been a way of showing how little 
 of anything else she imputed. Quality, as distinguished from 
 quantity, was what she had. " Oh, I think," I said, " that we 
 can scarcely speak for them." 
 
 " Why not ? They must certainly have had the most beautiful 
 time. Operas, theatres, suppers, dinners, diamonds, carriages, 
 journeys hither and yon with him, poor dear, telegrams sent by 
 each from everywhere to everywhere and always lying about, 
 elaborate arrivals and departures at stations for everyone to see, 
 and, in fact, quite a crowd usually collected as many witnesses 
 as you like. Then," she wound up, "his brougham standing 
 always half the day and half the night at their doors. He 
 has had to keep a brougham, and the proper sort of man, just 
 for that alone. In other words unlimited publicity." 
 
 "I see. What more can they have wanted? Yes," I pon- 
 dered, " they like, for the most part, we suppose, a studied, out- 
 rageous affichage, and they must have thoroughly enjoyed it." 
 
 " Ah, but it was only that." 
 
 I wondered. " Only what ? " 
 
So THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " Only affiche. Only outrageous. Only the form of well, of 
 what would definitely serve. He never saw them alone." 
 
 I wondered or at least appeared to still more. " Never ? " 
 
 "Never. Never once." She had a wonderful air of answer- 
 ing for it. " I know." 
 
 I saw that, after all, she really believed she knew, and I had 
 indeed, for that matter, to recognise that I myself believed her 
 knowledge to be sound. Only there went with it a complacency, 
 an enjoyment of having really made me see what could be done 
 for her, so little to my taste that for a minute or two I could 
 scarce trust myself to speak : she looked somehow, as she sat 
 there, so lovely, and yet, in spite of her loveliness or perhaps 
 even just because of it so smugly selfish ; she put it to me with 
 so small a consciousness of anything but her personal triumph 
 that, while she had kept her skirts clear, her name unuttered and 
 her reputation untouched, " they " had been in it even more than 
 her success required. It was their skirts, their name and their 
 reputation that, in the proceedings at hand, would bear the 
 brunt. It was only after waiting a while that I could at last say : 
 " You're perfectly sure then of Mrs. Brivet's intention ? " 
 
 " Oh, we've had formal notice." 
 
 "And he's himself satisfied of the sufficiency ?" 
 
 "Of the sufficiency ?" 
 
 " Of what he has done." 
 
 She rectified. " Of what he has appeared to do." 
 
 " That is then enough ? " 
 
 " Enough," she laughed, " to send him to the gallows ! " To 
 which I could only reply that all was well that ended well. 
 
 ALL for me, however, as it proved, had not ended yet. Brivet, 
 as I have mentioned, duly reappeared to sit for me, and Mrs. 
 Cavenham, on his arrival, as consistently went abroad. He con- 
 firmed to me that lady's news of how he had "fetched," as he 
 called it, his wife let me know, as decently owing to me after 
 what had passed, on the subject, between us, that the forces set 
 in motion had logically operated ; but he made no other allusion 
 to his late accomplice for I now took for granted the close 
 of the connection than was conveyed in this intimation. He 
 spoke and the effect was almost droll as if he had had, since 
 our previous meeting, a busy and responsible year and wound up 
 an affair (as he was accustomed to wind up affairs) involving 
 a mass of detail ; he even dropped into occasional reminiscence 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 81 
 
 of what he had seen and enjoyed and disliked during a recent 
 period of rather far-reaching adventure ; but he stopped just as 
 short as Mrs. Cavenham had done and, indeed, much shorter 
 than she of introducing Mrs. Dundene by name into our talk. 
 And what was singular in this, I soon saw, was apart from 
 a general discretion that he abstained not at all because his 
 mind was troubled, but just because, on the contrary, it was 
 so much at ease. It was perhaps even more singular still, mean- 
 while, that, though I had scarce been able to bear Mrs. Caven- 
 ham's manner in this particular, I found I could put up perfectly 
 with that of her friend. She had annoyed me, but he didn't 
 I give the inconsistency for what it is worth. The obvious state 
 of his conscience had always been a strong point in him and one 
 that exactly irritated some people as much as it charmed others ; 
 so that if, in general, it was positively, and in fact quite aggres- 
 sively approving, this monitor, it had never held its head so high 
 as at the juncture of which I speak. I took all this in with 
 eagerness, for I saw how it would play into my work. Seeking 
 as I always do, instinctively, to represent sitters in the light of 
 the thing, whatever it may be, that facially, least wittingly or 
 responsibly, gives the pitch of their aspect, I felt immediately 
 that I should have the clue for making a capital thing of Brivet 
 were I to succeed in showing him in just this freshness of his 
 cheer. His cheer was that of his being able to say to himself 
 that he had got all he wanted precisely as he wanted : without 
 having harmed a fly. He had arrived so neatly where most men 
 arrive besmirched, and what he seemed to cry out as he stood 
 before my canvas wishing everyone well all round was : " See 
 how clever and pleasant and practicable, how jolly and lucky and 
 rich I've been ! " I determined, at all events, that I would make 
 some such characteristic words as these cross, at any cost, the 
 footlights, as it were, of my frame. 
 
 Well, I can't but feel to this hour that I really hit my nail 
 that the man is fairly painted in the light and that the work re- 
 mains as yet my high-water mark. He himself was delighted 
 with it and all the more, I think, that before it was finished he 
 received from America the news of his liberation. He had not 
 defended the suit as to which judgment, therefore, had been 
 expeditiously rendered ; and he was accordingly free as air and 
 with the added sweetness of every augmented appearance that 
 his wife was herself blindly preparing to seek chastisement at 
 the hands of destiny. There being at last no obstacle to his 
 open association with Mrs. Cavenham, he called her directly back 
 to London to admire my achievement, over which, from the very 
 
82 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 first glance, she as amiably let herself go. It was the very view 
 of him she had desired to possess ; it was the dear man in his 
 intimate essence for those who knew him ; and for any one who 
 should ever be deprived of him it would be the next best thing 
 to the sound of his voice. We of course by no means lingered, 
 however, on the contingency of privation, which was promptly 
 swept away in the rush of Mrs. Cavenham's vision of how straight 
 also, above and beyond, I had, as she called it, attacked. I 
 couldn't quite myself, I fear, tell how straight, but Mrs. Cavenham 
 perfectly could, and did, for everybody : she had at her fingers' 
 ends all the reasons why the thing would be a treasure even for 
 those who had never seen " Frank." 
 
 I had finished the picture, but was, according to my practice, 
 keeping it near me a little, for afterthoughts, when I received 
 from Mrs. Dundene the first visit she had paid me for many a 
 month. " I've come," she immediately said, " to ask you a 
 favour " ; and she turned her eyes, for a minute, as if contentedly 
 full of her thought, round the large workroom she already knew 
 so well and in which her beauty had really rendered more services 
 than could ever be repaid. There were studies of her yet on the 
 walls ; there were others thrust away in corners ; others still had 
 gone forth from where she stood and carried to far-away places 
 the reach of her lingering look. I had greatly, almost incon- 
 veniently missed her, and I don't know why it was that she 
 struck me now as more beautiful than ever. She had always, for 
 that matter, had a way of seeming each time a little different and 
 a little better. Dressed very simply in black materials, feathers 
 and lace, that gave the impression of being light and fine, she 
 had indeed the air of a special type, but quite as some great 
 lady might have had it. She looked like a princess in Court 
 mourning. Oh, she had been a case for the petitioner was 
 everything the other side wanted ! " Mr. Brivet," she went on to 
 say, " has kindly offered me a present. I'm to ask of him what- 
 ever in the world I most desire." 
 
 I knew in an instant, on this, what was coming, but I was at 
 first wholly taken up with the simplicity of her allusion to her 
 late connection. Had I supposed that, like Brivet, she wouldn't 
 allude to it at all? or had I stupidly assumed that if she did it 
 would be with ribaldry and rancour? I hardly know; I only 
 know that I suddenly found myself charmed to receive from 
 her thus the key of my own freedom. There was something I 
 wanted to say to her, and she had thus given me leave. But for 
 the moment I only repeated as with amused interest : "Whatever 
 in the world ? " 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 83 
 
 " Whatever in all the world." 
 
 " But that's immense, and in what way can poor / help ? " 
 
 " By painting him for me. I want a portrait of him." 
 
 I looked at her a moment in silence. She was lovely. " That's 
 what * in all the world ' you've chosen ? " 
 
 " Yes thinking it over : full-length. I want it for remem- 
 brance, and I want it as you will do it. It's the only thing I do 
 want." 
 
 "Nothing else?" 
 
 "Oh, it's enough." I turned about she was wonderful. I 
 had whisked out of sight for a month the picture I had produced 
 for Mrs. Cavenham, and it was now completely covered with a 
 large piece of stuff. I stood there a little, thinking of it, and 
 she went on as if she feared I might be unwilling. " Can't you 
 doit?" 
 
 It showed me that she had not heard from him of my having 
 painted him, and this, further, was an indication that, his purpose 
 effected, he had ceased to see her. " I suppose you know," I 
 presently said, " what you've done for him ? " 
 
 " Oh yes ; it was what I wanted." 
 
 " It was what he wanted ! " I laughed. 
 
 " Well, I want what he wants." 
 
 " Even to his marrying Mrs. Cavenham ? " 
 
 She hesitated. " As well her as anyone, from the moment he 
 couldn't marry me" 
 
 " It was beautiful of you to be so sure of that," I returned. 
 
 " How could I be anything else but sure ? He doesn't so 
 much as know me ! " said Alice Dundene. 
 
 " No," I declared, " I verily believe he doesn't. There's your 
 picture," I added, unveiling my work. 
 
 She was amazed and delighted. " I may have that ? " 
 
 " So far as I'm concerned absolutely." 
 
 " Then he had himself the beautiful thought of sitting for me ? " 
 
 I faltered but an instant. "Yes." 
 
 Her pleasure in what I had done was a joy to me. " Why, it's 
 of a truth ! It's perfection." 
 
 " I think it is." 
 
 " It's the whole story. It's life." 
 
 "That's what I tried for," I said; and I added to myself: 
 "Why the deuce do we?" 
 
 " It will be him for me," she meanwhile went on. " I shall live 
 with it, keep it all to myself, and do you know what it will do ? 
 it will seem to make up." 
 
 "To make up?" 
 
84 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " I never saw him alone," said Mrs. Dundene. 
 
 I am still keeping the thing to send to her, punctually, on the 
 day he's married; but I had of course, on my understanding 
 with her, a tremendous bout with Mrs. Cavenham, who pro- 
 tested with indignation against my " base treachery" and made to 
 Brivet an appeal for redress which, enlightened, face to face with 
 the magnificent humility of his other friend's selection, he 
 couldn't, for shame, entertain. All he was able to do was to 
 suggest to me that I might for one or other of the ladies, at my 
 choice, do him again ; but I had no difficulty in replying that 
 my best was my best and that what was done was done. He 
 assented with the awkwardness of a man in dispute between 
 women, and Mrs. Cavenham remained furious. "Can't 'they' 
 of all possible things, think ! take something else ? " 
 
 "Oh, they want him!" 
 
 " Him ? " It was monstrous. 
 
 "To live with," I explained " to make up." 
 
 " To make up for what ? " 
 
 " Why, you know, they never saw him alone." 
 
MRS. MED WIN 
 
 v 
 
 I 
 
 " \ T 7 ELL, we are a pair ! " the poor lady's visitor broke out 
 V V to her, at the end of her explanation, in a manner dis- 
 concerting enough. The poor lady was Miss Cutter, who lived 
 in South Audley Street, where she had an "upper half" so 
 concise that it had to pass, boldly, for convenient ; and her 
 visitor was her half-brother, whom she had not seen for three 
 years. She was remarkable for a maturity of which every 
 symptom might have been observed to be admirably controlled, 
 had not a tendency to stoutness just affirmed its independence. 
 Her present, no doubt, insisted too much on her past, but with 
 the excuse, sufficiently valid, that she must certainly once have 
 been prettier. She was clearly not contented with once she 
 wished to be prettier again. She neglected nothing that could 
 produce that illusion, and, being both fair and fat, dressed almost 
 wholly in black. When she added a little colour it was not, at 
 any rate, to her drapery. Her small rooms had the peculiarity 
 that everything they contained appeared to testify with vividness 
 to her position in society, quite as if they had been furnished by 
 the bounty of admiring friends. They were adorned indeed 
 almost exclusively with objects that nobody buys, as had more 
 than once been remarked by spectators of her own sex, for her- 
 self, and would have been luxurious if luxury consisted mainly in 
 photographic portraits slashed across with signatures, in baskets 
 of flowers beribboned with the cards of passing compatriots, and 
 in a neat collection of red volumes, blue volumes, alphabetical 
 volumes, aids to London lucidity, of every sort, devoted to 
 addresses and engagements. To be in Miss Cutter's tiny drawing- 
 room, in short, even with Miss Cutter alone should you by any 
 chance have found her so was somehow to be in the world and 
 in a crowd. It was like an agency it bristled with particulars. 
 
 This was what the tall, lean, loose gentleman lounging there 
 before her might have appeared to read in the suggestive scene 
 over which, while she talked to him, his eyes moved without 
 haste and without rest. " Oh, come, Mamie ! " he occasionally 
 
 85 
 
86 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 threw off; and the words were evidently connected with the im- 
 pression thus absorbed. His comparative youth spoke of waste 
 even as her positive her too positive spoke of economy. 
 There was only one thing, that is, to make up in him for every- 
 thing he had lost, though it was distinct enough indeed that this 
 thing might sometimes serve. It consisted in the perfection of 
 an indifference, an indifference at the present moment directed 
 to the plea a plea of inability, of pure destitution with which 
 his sister had met him. Yet it had even now a wider embrace, 
 took in quite sufficiently all consequences of queerness, confessed 
 in advance to the false note that, in such a setting, he almost 
 excruciatingly constituted. He cared as little that he looked at 
 moments all his impudence as that he looked all his shabbiness, 
 all his cleverness, all his history. These different things were 
 written in him in his premature baldness, his seamed, strained 
 face, the lapse from bravery of his long tawny moustache ; above 
 all, in his easy, friendly, universally acquainted eye, so much too 
 sociable for mere conversation. What possible relation with him 
 could be natural enough to meet it ? He wore a scant, rough 
 Inverness cape and a pair of black trousers, wanting in substance 
 and marked with the sheen of time, that had presumably once 
 served for evening use. He spoke with the slowness helplessly 
 permitted to Americans as something too slow to be stopped 
 and he repeated that he found himself associated with Miss 
 Cutter in a harmony worthy of wonder. She had been telling 
 him not only that she couldn't possibly give him ten pounds, but 
 that his unexpected arrival, should he insist on being much in 
 view, might seriously interfere with arrangements necessary to 
 her own maintenance ; on which he had begun by replying that 
 he of course knew she had long ago spent her money, but that he 
 looked to her now exactly because she had, without the aid of 
 that convenience, mastered the art of life. 
 
 " I'd really go away with a fiver, my dear, if you'd only tell me 
 how you do it. It's no use saying only, as you've always said, 
 that 'people are very kind to you.' What the devil are they kind 
 to you fort" 
 
 " Well, one reason is precisely that no particular inconvenience 
 has hitherto been supposed to attach to me. I'm just what I 
 am," said Mamie Cutter ; " nothing less and nothing more. It's 
 awkward to have to explain to you, which, moreover, I really 
 needn't in the least. I'm clever and amusing and charming." 
 She was uneasy and even frightened, but she kept her temper 
 and met him with a grace of her own. " I don't think you ought 
 to ask me more questions than I ask you." 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 87 
 
 "Ah, my dear," said the odd young man, "/'# no mysteries. 
 Why in the world, since it was what you came out for and have 
 devoted so much of your time to, haven't you pulled it off ? Why 
 haven't you married ? " 
 
 " Why haven't you ? " she retorted. " Do you think that if I 
 had it would have been better for you ? that my husband would 
 for a moment have put up with you ? Do you mind my asking 
 you if you'll kindly go now ? " she went on after a glance at the 
 clock. " I'm expecting a friend, whom I must see alone, on a 
 matter of great importance " 
 
 " And my being seen with you may compromise your respecta- 
 bility or undermine your nerve ? " He sprawled imperturbably 
 in his place, crossing again, in another sense, his long black legs 
 and showing, above his low shoes, an absurd reach of parti- 
 coloured sock. " I take your point well enough, but mayn't you 
 be after all quite wrong? If you can't do anything for me 
 couldn't you at least do something with me ? If it comes to 
 that, I'm clever and amusing and charming too ! I've been such 
 an ass that you don't appreciate me. But people like me I 
 assure you they do. They usually don't know what an ass I've 
 been ; they only see the surface, which " and he stretched him- 
 self afresh as she looked him up and down " you can imagine 
 them, can't you, rather taken with? I'm 'what I am' too; 
 nothing less and nothing more. That's true of us as a family, 
 you see. We are a crew ! " He delivered himself serenely. His 
 voice was soft and flat, his pleasant eyes, his simple tones tending 
 to the solemn, achieved at moments that effect of quaintness 
 which is, in certain connections, socially so known and enjoyed. 
 " English people have quite a weakness for me more than any 
 others. I get on with them beautifully. I've always been with 
 them abroad. They think me," the young man explained, 
 "diabolically American." 
 
 " You ! " Such stupidity drew from her a sigh of compassion. 
 
 Her companion apparently quite understood it. "Are you 
 homesick, Mamie ? " he asked, with wondering irrelevance. 
 
 The manner of the question made her for some reason, in spite 
 of her preoccupations, break into a laugh. A shade of indulgence, 
 a sense of other things, came back to her. "You are funny, 
 Scott ! " 
 
 " Well," remarked Scott, " that's just what I claim. But are 
 you so homesick ? " he spaciously inquired, not as if to a practical 
 end, but from an easy play of intelligence. 
 
 " I'm just dying of it ! " said Mamie Cutter. 
 
 " Why, so am I ! " Her visitor had a sweetness of concurrence. 
 
88 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " We're the only decent people," Miss Cutter declared. " And 
 I know. You don't you can't ; and I can't explain. Come in," 
 she continued with a return of her impatience and an increase of 
 her decision, "at seven sharp." 
 
 She had quitted her seat some time before, and now, to get 
 him into motion, hovered before him while, still motionless, he 
 looked up at her. Something intimate, in the silence, appeared 
 to pass between them a community of fatigue and failure and, 
 after all, of intelligence. There was a final, cynical humour in it. 
 It determined him, at any rate, at last, and he slowly rose, taking 
 in again as he stood there the testimony of the room. He might 
 have been counting the photographs, but he looked at the flowers 
 with detachment. " Who's coming ? " 
 
 " Mrs. Medwin." 
 . "American?" 
 
 "Dear no!" 
 
 " Then what are you doing for her ? " 
 
 " I work for everyone," she promptly returned. 
 
 "For everyone who pays? So I suppose. Yet isn't it only 
 we who do pay ? " 
 
 There was a drollery, not lost on her, in the way his queer 
 presence lent itself to his emphasised plural. " Do you consider 
 that you do?" 
 
 At this, with his deliberation, he came back to his charming 
 idea. " Only try me, and see if I can't be made to. Work me 
 in." On her sharply presenting her back he stared a little at the 
 clock. " If I come at seven may I stay to dinner? " 
 
 It brought her round again. " Impossible. I'm dining out." 
 
 "With whom?" 
 
 She had to think. " With Lord Considine." 
 
 " Oh, my eye ! " Scott exclaimed. 
 
 She looked at him gloomily. "Is that sort of tone what 
 makes you pay? I think you might understand," she went on, 
 "that if you're to sponge on me successfully you mustn't ruin 
 me. I must have some remote resemblance to a lady." 
 
 "Yes? But why must /?" Her exasperated silence was full 
 of answers, of which, however, his inimitable manner took no 
 account. "You don't understand my real strength; I doubt 
 if you even understand your own. You're clever, Mamie, but 
 you're not so clever as I supposed. However," he pursued, " it's 
 out of Mrs. Medwin that you'll get it." 
 
 "Get what?" 
 
 " Why, the cheque that will enable you to assist me." 
 
 On this, for a moment, she met his eyes. " If you'll come 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 89 
 
 back at seven sharp not a minute before, and not a minute 
 after, I'll give you two five-pound notes." 
 
 He thought it over. "Whom are you expecting a minute 
 after?" 
 
 It sent her to the window with a groan almost of anguish, and 
 she answered nothing till she had looked at the street. " If you 
 injure me, you know, Scott, you'll be sorry." 
 
 " I wouldn't injure you for the world. What I want to do in 
 fact is really to help you, and I promise you that I won't leave 
 you by which I mean won't leave London till I've effected 
 something really pleasant for you. I like you, Mamie, because 
 I like pluck ; I like you much more than you like me. I like 
 you very, very much." He had at last with this reached the 
 door and opened it, but he remained with his hand on the latch. 
 " What does Mrs. Medwin want of you ? " he thus brought out. 
 
 She had come round to see him disappear, and in the relief of 
 this prospect she again just indulged him. "The impossible." 
 
 He waited another minute. " And you're going to do it ? " 
 
 " I'm going to do it," said Mamie Cutter. 
 
 " Well, then, that ought to be a haul. Call it three fivers ! " 
 he laughed. " At seven sharp." And at last he left her alone. 
 
 II 
 
 Miss CUTTER waited till she heard the house-door close; after 
 which, in a sightless, mechanical way, she moved about the room, 
 readjusting various objects that he had not touched. It was as 
 if his mere voice and accent had spoiled her form. But she 
 was not left too long to reckon with these things, for Mrs. 
 Medwin was promptly announced. This lady was not, more 
 than her hostess, in the first flush of her youth; her appear- 
 ance the scattered remains of beauty manipulated by taste 
 resembled one of the light repasts in which the fragments of 
 yesterday's dinner figure with a conscious ease that makes up 
 for the want of presence. She was perhaps of an effect still 
 too immediate to be called interesting, but she was candid, 
 gentle and surprised not fatiguingly surprised, only just in the 
 right degree; and her white face it was too white with the 
 fixed eyes, the somewhat touzled hair and the Louis Seize hat, 
 might at the end of the very long neck have suggested the head 
 of a princess carried, in a revolution, on a pike. She im- 
 mediately took up the business that had brought her, with the 
 air, however, of drawing from the omens then discernible less 
 confidence than she had hoped. The complication lay in the 
 
90 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 fact that if it was Mamie's part to present the omens, that lady 
 yet had so to colour them as to make her own service large. 
 She perhaps over-coloured, for her friend gave way to momentary 
 despair. 
 
 " What you mean is then that it's simply impossible ? " 
 
 "Oh no," said Mamie, with a qualified emphasis. "It's 
 possible' 1 
 
 " But disgustingly difficult ? " 
 
 " As difficult as you like." 
 
 " Then what can I do that I haven't done ? " 
 
 " You can only wait a little longer." 
 
 "But that's just what I have done. I've done nothing else. 
 I'm always waiting a little longer ! " 
 
 Miss Cutter retained, in spite of this pathos, her grasp of 
 the subject. "The thing, as I've told you, is for you first to 
 be seen." 
 
 "But if people won't look at me?" 
 
 "They will." 
 
 "They will?" Mrs. Medwin was eager. 
 
 "They shall," her hostess went on. "It's their only having 
 heard without having seen." 
 
 "But if they stare straight the other way?" Mrs. Medwin 
 continued to object. "You can't simply go up to them and 
 twist their heads about." 
 
 " It's just what I can," said Mamie Cutter. 
 
 But her charming visitor, heedless for the moment of this 
 attenuation, had found the way to put it. " It's the old story. 
 You can't go into the water till you swim, and you can't swim 
 till you go into the water. I can't be spoken to till I'm seen, 
 but I can't be seen till I'm spoken to." 
 
 She met this lucidity, Miss Cutter, with but an instant's lapse. 
 "You say I can't twist their heads about. But I have twisted 
 them." 
 
 It had been quietly produced, but it gave her companion a 
 jerk. "They say 'Yes'?" 
 
 She summed it up. " All but one. She says ' No.' " 
 
 Mrs. Medwin thought ; then jumped. " Lady Wantridge ? " 
 
 Miss Cutter, as more delicate, only bowed admission. " I 
 shall see her either this afternoon or late to-morrow. But she 
 has written." 
 
 Her visitor wondered again. " May I see her letter? " 
 
 "No." She spoke with decision. "But I shall square her." 
 
 "Then how?" 
 
 "Well" and Miss Cutter, as if looking upward for inspira- 
 
MRS. MEDWIN gi 
 
 tion, fixed her eyes awhile on the ceiling "well, it will come 
 to me." 
 
 Mrs. Medwin watched her it was impressive. " And will 
 they come to you the others ? " This question drew out the 
 fact that they would so far, at least, as they consisted of Lady 
 Edward, Lady Bellhouse and Mrs. Pouncer, who had engaged 
 to muster, at the signal of tea, on the i4th prepared, as it were, 
 for the worst. There was of course always the chance that 
 Lady Wantridge might take the field in such force as to paralyse 
 them, though that danger, at the same time, seemed inconsistent 
 with her being squared. It didn't perhaps all quite ideally hang 
 together; but what it sufficiently came to was that if she was 
 the one who could do most for a person in Mrs. Medwin's 
 position she was also the one who could do most against It 
 would therefore be distinctly what our friend familiarly spoke of 
 as " collar-work." The effect of these mixed considerations was 
 at any rate that Mamie eventually acquiesced in the idea, hand- 
 somely thrown out by her client, that she should have an 
 "advance" to go on with. Miss Cutter confessed that it seemed 
 at times as if one scarce could go on ; but the advance was, in 
 spite of this delicacy, still more delicately made made in the 
 form of a banknote, several sovereigns, some loose silver and 
 two coppers, the whole contents of her purse, neatly disposed by 
 Mrs. Medwin on one of the tiny tables. It seemed to clear the 
 air for deeper intimacies, the fruit of which was that Mamie, 
 lonely, after all, in her crowd, and always more helpful than 
 helped, eventually brought out that the way Scott had been 
 going on was what seemed momentarily to overshadow her own 
 power to do so. 
 
 " I've had a descent from him." But she had to explain. " My 
 half-brotherScott Homer. A wretch." 
 
 "What kind of a wretch?" 
 
 "Every kind. I lose sight of him at times he disappears 
 abroad. But he always turns up again, worse than ever." 
 
 "Violent?" 
 
 " No." 
 
 "Maudlin?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 " Only unpleasant ? " 
 
 "No. Rather pleasant. Awfully clever awfully travelled 
 and easy." 
 
 "Then what's the matter with him? " 
 
 Mamie mused, hesitated seemed to see a wide past. " I 
 don't know." 
 
92 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 "Something in the background?" Then as her friend was 
 silent, " Something queer about cards ? " Mrs. Medwin threw off. 
 
 " I don't know and I don't want to ! " 
 
 "Ah well, I'm sure / don't," Mrs. Medwin returned with 
 spirit. The note of sharpness was perhaps also a little in the 
 observation she made as she gathered herself to go. " Do you 
 mind my saying something ? " 
 
 Mamie took her eyes quickly from the money on the little 
 stand. " You may say what you like." 
 
 " I only mean that anything awkward you may have to keep 
 out of the way does seem to make more wonderful, doesn't it, 
 that you should have got just where you are? I allude, you 
 know, to your position/' 
 
 "I see." Miss Cutter somewhat coldly smiled. "To my 
 power." 
 
 " So awfully remarkable in an American." 
 
 " Ah, you like us so." 
 
 Mrs. Medwin candidly considered. " But we don't, dearest." 
 
 Her companion's smile brightened. " Then why do you come 
 tome?" 
 
 "Oh, I likejflw /" Mrs. Medwin made out. 
 
 "Then that's it. There are no 'Americans.' It's always 
 'you.'" 
 
 " Me ? " Mrs. Medwin looked lovely, but a little muddled. 
 
 " Me!" Mamie Cutter laughed. "But if you like me, you 
 dear thing, you can judge if I like you." She gave her a kiss to 
 dismiss her. " I'll see you again when I've seen her." 
 
 " Lady Wantridge ? I hope so, indeed. I'll turn up late to- 
 morrow, if you don't catch me first. Has it come to you yet ? " 
 the visitor, now at the door, went on. 
 
 " No ; but it will. There's time." 
 
 " Oh, a little less every day ! " 
 
 Miss Cutter had approached the table and glanced again at the 
 gold and silver and the note, not indeed absolutely overlooked the 
 two coppers. " The balance," she put it, " the day after ?" 
 
 " That very night, if you like." 
 
 " Then count on me." 
 
 " Oh, if I didn't ! " But the door closed on the dark idea. 
 
 Yearningly then, and only when it had done so, Miss Cutter took 
 up the money. 
 
 She went out with it ten minutes later, and, the calls on her 
 time being many, remained out so long that at half-past six she 
 had not come back. At that hour, on the other hand, Scott 
 Homer knocked at her door, where her maid, who opened it with 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 93 
 
 a weak pretence of holding it firm, ventured to announce to him, 
 as a lesson well learnt, that he had not been expected till seven. 
 No lesson, none the less, could prevail against his native art. He 
 pleaded fatigue, her, the maid's, dreadful depressing London, and 
 the need to curl up somewhere. If she would just leave him 
 quiet half an hour that old sofa upstairs would do for it, of which 
 he took quickly such effectual possession that when, five minutes 
 later, she peeped, nervous for her broken vow, into the drawing- 
 room, the faithless young woman found him extended at his length 
 and peacefully asleep. 
 
 Ill 
 
 THE situation before Miss Cutter's return developed in other 
 directions still, and when that event took place, at a few minutes 
 past seven, these circumstances were, by the foot of the stair, 
 between mistress and maid, the subject of some interrogative 
 gasps and scared admissions. Lady Wantridge had arrived shortly 
 after the interloper, and wishing, as she said, to wait, had gone 
 straight up in spite of being told he was lying down. 
 
 " She distinctly understood he was there ? " 
 
 " Oh yes, ma'am ; I thought it right to mention." 
 
 " And what did you call him ? " 
 
 " Well, ma'am, I thought it unfair to you to call him anything 
 but a gentleman." 
 
 Mamie took it all in, though there might well be more of it 
 than one could quickly embrace. " But if she has had time," 
 she flashed, " to find out he isn't one ? " 
 
 " Oh, ma'am, she had a quarter of an hour." 
 
 " Then she isn't with him still ? " 
 
 " No, ma'am ; she came down again at last. She rang, and I 
 saw her here, and she said she wouldn't wait longer." 
 
 Miss Cutter darkly mused. " Yet had already waited ? " 
 
 " Quite a quarter." 
 
 " Mercy on us ! " She began to mount. Before reaching the 
 top, however, she had reflected that quite a quarter was long if 
 Lady Wantridge had only been shocked. On the other hand, it 
 was short if she had only been pleased. But how could she have 
 been pleased ? The very essence of their actual crisis was just 
 that there was no pleasing her. Mamie had but to open the 
 drawing-room door indeed to perceive that this was not true at 
 least of Scott Homer, who was horribly cheerful. 
 
 Miss Cutter expressed to her brother without reserve her sense 
 of the constitutional, the brutal selfishness that had determined 
 
94 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 his mistimed return. It had taken place, in violation of their 
 agreement, exactly at the moment when it was most cruel to her 
 that he should be there, and if she must now completely wash 
 her hands of him he had only himself to thank. She had come 
 in flushed with resentment and for a moment had been voluble ; 
 but it would have been striking that, though the way he received 
 her might have seemed but to aggravate, it presently justified him 
 by causing their relation really to take a stride. He had the art 
 of confounding those who would quarrel with him by reducing 
 them to the humiliation of an irritated curiosity. 
 
 " What could she have made of you ? " Mamie demanded. 
 
 " My dear girl, she's not a woman who's eager to make too 
 much of anything anything, I mean, that will prevent her from 
 doing as she likes, what she takes into her head. Of course," 
 he continued to explain, "if it's something she doesn't want to 
 do, she'll make as much as Moses." 
 
 Mamie wondered if that was the way he talked to her visitor, 
 but felt obliged to own to his acuteness. It was an exact descrip- 
 tion of Lady Wantridge, and she was conscious of tucking it away 
 for future use in a corner of her miscellaneous little mind. She 
 withheld, however, all present acknowledgment, only addressing 
 him another question. " Did you really get on with her ? " 
 
 " Have you still to learn, darling I can't help again putting 
 it to you that I get on with everybody? That's just what I 
 don't seem able to drive into you. Only see how I get on with 
 ymt" 
 
 She almost stood corrected. "What I mean is, of course, 
 whether " 
 
 "Whether she made love to me? Shyly, yet or because 
 shamefully? She would certainly have liked awfully to stay." 
 
 "Then why didn't she?" 
 
 " Because, on account of some other matter and I could see 
 it was true she hadn't time. Twenty minutes she was here 
 less were all she came to give you. So don't be afraid I've 
 frightened her away. She'll come back." 
 
 Mamie thought it over. "Yet you didn't go with her to 
 the door ? " 
 
 " She wouldn't let me, and I know when to do what I'm told 
 quite as much as what I'm not told. She wanted to find out 
 about me. I mean from your little creature ; a pearl of fidelity, 
 by the way." 
 
 "But what on earth did she come up for?" Mamie again 
 found herself appealing, and, just by that fact, showing her need 
 of help. 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 95 
 
 "Because she always goes up." Then, as, in the presence 
 of this rapid generalisation, to say nothing of that of such a 
 relative altogether, Miss Cutter could only show as comparatively 
 blank : " I mean she knows when to go up and when to come 
 down. She has instincts ; she didn't know whom you might have 
 up here. It's a kind of compliment to you anyway. Why, 
 Mamie," Scott pursued, " you don't know the curiosity we any 
 of us inspire. You wouldn't believe what I've seen. The bigger 
 bugs they are the more they're on the look-out." 
 
 Mamie still followed, but at a distance. "The look-out for 
 what?" 
 
 " Why, for anything that will help them to live. You've been 
 here all this time without making out then, about them, what 
 I've had to pick out as I can ? They're dead, don't you see ? 
 And we're alive." 
 
 " You ? Oh ! " Mamie almost laughed about it 
 
 "Well, they're a worn-out old lot, anyhow; they've used up their 
 resources. They do look out ; and I'll do them the justice to 
 say they're not afraid not even of me!" he continued as his 
 sister again showed something of the same irony. " Lady 
 Wantridge, at any rate, wasn't ; that's what I mean by her having 
 made love to me. She does what she likes. Mind it, you know." 
 He was by this time fairly teaching her to know one of her best 
 friends, and when, after it, he had come back to the great point 
 of his lesson that of her failure, through feminine inferiority, 
 practically to grasp the truth that their being just as they were, 
 he and she, was the real card for them to play when he had 
 renewed that reminder he left her absolutely in a state of 
 dependence. Her impulse to press him on the subject of Lady 
 Wantridge dropped ; it was as if she had felt that, whatever had 
 taken place, something would somehow come of it. She was 
 to be, in a manner, disappointed, but the impression helped to 
 keep her over to the next morning, when, as Scott had foretold, 
 his new acquaintance did reappear, explaining to Miss Cutter 
 that she had acted the day before to gain time and that she 
 even now sought to gain it by not waiting longer. What, she 
 promptly intimated she had asked herself, could that friend be 
 thinking of? She must show where she stood before things had 
 gone too far. If she had brought her answer without more delay 
 she wished to make it sharp. Mrs. Medwin ? Never ! " No, 
 my dear not I. There I stop." 
 
 Mamie had known it would be "collar-work," but somehow 
 now, at the beginning, she felt her heart sink. It was not that 
 she had expected to carry the position with a rush, but that, 
 
96 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 as always after an interval, her visitor's defences really loomed 
 and quite, as it were, to the material vision too large. She was 
 always planted with them, voluminous, in the very centre of the 
 passage ; was like a person accommodated with a chair in some 
 unlawful place at the theatre. She wouldn't move and you 
 couldn't get round. Mamie's calculation indeed had not been 
 on getting round ; she was obliged to recognise that, too foolishly 
 and fondly, she had dreamed of producing a surrender. Her 
 dream had been the fruit of her need ; but, conscious that she 
 was even yet unequipped for pressure, she felt, almost for the first 
 time in her life, superficial and crude. She was to be paid but 
 with what was she, to that end, to pay? She had engaged to 
 find an answer to this question, but the answer had not, accord- 
 ing to her promise, " come." And Lady Wantridge meanwhile 
 massed herself, and there was no view of her that didn't show 
 her as verily, by some process too obscure to be traced, the hard 
 depository of the social law. She was no younger, no fresher, 
 no stronger, really, than any of them ; she was only, with a kind 
 of haggard fineness, a sharpened taste for life, and, with all sorts of 
 things behind and beneath her, more abysmal and more immoral, 
 more secure and more impertinent. The points she made were 
 two in number. One was that she absolutely declined ; the other 
 was that she quite doubted if Mamie herself had measured the 
 job. The thing couldn't be done. But say it could be; was 
 Mamie quite the person to do it ? To this Miss Cutter, with 
 a sweet smile, replied that she quite understood how little she 
 might seem so. " I'm only one of the persons to whom it has 
 appeared that you are." 
 
 " Then who are the others ? " 
 
 "Well, to begin with, Lady Edward, Lady Bellhouse and 
 Mrs. Pouncer." 
 
 "Do you mean that they'll come to meet her?" 
 
 " I've seen them, and they've promised." 
 
 " To come, of course," Lady Wantridge said, " if / come." 
 
 Her hostess hesitated. "Oh, of course, you could prevent 
 them. But I should take it as awfully kind of you not to. 
 Won't you do this for me?" Mamie pleaded. 
 
 Her friend looked about the room very much as Scott had 
 done. " Do they really understand what it's for ? " 
 
 " Perfectly. So that she may call." 
 
 "And what good will that do her?" 
 
 Miss Cutter faltered, but she presently brought it out. " Of 
 course what one hopes is that you'll ask her." 
 
 "Ask her to call?" 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 97 
 
 "Ask her to dine. Ask her, if you'd be so truly sweet, for 
 a Sunday, or something of that sort, and even if only in one of 
 your most mixed parties, to Catchmore." 
 
 Miss Cutter felt the less hopeful after this effort in that her 
 companion only showed a strange good nature. And it was not 
 the amiability of irony; yet it was amusement. "Take Mrs. 
 Medwin into my family?" 
 
 " Some day, when you're taking forty others." 
 
 "Ah, but what I don't see is what it does for you. You're 
 already so welcome among us that you can scarcely improve your 
 position even by forming for us the most delightful relation." 
 
 " Well, I know how dear you are," Mamie Cutter replied ; 
 " but one has, after all, more than one side, and more than one 
 sympathy. I like her, you know." And even at this Lady 
 Wantridge was not shocked ; she showed that ease and blandness 
 which were her way, unfortunately, of being most impossible. 
 She remarked that she might listen to such things, because she 
 was clever enough for them not to matter ; only Mamie should 
 take care how she went about saying them at large. When she 
 became definite, however, in a minute, on the subject of the 
 public facts, Miss Cutter soon found herself ready to make her 
 own concession. Of course, she didn't dispute them : there they 
 were ; they were unfortunately on record, and nothing was to 
 be done about them but to Mamie found it, in truth, at this 
 point, a little difficult. 
 
 " Well, what ? Pretend already to have forgotten them ? " 
 
 " Why not, when you've done it in so many other cases ? " 
 
 " There are no other cases so bad. One meets them, at any 
 rate, as they come. Some you can manage, others you can't. 
 It's no use, you must give them up. They're past patching; 
 there's nothing to be done with them. There's nothing, accord- 
 ingly, to be done with Mrs. Medwin but to put her off." And 
 Lady Wantridge rose to her height. 
 
 "Well, you know, I do do things," Mamie quavered with a 
 smile so strained that it partook of exaltation. 
 
 " You help people ? Oh yes, I've known you to do wonders. 
 But stick," said Lady Wantridge with strong and cheerful 
 emphasis, " to your Americans ! " 
 
 Miss Cutter, gazing, got up. "You don't do justice, Lady 
 Wantridge, to your own compatriots. Some of them are really 
 charming. Besides," said Mamie, "working for mine often 
 strikes me, so far as the interest the inspiration and excitement, 
 don't you know ? go, as rather too easy. You all, as I constantly 
 have occasion to say, like us so ! " 
 
98 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 Her companion frankly weighed it. "Yes; it takes that to 
 account for your position. I've always thought of you, never- 
 theless, as keeping, for their benefit, a regular working agency. 
 They come to you, and you place them. There remains, 
 I confess," her ladyship went on in the same free spirit, " the 
 great wonder " 
 
 "Of how I first placed my poor little self? Yes," Mamie 
 bravely conceded, " when / began there was no agency. I just 
 worked my passage. I didn't even come to you, did I ? You 
 never noticed me till, as Mrs. Short Stokes says, 'I was 'way, 
 'way up ! ' Mrs. Medwin," she threw in, " can't get over 
 it" Then, as her friend looked vague : " Over my social 
 situation." 
 
 " Well, it's no great flattery to you to say," Lady Wantridge 
 good-humouredly returned, "that she certainly can't hope for 
 one resembling it." Yet it really seemed to spread there before 
 them. " You simply made Mrs. Short Stokes." 
 
 " In spite of her name ! " Mamie smiled. 
 
 "Oh, your names ! In spite of everything." 
 
 "Ah, I'm something of an artist." With which, and a 
 relapse marked by her wistful eyes into the gravity of the matter, 
 she supremely fixed her friend. She felt how little she minded 
 betraying at last the extremity of her need, and it was out of this 
 extremity that her appeal proceeded. " Have I really had your 
 last word? It means so much to me." 
 
 Lady Wantridge came straight to the point. " You mean you 
 depend on it ? " 
 
 "Awfully!" 
 
 " Is it all you have ? " 
 
 "All. Now." 
 
 "But Mrs. Short Stokes and the others 'rolling,' aren't they? 
 Don't they pay up?" 
 
 "Ah," sighed Mamie, "if it wasn't for them !" 
 
 Lady Wantridge perceived. " You've had so much ? " 
 
 " I couldn't have gone on." 
 
 " Then what do you do with it all ? " 
 
 " Oh, most of it goes back to them. There are all sorts, and 
 it's all help. Some of them have nothing." 
 
 "Oh, if you feed the hungry," Lady Wantridge laughed, 
 "you're indeed in a great way of business. Is Mrs. Medwin" 
 her transition was immediate "really rich?" 
 
 " Really. He left her everything." 
 
 "So that if I do say 'yes' " 
 
 " It will quite set me up." 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 99 
 
 " I see and how much more responsible it makes one ! But 
 I'd rather myself give you the money." 
 
 " Oh ! " Mamie coldly murmured. 
 
 "You mean I mayn't suspect your prices? Well, I daresay 
 I don't ! But I'd rather give you ten pounds." 
 
 " Oh ! " Mamie repeated in a tone that sufficiently covered 
 her prices. The question was in every way larger. " Do you 
 never forgive?" she reproachfully inquired. The door opened, 
 however, at the moment she spoke, and Scott Homer presented 
 himself. 
 
 IV 
 
 SCOTT HOMER wore exactly, to his sister's eyes, the aspect he 
 had worn the day before, and it also formed, to her sense, the 
 great feature of his impartial greeting. 
 
 " How d'ye do, Mamie ? How d'ye do, Lady Wantridge ? " 
 
 "How d'ye do again ? " Lady Wantridge replied with an 
 equanimity striking to her hostess. It was as if Scott's own had 
 been contagious ; it was almost indeed as if she had seen him 
 before. Had she ever so seen him before the previous day? 
 While Miss Cutter put to herself this question her visitor, at all 
 events, met the one she had previously uttered. 
 
 " Ever ' forgive ' ? " this personage echoed in a tone that made 
 as little account as possible of the interruption. " Dear, yes ! 
 The people I have forgiven ! " She laughed perhaps a little 
 nervously; and she was now looking at Scott. The way she 
 looked at him was precisely what had already had its effect for 
 his sister. " The people I can ! " 
 
 " Can you forgive me ? " asked Scott Homer. 
 
 She took it so easily. " But what ? " 
 
 Mamie interposed; she turned directly to her brother. 
 "Don't try her. Leave it so." She had had an inspiration; it 
 was the most extraordinary thing in the world. "Don't try 
 him" she had turned to their companion. She looked grave, 
 sad, strange. "Leave it so." Yes, it was a distinct inspira- 
 tion, which she couldn't have explained, but which had come, 
 prompted by something she had caught the extent of the 
 recognition expressed in Lady Wantridge's face. It had come 
 absolutely of a sudden, straight out of the opposition of the 
 two figures before her quite as if a concussion had struck a 
 light. The light was helped by her quickened sense that her 
 friend's silence on the incident of the day before showed some 
 sort of consciousness. She looked surprised. " Do you know 
 my brother ? " 
 
ioo THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " Do I know you ? " Lady Wantridge asked of him. 
 
 "No, Lady Wantridge," Scott pleasantly confessed, "not one 
 little mite ! " 
 
 " Well, then, if you must go ! " and Mamie offered her a 
 
 hand. " But I'll go down with you. Not you I " she launched 
 at her brother, who immediately effaced himself. His way of 
 doing so and he had already done so, as for Lady Wantridge, 
 in respect to their previous encounter struck her even at 
 the moment as an instinctive, if slightly blind, tribute to her 
 possession of an idea ; and as such, in its celerity, made her so 
 admire him, and their common wit, that, on the spot, she more 
 than forgave him his queerness. He was right. He could be 
 as queer as he liked ! The queerer the better ! It was at the 
 foot of the stairs, when she had got her guest down, that what 
 she had assured Mrs. Medwin would come did indeed come. 
 " Did you meet him here yesterday ? " 
 
 " Dear, yes. Isn't he too funny ? " 
 
 " Yes," said Mamie gloomily. " He is funny. But had you 
 ever met him before ? " 
 
 "Dear, no!" 
 
 " Oh ! "and Mamie's tone might have meant many things. 
 
 Lady Wantridge, however, after all, easily overlooked it. "I 
 only knew he was one of your odd Americans. That's why, 
 when I heard yesterday, here, that he was up there awaiting your 
 return, I didn't let that prevent me. I thought he might be. He 
 certainly," her ladyship laughed, " is." 
 
 "Yes, he's very American," Mamie went on in the same way. 
 
 " As you say, we are fond of you ! Good-bye," said Lady 
 Wantridge. 
 
 But Mamie had not half done with her. She felt more and 
 more or she hoped at least that she looked strange. She was, 
 no doubt, if it came to that, strange. " Lady Wantridge," she 
 almost convulsively broke out, " I don't know whether you'll 
 understand me, but I seem to feel that I must act with you I 
 don't know what to call it ! responsibly. He is my brother." 
 
 "Surely and why not?" Lady Wantridge stared. "He's 
 the image of you ! " 
 
 " Thank you ! " and Mamie was stranger than ever. 
 
 " Oh, he's good-looking. He's handsome, my dear. Oddly 
 but distinctly ! " Her ladyship was for treating it much as 
 a joke. 
 
 But Mamie, all sombre, would have none of this. She boldly 
 gave him up. " I think he's awful." 
 
 "He is indeed delightfully. And where do you get your 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 101 
 
 ways of saying things ? It isn't anything and the things aren't 
 anything. But it's so droll." 
 
 "Don't let yourself, all the same," Mamie consistently 
 pursued, "be carried away by it. The thing can't be done 
 simply." 
 
 Lady Wantridge wondered. " ' Done simply ' ? " 
 
 " Done at all." 
 
 " But what can't be ? " 
 
 " Why, what you might think from his pleasantness. What 
 he spoke of your doing for him." 
 
 Lady Wantridge recalled. " Forgiving him ? " 
 
 "He asked you if you couldn't. But you can't. It's too 
 dreadful for me, as so near a relation, to have, loyally loyally to 
 you to say it. But he's impossible." 
 
 It was so portentously produced that her ladyship had some- 
 how to meet it. " What's the matter with him ? " 
 
 " I don't know." 
 
 "Then what's the matter with you?" Lady Wantridge 
 inquired. 
 
 "It's because I won't know," Mamie not without dignity 
 explained. 
 
 "Then /won't either!" 
 
 "Precisely. Don't. It's something," Mamie pursued, with 
 some inconsequence, " that somewhere or other, at some time 
 or other he appears to have done ; something that has made 
 a difference in his life." 
 
 " ' Something ' ? " Lady Wantridge echoed again. " What 
 kind of thing ? " 
 
 Mamie looked up at the light above the door, through which 
 the London sky was doubly dim. " I haven't the least idea." 
 
 " Then what kind of difference ? " 
 
 Mamie's gaze was still at the light. "The difference you 
 see." 
 
 Lady Wantridge, rather obligingly, seemed to ask herself what 
 she saw. " But I don't see any ! It seems, at least," she added, 
 " such an amusing one ! And he has such nice eyes." 
 
 " Oh, dear eyes ! " Mamie conceded ; but with too much sad- 
 ness, for the moment, about the connections of the subject, to 
 say more. 
 
 It almost forced her companion, after an instant, to proceed. 
 " Do you mean he can't go home ? " 
 
 She weighed her responsibility. "I only make out more's 
 the pity ! that he doesn't." 
 
 " Is it then something too terrible ? " 
 
102 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 She thought again. "I don't know what for men is too 
 terrible." 
 
 " Well then, as you don't know what ' is ' for women either 
 good-bye ! " her visitor laughed. 
 
 It practically wound up the interview; which, however, 
 terminating thus on a considerable stir of the air, was to give 
 Miss Cutter, the next few days, the sense of being much blown 
 about. The degree to which, to begin with, she had been 
 drawn or perhaps rather pushed closer to Scott was marked 
 in the brief colloquy that, on her friend's departure, she had 
 with him. He had immediately said it. "You'll see if she 
 doesn't ask me down ! " 
 
 "So soon?" 
 
 "Oh, I've known them at places at Cannes, at Pau, at 
 Shanghai to do it sooner still. I always know when they will. 
 You can't make out they don't love me ! " He spoke almost 
 plaintively, as if he wished she could. 
 
 " Then I don't see why it hasn't done you more good." 
 
 " Why, Mamie," he patiently reasoned, " what more good could 
 it? As I tell you," he explained, "it has just been my life." 
 
 " Then why do you come to me for money ? " 
 
 "Oh, they don't give me that!" Scott returned. 
 
 " So that it only means then, after all, that I, at the best, must 
 keep you up ? " 
 
 He fixed on her the nice eyes that Lady Wantridge admired. 
 " Do you mean to tell me that already at this very moment I 
 am not distinctly keeping you ? " 
 
 She gave him back his look. " Wait till she has asked you, 
 and then," Mamie added, " decline." 
 
 Scott, not too grossly, wondered. " As acting for you ? " 
 
 Mamie's next injunction was answer enough. " But before 
 yes call." 
 
 He took it in. "Call but decline. Good." 
 
 " The rest," she said, " I leave to you." And she left it, in 
 fact, with such confidence that for a couple of days she was not 
 only conscious of no need to give Mrs. Medwin another turn of 
 the screw, but positively evaded, in her fortitude, the reappearance 
 of that lady. It was not till the third day that she waited upon 
 her, finding her, as she had expected, tense. 
 
 " Lady Wantridge will ? " 
 
 " Yes, though she says she won't." 
 
 " She says she won't ? O oh ! " Mrs. Medwin moaned. 
 
 " Sit tight all the same. I have her ! " 
 
 " But how ? " 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 103 
 
 " Through Scott whom she wants." 
 
 " Your bad brother ! " Mrs. Medwin stared. " What does she 
 want of him ? " 
 
 " To amuse them at Catchmore. Anything for that. And he 
 would. But he sha'n't!" Mamie declared. "He sha'n't go 
 unless she comes. She must meet you first you're my con- 
 dition." 
 
 " O o oh ! " Mrs. Medwin's tone was a wonder of hope and 
 fear. " But doesn't he want to go ? " 
 
 " He wants what / want. She draws the line at you. I draw 
 the line at him" 
 
 " But she doesn't she mind that he's bad ? " 
 
 It was so artless that Mamie laughed. " No ; it doesn't touch 
 her. Besides, perhaps he isn't. It isn't as im you people seem 
 not to know. He has settled everything, at all events, by going 
 to see her. It's before her that he's the thing she will have to 
 have." 
 
 "Have to?" 
 
 " For Sundays in the country. A feature the feature." 
 
 " So she has asked him ? " 
 
 "Yes; and he has declined." 
 
 " For me ? " Mrs. Medwin panted. 
 
 " For me," said Mamie, on the doorstep. " But I don't leave 
 him for long." Her hansom had waited. " She'll come." 
 
 Lady Wantridge did come. She met in South Audley Street, 
 on the fourteenth, at tea, the ladies whom Mamie had named to 
 her, together with three or four others, and it was rather a master- 
 stroke for Miss Cutter that, if Mrs. Medwin was modestly present, 
 Scott Homer was as markedly not. This occasion, however, is a 
 medal that would take rare casting, as would also, for that matter, 
 even the minor light and shade, the lower relief, of the pecuniary 
 transaction that Mrs. Medwin's flushed gratitude scarce awaited 
 the dispersal of the company munificently to complete. A new 
 understanding indeed on the spot rebounded from it, the con- 
 ception of which, in Mamie's mind, had promptly bloomed. 
 " He sha'n't go now unless he takes you." Then, as her fancy 
 always moved quicker for her client than her client's own 
 " Down with him to Catchmore ! When he goes to amuse them, 
 you" she comfortably declared, " shall amuse them too." Mrs. 
 Medwin's response was again rather oddly divided, but she was 
 sufficiently intelligible when it came to meeting the intimation 
 that this latter would be an opportunity involving a separate fee. 
 " Say," Mamie had suggested, " the same." 
 
 "Very well; the same." 
 
io 4 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 The knowledge that it was to be the same had perhaps some- 
 thing to do, also, with the obliging spirit in which Scott eventually 
 went. It was all, at the last, rather hurried a party rapidly got 
 together for the Grand Duke, who was in England but for the 
 hour, who had good-naturedly proposed himself, and who liked 
 his parties small, intimate and funny. This one was of the 
 smallest, and it was finally judged to conform neither too little 
 nor too much to the other conditions after a brief whirlwind of 
 wires and counterwires, and an iterated waiting of hansoms at 
 various doors to include Mrs. Medwin. It was from Catchmore 
 itself that, snatching a moment on the wondrous Sunday afternoon, 
 this lady had the harmonious thought of sending the new cheque. 
 She was in bliss enough, but her scribble none the less intimated 
 that it was Scott who amused them most. He was the feature. 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 
 
 FRANK GRANGER had arrived from Paris to paint a 
 portrait an order given him, as a young compatriot with a 
 future, whose early work would some day have a price, by a lady 
 from New York, a friend of his own people and also, as it 
 happened, of Addie's, the young woman to whom it was publicly 
 both affirmed and denied that he was engaged. Other young 
 women in Paris fellow-members there of the little tight trans- 
 pontine world of art-study professed to know that the pair had 
 been "several times" over so closely contracted. This, however, 
 was their own affair ; the last phase of the relation, the last time 
 of the times, had passed into vagueness ; there was perhaps even 
 an impression that if they were inscrutable to their friends they 
 were not wholly crystalline to each other and themselves. What 
 had occurred for Granger, at all events, in connection with the 
 portrait was that Mrs. Bracken, his intending model, whose 
 return to America was at hand, had suddenly been called to 
 London by her husband, occupied there with pressing business, 
 but had yet desired that her displacement should not interrupt 
 her sittings. The young man, at her request, had followed her 
 to England and profited by all she could give him, making shift 
 with a small studio lent him by a London painter whom he had 
 known and liked, a few years before, in the French atelier that 
 then cradled, and that continued to cradle, so many of their 
 kind. 
 
 The British capital was a strange, grey world to him, where 
 people walked, in more ways than one, by a dim light; but he 
 was happily of such a turn that the impression, just as it came, 
 could nowhere ever fail him, and even the worst of these things 
 was almost as much an occupation putting it only at that as 
 the best. Mrs. Bracken, moreover, passed him on, and while 
 the darkness ebbed a little in the April days he found himself 
 consolingly committed to a couple of fresh subjects. This cut 
 him out work for more than another month, but meanwhile, as 
 
 105 
 
106 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 he said, he saw a lot a lot that, with frequency and with much 
 expression, he wrote about to Addie. She also wrote to her 
 absent friend, but in briefer snatches, a meagreness to her 
 reasons for which he had long since assented. She had other 
 play for her pen, as well as, fortunately, other remuneration ; a 
 regular correspondence for a "prominent Boston paper," fitful 
 connections with public sheets perhaps also, in cases, fitful, and 
 a mind, above all, engrossed at times, to the exclusion of every- 
 thing else, with the study of the short story. This last was what 
 she had mainly come out to go into, two or three years after he 
 had found himself engulfed in the mystery of Carolus. She was 
 indeed, on her own deep sea, more engulfed than he had ever been, 
 and he had grown to accept the sense that, for progress too, she 
 sailed under more canvas. It had not been particularly present 
 to him till now that he had in the least got on, but the way in 
 which Addie had and evidently, still more, would was the 
 theme, as it were, of every tongue. She had thirty short stories 
 out and nine descriptive articles. His three or four portraits 
 of fat American ladies they were all fat, all ladies and all 
 American were a poor show compared with these triumphs; 
 especially as Addie had begun to throw out that it was about 
 time they should go home. It kept perpetually coming up in 
 Paris, in the transpontine world, that, as the phrase was, America 
 had grown more interesting since they left. Addie was attentive 
 to the rumour, and, as full of conscience as she was of taste, of 
 patriotism as of curiosity, had often put it to him frankly, with 
 what he, who was of New York, recognised as her New England 
 emphasis : " I'm not sure, you know, that we do real justice to 
 our country." Granger felt he would do it on the day if the 
 day ever came he should irrevocably marry her. No other 
 country could possibly have produced her. 
 
 II 
 
 BUT meanwhile it befell, in London, that he was stricken with 
 influenza and with subsequent sorrow. The attack was short 
 but sharp had it lasted Addie would certainly have come to his 
 aid ; most of a blight, really, in its secondary stage. The good 
 ladies his sitters the ladies with the frizzled hair, with the 
 diamond earrings, with the chins tending to the massive 
 left for him, at the door of his lodgings, flowers, soup and 
 love, so that with their assistance he pulled through ; but his 
 convalescence was slow and his weakness out of proportion to 
 the muffled shock. He came out, but he went about lame ; 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 107 
 
 it tired him to paint he felt as if he had been ill for a month. 
 He strolled in Kensington Gardens when he should have been 
 at work ; he sat long on penny chairs and helplessly mused and 
 mooned. Addie desired him to return to Paris, but there were 
 chances under his hand that he felt he had just wit enough left 
 not to relinquish. He would have gone for a week to the sea 
 he would have gone to Brighton ; but Mrs. Bracken had to be 
 finished Mrs. Bracken was so soon to sail. He just managed 
 to finish her in time the day before the date fixed for his break- 
 ing ground on a greater business still, the circumvallation of 
 Mrs. Dunn. Mrs. Dunn duly waited on him, and he sat down 
 before her, feeling, however, ere he rose, that he must take a 
 long breath before the attack. While asking himself that night, 
 therefore, where he should best replenish his lungs, he received 
 from Addie, who had had from Mrs. Bracken a poor report of 
 him, a communication which, besides being of sudden and 
 startling interest, applied directly to his case. 
 
 His friend wrote to him under the lively emotion of having 
 from one day to another become aware of a new relative, an 
 ancient cousin, a sequestered gentlewoman, the sole survival of 
 "the English branch of the family," still resident, at Flicker- 
 bridge, in the " old family home," and with whom, that he might 
 immediately betake himself to so auspicious a quarter for change 
 of air, she had already done what was proper to place him, as 
 she said, in touch. What came of it all, to be brief, was that 
 Granger found himself so placed almost as he read : he was in 
 touch with Miss Wenham of Flickerbridge, to the extent of 
 being in correspondence with her, before twenty-four hours had 
 sped. And on the second day he was in the train, settled for 
 a five-hours' run to the door of this amiable woman, who had 
 so abruptly and kindly taken him on trust and of whom but 
 yesterday he had never so much as heard. This was an oddity 
 the whole incident was of which, in the corner of his compart- 
 ment, as he proceeded, he had time to take the size. But the 
 surprise, the incongruity, as he felt, could but deepen as he went. 
 It was a sufficiently queer note, in the light, or the absence of it, 
 of his late experience, that so complex a product as Addie should 
 have any simple insular tie ; but it was a queerer note still that 
 she should have had one so long only to remain unprofitably 
 unconscious of it. Not to have done something with it, used it, 
 worked it, talked about it at least, and perhaps even written 
 these things, at the rate she moved, represented a loss of oppor- 
 tunity under which, as he saw her, she was peculiarly formed to 
 wince. She was at any rate, it was clear, doing something with 
 
io8 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 it now } using it, working it, certainly, already talking and, yes, 
 quite possibly writing about it. She was, in short, smartly 
 making up what she had missed, and he could take such com- 
 fort from his own action as he had been helped to by the rest of 
 the facts, succinctly reported from Paris on the very morning of 
 his start. 
 
 It was the singular story of a sharp split in a good English 
 house that dated now from years back. A worthy Briton, of 
 the best middling stock, had, early in the forties, as a very young 
 man, in Dresden, whither he had been despatched to qualify in 
 German for a stool in an uncle's counting-house, met, admired, 
 wooed and won an American girl, of due attractions, domiciled 
 at that period with her parents and a sister, who was also attrac- 
 tive, in the Saxon capital. He had married her, taken her to 
 England, and there, after some years of harmony and happiness, 
 lost her. The sister in question had, after her death, come to 
 him, and to his young child, on a visit, the effect of which, 
 between the pair, eventually denned itself as a sentiment that 
 was not to be resisted. The bereaved husband, yielding to a 
 new attachment and a new response, and finding a new union 
 thus prescribed, had yet been forced to reckon with the unaccom- 
 modating law of the land. Encompassed with frowns in his own 
 country, however, marriages of this particular type were wreathed 
 in smiles in his sister's-in-law, so that his remedy was not for- 
 bidden. Choosing between two allegiances he had let the one 
 go that seemed the least close, and had, in brief, transplanted 
 his possibilities to an easier air. The knot was tied for the 
 couple in New York, where, to protect the legitimacy of such 
 other children as might come to them, they settled and pros- 
 pered. Children came, and one of the daughters, growing up 
 and marrying in her turn, was, if Frank rightly followed, the 
 mother of his own Addie, who had been deprived of the know- 
 ledge of her indeed, in childhood, by death, and been brought 
 up, though without undue tension, by a stepmother a character 
 thus, in the connection, repeated. 
 
 The breach produced in England by the invidious action, as it 
 was there held, of the girl's grandfather, had not failed to widen 
 all the more that nothing had been done on the American side 
 to close it. Frigidity had settled, and hostility had only been 
 arrested by indifference. Darkness, therefore, had fortunately 
 supervened, and a cousinship completely divided. On either 
 side of the impassable gulf, of the impenetrable curtain, each 
 branch had put forth its leaves a foliage wanting, in the 
 American quarter, it was distinct enough to Granger, in no sign 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 109 
 
 or symptom of climate and environment. The graft in New 
 York had taken, and Addie was a vivid, an unmistakeable flower. 
 At Flickerbridge, or wherever, on the other hand, strange to say, 
 the parent stem had had a fortune comparatively meagre. For- 
 tune, it was true, in the vulgarest sense, had attended neither 
 party. Addie's immediate belongings were as poor as they were 
 numerous, and he gathered that Miss Wenham's pretensions to 
 wealth were not so marked as to expose the claim of kinship to 
 the imputation of motive. To this lady's single identity, at all 
 events, the original stock had dwindled, and our young man was 
 properly warned that he would find her shy and solitary. What 
 was singular was that, in these conditions, she should desire, she 
 should endure, to receive him. But that was all another story, 
 lucid enough when mastered. He kept Addie's letters, excep- 
 tionally copious, in his lap; he conned them at intervals; he 
 held the threads. 
 
 He looked out between whiles at the pleasant English land, 
 an April aquarelle washed in with wondrous breadth. He knew 
 the French thing, he knew the American, but he had known 
 nothing of this. He saw it already as the remarkable Miss 
 Wenham's setting. The doctor's daughter at Flickerbridge, with 
 nippers on her nose, a palette on her thumb and innocence in 
 her heart, had been the miraculous link. She had become 
 aware, even there, in our world of wonders, that the current 
 fashion for young women so equipped was to enter the Parisian 
 lists. Addie had accordingly chanced upon her, on the slopes 
 of Montparnasse, as one of the English girls in one of the 
 thorough-going sets. They had met in some easy collocation 
 and had fallen upon common ground; after which the young 
 woman, restored to Flickerbridge for an interlude and retailing 
 there her adventures and impressions, had mentioned to Miss 
 Wenham, who had known and protected her from babyhood, 
 that that lady's own name of Adelaide was, as well as the sur- 
 name conjoined with it, borne, to her knowledge, in Paris, by an 
 extraordinary American specimen. She had then recrossed the 
 Channel with a wonderful message, a courteous challenge, to her 
 friend's duplicate, who had in turn granted through her every 
 satisfaction. The duplicate had, in other words, bravely let 
 Miss Wenham know exactly who she was. Miss Wenham, in 
 whose personal tradition the flame of resentment appeared to 
 have been reduced by time to the palest ashes for whom, 
 indeed, the story of the great schism was now but a legend only 
 needing a little less dimness to make it romantic Miss Wenham 
 had promptly responded by a letter fragrant with the hope that 
 
no THE BETTER SORT 
 
 old threads might be taken up. It was a relationship that they 
 must puzzle out together, and she had earnestly sounded the 
 other party to it on the subject of a possible visit. Addie had 
 met her with a definite promise; she would come soon, she 
 would come when free, she would come in July ; but meanwhile 
 she sent her deputy. Frank asked himself by what name she 
 had described, by what character introduced him to Flicker- 
 bridge. He felt mainly, on the whole, as if he were going there 
 to find out if he were engaged to her. He was at sea, really, 
 now, as to which of the various views Addie herself took of it. 
 To Miss Wenham she must definitely have taken one, and 
 perhaps Miss Wenham would reveal it. This expectation was 
 really his excuse for a possible indiscretion. 
 
 Ill 
 
 HE was indeed to learn on arrival to what he had been committed; 
 but that was for a while so much a part of his first general impres- 
 sion that the fact took time to detach itself, the first general 
 impression demanding verily all his faculties of response. He 
 almost felt, for a day or two, the victim of a practical joke, a gross 
 abuse of confidence. He had presented himself with the moderate 
 amount of flutter involved in a sense of due preparation ; but he 
 had then found that, however primed with prefaces and prompted 
 with hints, he had not been prepared at all. How could he be, 
 he asked himself, for anything so foreign to his experience, so alien 
 to his proper world, so little to be preconceived in the sharp north 
 light of the newest impressionism, and yet so recognised, after all, 
 really, in the event, so noted and tasted and assimilated ? It was 
 a case he would scarce have known how to describe could doubt- 
 less have described best with a full, clean brush, supplemented by 
 a play of gesture ; for it was always his habit to see an occasion, 
 of whatever kind, primarily as a picture, so that he might get it, 
 as he was wont to say, so that he might keep it, well together. He 
 had been treated of a sudden, in this adventure, to one of the 
 sweetest, fairest, coolest impressions of his life one, moreover, 
 visibly, from the start, complete and homogeneous. Oh, it was 
 there, if that was all one wanted of a thing ! It was so " there " 
 that, as had befallen him in Italy, in Spain, confronted at last, in 
 dusky side-chapel or rich museum, with great things dreamed of 
 or with greater ones unexpectedly presented, he had held his 
 breath for fear of breaking the spell ; had almost, from the quick 
 impulse to respect, to prolong, lowered his voice and moved on 
 tiptoe. Supreme beauty suddenly revealed is apt to strike us as a 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE in 
 
 possible illusion, playing with our desire instant freedom with it 
 to strike us as a possible rashness. 
 
 This fortunately, however and the more so as his freedom for 
 the time quite left him didn't prevent his hostess, the evening of 
 his advent and while the vision was new, from being exactly as 
 queer and rare and unpayable, as improbable, as impossible, as 
 delightful at dinner at eight (she appeared to keep these immense 
 hours) as she had overwhelmingly been at tea at five. She was 
 in the most natural way in the world one of the oddest apparitions, 
 but that the particular means to such an end could be natural was 
 an inference difficult to make. He failed in fact to make it for 
 a couple of days ; but then though then only he made it with 
 confidence. By this time indeed he was sure of everything, in- 
 cluding, luckily, himself. If we compare his impression, with 
 slight extravagance, to some of the greatest he had ever received, 
 this is simply because the image before him was so rounded and 
 stamped. It expressed with pure perfection, it exhausted its 
 character. It was so absolutely and so unconsciously what it was. 
 He had been floated by the strangest of chances out of the 
 rushing stream into a clear, still backwater a deep and quiet 
 pool in which objects were sharply mirrored. He had hitherto 
 in life known nothing that was old except a few statues and 
 pictures; but here everything was old, was immemorial, and 
 nothing so much so as the very freshness itself. Vaguely to 
 have supposed there were such nooks in the world had done 
 little enough, he now saw, to temper the glare of their opposites. 
 It was the fine touches that counted, and these had to be seen 
 to be believed. 
 
 Miss Wenham, fifty-five years of age, and unappeasably timid, 
 unaccountably strange, had, on her reduced scale, an almost 
 Gothic grotesqueness ; but the final effect of one's sense of it was 
 an amenity that accompanied one's steps like wafted gratitude. 
 More flurried, more spasmodic, more apologetic, more completely 
 at a loss at one moment and more precipitately abounding at 
 another, he had never before in all his days seen any maiden lady; 
 yet for no maiden lady he had ever seen had he so promptly con- 
 ceived a private enthusiasm. Her eyes protruded, her chin receded 
 and her nose carried on in conversation a queer little independent 
 motion. She wore on the top of her head an upright circular cap 
 that made her resemble a caryatid disburdened, and on other 
 parts of her person strange combinations of colours, stuffs, shapes, 
 of metal, mineral and plant. The tones of her voice rose and 
 fell, her facial convulsions, whether tending one could scarce 
 make out to expression or repression, succeeded each other by 
 
ii2 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 a law of their own ; she was embarrassed at nothing and at every- 
 thing, frightened at everything and at nothing, and she approached 
 objects, subjects, the simplest questions and answers and the 
 whole material of intercourse, either with the indirectness of terror 
 or with the violence of despair. These things, none the less, her 
 refinements of oddity and intensities of custom, her suggestion at 
 once of conventions and simplicities, of ease and of agony, her 
 roundabout, retarded suggestions and perceptions, still permitted 
 her to strike her guest as irresistibly charming. He didn't know 
 what to call it ; she was a fruit of time. She had a queer distinc- 
 tion. She had been expensively produced, and there would be a 
 good deal more of her to come. 
 
 The result of the whole quality of her welcome, at any rate, 
 was that the first evening, in his room, before going to bed, he 
 relieved his mind in a letter to Addie, which, if space allowed us 
 to embody it in our text, would usefully perform the office of a 
 "plate." It would enable us to present ourselves as profusely 
 illustrated. But the process of reproduction, as we say, costs. 
 He wished his friend to know how grandly their affair turned out. 
 She had put him in the way of something absolutely special an 
 old house untouched, untouchable, indescribable, an old corner 
 such as one didn't believe existed, and the holy calm of which 
 made the chatter of studios, the smell of paint, the slang of critics, 
 the whole sense and sound of Paris, come back as so many signs 
 of a huge monkey- cage. He moved about, restless, while he 
 wrote ; he lighted cigarettes and, nervous and suddenly scrupulous, 
 put them out again ; the night was mild and one of the windows 
 of his large high room, which stood over the garden, was up. He 
 lost himself in the things about him, in the type of the room, the 
 last century with not a chair moved, not a point stretched. He 
 hung over the objects and ornaments, blissfully few and adorably 
 good, perfect pieces all, and never one, for a change, French. The 
 scene was as rare as some fine old print with the best bits down 
 in the corners. Old books and old pictures, allusions remembered 
 and aspects conjectured, reappeared to him ; he knew now what 
 anxious islanders had been trying for in their backward hunt for 
 the homely. But the homely at Flickerbridge was all style, even 
 as style at the same time was mere honesty. The larger, the 
 smaller past he scarce knew which to call it was at all events 
 so hushed to sleep round him as he wrote that he had almost a 
 bad conscience about having come. How one might love it, but 
 how one might spoil it ! To look at it too hard was positively to 
 make it conscious, and to make it conscious was positively to 
 wake it up. Its only safety, of a truth, was to be left still to sleep 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 113 
 
 to sleep in its large, fair chambers, and under its high, clean 
 canopies. 
 
 He added thus restlessly a line to his letter, maundered round 
 the room again, noted and fingered something else, and then, 
 dropping on the old flowered sofa, sustained by the tight cubes of 
 its cushions, yielded afresh to the cigarette, hesitated, stared, wrote 
 a few words more. He wanted Addie to know, that was what he 
 most felt, unless he perhaps felt more how much she herself would 
 want to. Yes, what he supremely saw was all that Addie would 
 make of it. Up to his neck in it there he fairly turned cold at 
 the sense of suppressed opportunity, of the outrage of privation, 
 that his correspondent would retrospectively and, as he even 
 divined with a vague shudder, almost vindictively nurse. Well, 
 what had happened was that the acquaintance had been kept for 
 her, like a packet enveloped and sealed for delivery, till her atten- 
 tion was free. He saw her there, heard her and felt her felt how 
 she would feel and how she would, as she usually said, " rave." 
 Some of her young compatriots called it "yell," and in the 
 reference itself, alas ! illustrated their meaning. She would 
 understand the place, at any rate, down to the ground ; there 
 wasn't the slightest doubt of that. Her sense of it would be 
 exactly like his own, and he could see, in anticipation, just the 
 terms of recognition and rapture in which she would abound. 
 He knew just what she would call quaint, just what she would call 
 bland, just what she would call weird, just what she would call 
 wild. She would take it all in with an intelligence much more 
 fitted than his own, in fact, to deal with what he supposed he 
 must regard as its literary relations. She would have read the 
 obsolete, long-winded memoirs and novels that both the figures 
 and the setting ought clearly to remind one of; she would know 
 about the past generations the lumbering county magnates and 
 their turbaned wives and round-eyed daughters, who, in other 
 days, had treated the ruddy, sturdy, tradeless town, the solid 
 square houses and wide, walled gardens, the streets to-day all 
 grass and gossip, as the scene of a local " season." She would 
 have warrant for the assemblies, dinners, deep potations ; for the 
 smoked sconces in the dusky parlours; for the long, muddy century 
 of family coaches, "holsters," highwaymen. She would put a 
 finger, in short, just as he had done, on the vital spot the rich 
 humility of the whole thing, the fact that neither Flickerbridge in 
 general nor Miss Wenham in particular, nor anything nor anyone 
 concerned, had a suspicion of their character and their merit. 
 Addie and he would have to come to let in light. 
 
 He let it in then, little by little, before going to bed, through the 
 
ii 4 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 eight or ten pages he addressed to her ; assured her that it was 
 the happiest case in the world, a little picture yet full of "style" 
 too absolutely composed and transmitted, with tradition, and 
 tradition only, in every stroke, tradition still noiselessly breathing 
 and visibly flushing, marking strange hours in the tall mahogany 
 clocks that were never wound up and that yet audibly ticked on. 
 All the elements, he was sure he should see, would hang together 
 with a charm, presenting his hostess a strange iridescent fish for 
 the glazed exposure of an aquarium as floating in her native 
 medium. He left his letter open on the table, but, looking it 
 over next morning, felt of a sudden indisposed to send it. He 
 would keep it to add more, for there would be more to know ; 
 yet when three days had elapsed he had still not sent it. He 
 sent instead, after delay, a much briefer report, which he was 
 moved to make different and, for some reason, less vivid. 
 Meanwhile he learned from Miss Wenham how Addie had 
 introduced him. It took time to arrive with her at that point, 
 but after the Rubicon was crossed they went far afield. 
 
 IV 
 
 "On yes, she said you were engaged. That was why since I 
 had broken out so she thought I would like to see you ; as I 
 assure you I've been so delighted to. But arerit you?" the 
 good lady asked as if she saw in his face some ground for 
 doubt. 
 
 "Assuredly if she says so. It may seem very odd to you, 
 but I haven't known, and yet I've felt that, being nothing whatever 
 to you directly, I need some warrant for consenting thus to be 
 thrust on you. We were" the young man explained, "engaged 
 a year ago ; but since then (if you don't mind my telling you 
 such things ; I feel now as if I could tell you anything !) I 
 haven't quite known how I stand. It hasn't seemed that we were 
 in a position to marry. Things are better now, but I haven't 
 quite known how she would see them. They were so bad six 
 months ago that I understood her, I thought, as breaking off. I 
 haven't broken ; I've only accepted, for the time because men 
 must be easy with women being treated as ' the best of friends.' 
 Well, I try to be. I wouldn't have come here if I hadn't been. 
 I thought it would be charming for her to know you when I 
 heard from her the extraordinary way you had dawned upon her, 
 and charming therefore if I could help her to it. And if I'm 
 helping you to know her" he went on, "isn't that charming 
 too?" 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 115 
 
 " Oh, I so want to ! " Miss Wenham murmured, in her 
 unpractical, impersonal way. " You're so different!" she wistfully 
 declared. 
 
 " It's you, if I may respectfully, ecstatically say so, who are 
 different. That's the point of it all. I'm not sure that anything 
 so terrible really ought to happen to you as to know us." 
 
 " Well," said Miss Wenham, " I do know you a little, by this 
 time, don't I? And I don't find it terrible. It's a delightful 
 change for me." 
 
 " Oh, I'm not sure you ought to have a delightful change ! n 
 
 " Why not if you do ? " 
 
 " Ah, I can bear it. I'm not sure that you can. I'm too bad 
 to spoil I am spoiled. I'm nobody, in short; I'm nothing. 
 I've no type. You're all type. It has taken long, delicious 
 years of security and monotony to produce you. You fit your 
 frame with a perfection only equalled by the perfection with 
 which your frame fits you. So this admirable old house, all 
 time-softened white within and time-faded red without, so every- 
 thing that surrounds you here and that has, by some extraordinary 
 mercy, escaped the inevitable fate of exploitation : so it all, I say, 
 is the sort of thing that, if it were the least bit to fall to pieces, 
 could never, ah, never more, be put together again. I have, dear 
 Miss \Venhan," Granger went on, happy himself in his extravagance, 
 which was yet all sincere, and happier still in her deep, but alto- 
 gether pleased, mystification " I've found, do you know, just the 
 thing one has ever heard of that you most resemble. You're the 
 Sleeping Beauty in the wood." 
 
 He still had no compunction when he heard her bewilderedly 
 sigh : " Oh, you're too delightfully droll ! " 
 
 " No, I only put things just as they are, and as I've also learned 
 a little, thank heaven, to see them which isn't, I quite agree 
 with you, at all what anyone does. You're in the deep doze of 
 the spell that has held you for long years, and it would be a 
 sharne, a crime, to wake you up. Indeed I already feel, with a 
 thousand scruples, that I'm giving you the fatal shake. I say it 
 even though it makes me sound a little as if I thought myself the 
 fairy prince." 
 
 She gazed at him with her queerest, kindest look, which he was 
 getting used to, in spite of a faint fear, at the back of his head, 
 of the strange things that sometimes occurred when lonely ladies, 
 however mature, began to look at interesting young men from 
 over the seas as if the young men desired to flirt. "It's so 
 wonderful," she said, " that you should be so very odd and yet so 
 very good-natured." Well, it all came to the same thing it was 
 
Ii6 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 so wonderful that she should be so simple and yet so little of a 
 bore. He accepted with gratitude the theory of his languor 
 which moreover was real enough and partly perhaps why he was 
 so sensitive ; he let himself go as a convalescent, let her insist on 
 the weakness that always remained after fever. It helped him to 
 gain time, to preserve the spell even while he talked of breaking 
 it ; saw him through slow strolls and soft sessions, long gossips, 
 fitful, hopeless questions there was so much more to tell than, 
 by any contortion, she could and explanations addressed gallantly 
 and patiently to her understanding, but not, by good fortune, 
 really reaching it. They were perfectly at cross-purposes, and it 
 was all the better, and they wandered together in the silver haze 
 with all communication blurred. 
 
 When they sat in the sun in her formal garden he was quite 
 aware that the tenderest consideration failed to disguise his 
 treating her as the most exquisite of curiosities. The term of 
 comparison most present to him was that of some obsolete 
 musical instrument. The old-time order of her mind and her 
 air had the stillness of a painted spinnet that was duly dusted, 
 gently rubbed, but never tuned nor played on. Her opinions 
 were like dried roseleaves ; her attitudes like British sculpture ; 
 her voice was what he imagined of the possible tone of the old 
 gilded, silver-stringed harp in one of the corners of the drawing- 
 room. The lonely little decencies and modest dignities of her 
 life, the fine grain of its conservatism, the innocence of its 
 ignorance, all its monotony of stupidity and salubrity, its cold 
 dulness and dim brightness, were there before him. Meanwhile, 
 within him, strange things took place. It was literally true that 
 his impression began again, after a lull, to make him nervous and 
 anxious, and for reasons peculiarly confused, almost grotesquely 
 mingled, or at least comically sharp. He was distinctly an 
 agitation and a new taste that he could see ; and he saw quite 
 as much therefore the excitement she already drew from the 
 vision of Addie, an image intensified by the sense of closer 
 kinship and presented to her, clearly, with various erratic 
 enhancements, by her friend the doctor's daughter. At the end 
 of a few days he said to her : " Do you know she wants to come 
 without waiting any longer? She wants to come while I'm here. 
 I received this morning her letter proposing it, but I've been 
 thinking it over and have waited to speak to you. The thing is, 
 you see, that if she writes to you proposing it " 
 
 " Oh, I shall be so particularly glad ! " 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 117 
 
 THEY were, as usual, in the garden, and it had not yet been so 
 present to him that if he were only a happy cad there would be a 
 good way to protect her. As she wouldn't hear of his being yet 
 beyond precautions she had gone into the house for a particular 
 shawl that was just the thing for his knees, and, blinking in the 
 watery sunshine, had come back with it across the fine little lawn. 
 He was neither fatuous nor asinine, but he had almost to put it to 
 himself as a small task to resist the sense of his absurd advantage 
 with her. It filled him with horror and awkwardness, made him 
 think of he didn't know what, recalled something of Maupassant's 
 the smitten " Miss Harriet " and her tragic fate. There was a 
 preposterous possibility yes, he held the strings quite in his 
 hands of keeping the treasure for himself. That was the art of 
 life what the real artist would consistently do. He would close 
 the door on his impression, treat it as a private museum. He 
 would see that he could lounge and linger there, live with wonder- 
 ful things there, lie up there to rest and refit. For himself he was 
 sure that after a little he should be able to paint there do things 
 in a key he had never thought of before. When she brought him 
 the rug he took it from her and made her sit down on the bench 
 and resume her knitting ; then, passing behind her with a laugh, 
 he placed it over her own shoulders ; after which he moved to and 
 fro before her, his hands in his pockets and his cigarette in his 
 teeth. He was ashamed of the cigarette a villainous false note ; 
 but she allowed, liked, begged him to smoke, and what he said to 
 her on it, in one of the pleasantries she benevolently missed, was 
 that he did so for fear of doing worse. That only showed that 
 the end was really in sight. " I dare say it will strike you as 
 quite awful, what I'm going to say to you, but I can't help it. I 
 speak out of the depths of my respect for you. It will seem to 
 you horrid disloyalty to poor Addie. Yes there we are ; there 
 / am, at least, in my naked monstrosity." He stopped and 
 looked at her till she might have been almost frightened. " Don't 
 let her come. Tell her not to. I've tried to prevent it, but she 
 suspects." 
 
 The poor woman wondered. " Suspects ? " 
 
 "Well, I drew it, in writing to her, on reflection, as mild as I 
 could having been visited, in the watches of the night, by the 
 instinct ot what might happen. Something told me to keep back 
 my first letter in which, under the first impression, I myself 
 rashly * raved ' ; and I concocted instead of it an insincere and 
 guarded report. But guarded as I was I clearly didn't keep you 
 
ii8 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 ' down/ as we say, enough. The wonder of your colour daub you 
 over with grey as I might must have come through and told the 
 tale. She scents battle from afar by which I mean she scents 
 ' quaintness.' But keep her off. It's hideous, what I'm saying 
 but I owe it to you. I owe it to the world. She'll kill you." 
 
 " You mean I shan't get on with her ? " 
 
 " Oh, fatally ! See how / have. She's intelligent, remarkably 
 pretty, remarkably good. And she'll adore you." 
 
 "Well then?" 
 
 " Why, that will be just how she'll do for you." 
 
 " Oh, I can hold my own ! " said Miss Wenham with the head- 
 shake of a horse making his sleigh-bells rattle in frosty air. 
 
 " Ah, but you can't hold hers ! She'll rave about you. She'll 
 write about you. You're Niagara before the first white traveller 
 and you know, or rather you can't know, what Niagara became 
 after that gentleman. Addie will have discovered Niagara. She 
 will understand you in perfection ; she will feel you down to the 
 ground ; not a delicate shade of you will she lose or let anyone 
 else lose. You'll be too weird for words, but the words will 
 nevertheless come. You'll be too exactly the real thing and to 
 be left too utterly just as you are, and all Addie's friends and all 
 Addie's editors and contributors and readers will cross the 
 Atlantic and flock to Flickerbridge, so, unanimously, universally, 
 vociferously, to leave you. You'll be in the magazines with 
 illustrations; you'll be in the papers with headings; you'll be 
 everywhere with everything. You don't understand you think 
 you do, but you don't. Heaven forbid you should understand ! 
 That's just your beauty your * sleeping' beauty. But you 
 needn't. You can take me on trust. Don't have her. Say, as a 
 pretext, as a reason, anything in the world you like. Lie to her 
 scare her away. I'll go away and give you up I'll sacrifice 
 everything myself." Granger pursued his exhortation, convincing 
 himself more and more. " If I saw my way out, my way com- 
 pletely through, / would pile up some fabric of fiction for her I 
 should only want to be sure of its not tumbling down. One 
 would have, you see, to keep the thing up. But I would throw 
 dust in her eyes. I would tell her that you don't do at all that 
 you're not, in fact, a desirable acquaintance. I'd tell her you're 
 vulgar, improper, scandalous; I'd tell her you're mercenary, 
 designing, dangerous ; I'd tell her the only safe course is im- 
 mediately to let you drop. I would thus surround you with an 
 impenetrable legend of conscientious misrepresentation, a circle 
 of pious fraud, and all the while privately keep you for myself." 
 
 She had listened to him as if he were a band of music and she 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 119 
 
 a small shy garden-party. " I shouldn't like you to go away. I 
 shouldn't in the least like you not to come again." 
 
 "Ah, there it is!" he replied. "How can I come again if 
 Addie ruins you ? " 
 
 " But how will she ruin me even if she does what you say ? 
 I know I'm too old to change and really much too queer to please 
 in any of the extraordinary ways you speak of. If it's a question 
 of quizzing me I don't think my cousin, or anyone else, will have 
 quite the hand for it that you seem to have. So that if you 
 haven't ruined me ! " 
 
 " But I have that's just the point ! " Granger insisted. " I've 
 undermined you at least. I've left, after all, terribly little for 
 Addie to do." 
 
 She laughed in clear tones. "Well, then, we'll admit that 
 you've done everything but frighten me." 
 
 He looked at her with surpassing gloom. " No that again is 
 one of the most dreadful features. You'll positively like it 
 what's to come. You'll be caught up in a chariot of fire like the 
 prophet wasn't there, was there, one? of old. That's exactly 
 why if one could but have done it you would have been to be 
 kept ignorant and helpless. There's something or other in Latin 
 that says that it's the finest things that change the most easily for 
 the worse. You already enjoy your dishonour and revel in your 
 shame. It's too late you're lost ! " 
 
 VI 
 
 ALL this was as pleasant a manner of passing the time as any 
 other, for it didn't prevent his old-world corner from closing round 
 him more entirely, nor stand in the way of his making out, from 
 day to day, some new source, as well as some new effect, of its 
 virtue. He was really scared at moments at some of the liberties 
 he took in talk at finding himself so familiar; for the great note 
 of the place was just that a certain modern ease had never crossed 
 its threshold, that quick intimacies and quick oblivions were a 
 stranger to its air. It had known, in all its days, no rude, no loud 
 invasion. Serenely unconscious of most contemporary things, it 
 had been so of nothing so much as of the diffused social practice 
 of running in and out. Granger held his breath, on occasions, to 
 think how Addie would run. There were moments when, for 
 some reason, more than at others, he heard her step on the stair- 
 case and her cry in the hall. If he played freely, none the less, 
 with the idea with which we have shown him as occupied, it was 
 not that in every measurable way he didn't sacrifice, to the utmost, 
 
120 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 to stillness. He only hovered, ever so lightly, to take up again 
 his thread. She wouldn't hear of his leaving her, of his being in 
 the least fit again, as she said, to travel. She spoke of the 
 journey to London which was in fact a matter of many hours 
 as an experiment fraught with lurking complications. He added 
 then day to day, yet only hereby, as he reminded her, giving 
 other complications a larger chance to multiply. He kept it 
 before her, when there was nothing else to do, that she must 
 consider ; after which he had his times of fear that she perhaps 
 really would make for him this sacrifice. 
 
 He knew that she had written again to Paris, and knew that 
 he must himself again write a situation abounding for each in 
 the elements of a quandary. If he stayed so long, why then 
 he wasn't better, and if he wasn't better Addie might take it 
 
 into her head ! They must make it clear that he was better, 
 
 so that, suspicious, alarmed at what was kept from her, she 
 shouldn't suddenly present herself to nurse him. If he was 
 better, however, why did he stay so long? If he stayed only 
 for the attraction the sense of the attraction might be contagious. 
 This was what finally grew clearest for him, so that he had for 
 his mild disciple hours of still sharper prophecy. It consorted 
 with his fancy to represent to her that their young friend had 
 been by this time unsparingly warned; but nothing could be 
 plainer than that this was ineffectual so long as he himself resisted 
 the ordeal. To plead that he remained because he was too weak 
 to move was only to throw themselves back on the other horn 
 of their dilemma. If he was too weak to move Addie would 
 bring him her strength of which, when she got there, she 
 would give them specimens enough. One morning he broke 
 out at breakfast with an intimate conviction. They would see 
 that she was actually starting they would receive a wire by 
 noon. They didn't receive it, but by his theory the portent 
 was only the stronger. It had, moreover, its grave as well as 
 its gay side, for Granger's paradox and pleasantry were only the 
 most convenient way for him of saying what he felt. He literally 
 heard the knell sound, and in expressing this to Miss Wenham 
 with the conversational freedom that seemed best to pay his way 
 he the more vividly faced the contingency. He could never 
 return, and though he announced it with a despair that did 
 what might be to make it pass as a joke, he saw that, whether 
 or no she at last understood, she quite at last believed him. 
 On this, to his knowledge, she wrote again to Addie, and the 
 contents of her letter excited his curiosity. But that sentiment, 
 though not assuaged, quite dropped when, the day after, in the 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 121 
 
 evening, she let him know that she had had, an hour before, a 
 telegram. 
 
 "She comes Thursday." 
 
 He showed not the least surprise. It was the deep calm of 
 the fatalist. It had to be. " I must leave you then to-morrow." 
 
 She looked, on this, as he had never seen her ; it would have 
 been hard to say whether what was in hejr face was the last 
 failure to follow or the first effort to meet. " And really not to 
 come back ? " 
 
 "Never, never, dear lady. Why should I come back? You 
 can never be again what you have been. I shall have seen the 
 last of you." 
 
 " Oh ! " she touchingly urged. 
 
 "Yes, for I should next find you simply brought to self- 
 consciousness. You'll be exactly what you are, I charitably 
 admit nothing more or less, nothing different. But you'll be 
 it all in a different way. We live in an age of prodigious 
 machinery, all organised to a single end. That end is publicity 
 a publicity as ferocious as the appetite of a cannibal. The 
 thing therefore is not to have any illusions fondly to flatter 
 yourself, in a muddled moment, that the cannibal will spare you. 
 He spares nobody. He spares nothing. It will be all right. 
 You'll have a lovely time. You'll be only just a public char- 
 acter blown about the world for all you are and proclaimed for 
 all you are on the housetops. It will be for that, mind, I quite 
 recognise because Addie is superior as well as for all you 
 aren't. So good-bye." 
 
 He remained, however, till the next day, and noted at intervals 
 the different stages of their friend's journey ; the hour, this time, 
 she would really have started, the hour she would reach Dover, 
 the hour she would get to town, where she would alight at 
 Mrs. Dunn's. Perhaps she would bring Mrs. Dunn, for Mrs. 
 Dunn would swell the chorus. At the last, on the morrow, as 
 if in anticipation of this, stillness settled between them; he 
 became as silent as his hostess. But before he went she brought 
 out, shyly and anxiously, as an appeal, the question that, for 
 hours, had clearly been giving her thought. " Do you meet her 
 then to-night in London ? " 
 
 " Dear, no. In what position am I, alas ! to do that ? When 
 can I ever meet her again ? " He had turned it all over. " If 
 I could meet Addie after this, you know, I could meet you. And 
 if I do meet Addie," he lucidly pursued, " what will happen, by 
 the same stroke, is that I shall meet you. And that's just what 
 I've explained to you that I dread." 
 
122 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " You mean that she and I will be inseparable ? " 
 
 He hesitated. "I mean that she'll tell me all about you. 
 I can hear her, and her ravings, now." 
 
 She gave again and it was infinitely sad her little whinnying 
 laugh. " Oh, but if what you say is true, you'll know." 
 
 " Ah, but Addie won't ! Won't, I mean, know that / know 
 or at least won't believe it. Won't believe that anyone knows. 
 Such," he added, with a strange, smothered sigh, "is Addie. 
 Do you know," he wound up, "that what, after all, has most 
 definitely happened is that you've made me see her as I've never 
 done before ? " 
 
 She blinked and gasped, she wondered and despaired. " Oh, 
 no, it will be you. I've had nothing to do with it. Everything's 
 all you!" 
 
 But for all it mattered now ! " You'll see," he said, " that she's 
 charming. I shall go, for to-night, to Oxford. I shall almost 
 cross her on the way." 
 
 " Then, if she's charming, what am I to tell her from you in 
 explanation of such strange behaviour as your flying away just as 
 she arrives ? " 
 
 "Ah, you needn't mind about that you needn't tell her 
 anything." 
 
 She fixed him as if as never again. "It's none of my 
 business, of course I feel; but isn't it a little cruel if you're 
 engaged ? " 
 
 Granger gave a laugh almost as odd as one of her own. " Oh, 
 you've cost me that ! " and he put out his hand to her. 
 
 She wondered while she took it. " Cost you ? " 
 
 " We're not engaged. Good-bye." 
 
THE STORY IN IT 
 
 i 
 
 THE weather had turned so much worse that the rest of the 
 day was certainly lost. The wind had risen and the storm 
 gathered force ; they gave from time to time a thump at the firm 
 windows and dashed even against those protected by the verandah 
 their vicious splotches of rain. Beyond the lawn, beyond the 
 cliff, the great wet brush of the sky dipped deep into the sea. 
 But the lawn, already vivid with the touch of May, showed a 
 violence of watered green; the budding shrubs and trees re- 
 peated the note as they tossed their thick masses, and the cold, 
 troubled light, filling the pretty drawing-room, marked the spring 
 afternoon as sufficiently young. The two ladies seated there 
 in silence could pursue without difficulty as well as, clearly, 
 without interruption their respective tasks; a confidence ex- 
 pressed, when the noise of the wind allowed it to be heard, by 
 the sharp scratch of Mrs. Dyott's pen at the table where she was 
 busy with letters. 
 
 Her visitor, settled on a small sofa that, with a palm-tree, a 
 screen, a stool, a stand, a bowl of flowers and three photographs 
 in silver frames, had been arranged near the light wood -fire 
 as a choice "corner" Maud Blessingbourne, her guest, turned 
 audibly, though at intervals neither brief nor regular, the leaves 
 of a book covered in lemon-coloured paper and not yet despoiled 
 of a certain fresh crispness. This effect of the volume, for the 
 eye, would have made it, as presumably the newest French 
 novel and evidently, from the attitude of the reader, "good" 
 consort happily with the special tone of the room, a consistent 
 air of selection and suppression, one of the finer aesthetic 
 evolutions. If Mrs. Dyott was fond of ancient French furniture, 
 and distinctly difficult about it, her inmates could be fond with 
 whatever critical cocks of charming dark-braided heads over 
 slender sloping shoulders of modern French authors. Nothing 
 had passed for half an hour nothing, at least, to be exact, but 
 that each of the companions occasionally and covertly intermitted 
 her pursuit in such a manner as to ascertain the degree of absorp- 
 
 123 
 
I2 4 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 tion of the other without turning round. What their silence was 
 charged with, therefore, was not only a sense of the weather, but 
 a sense, so to speak, of its 'own nature. Maud Blessingbourne, 
 when she lowered her book into her lap, closed her eyes with 
 a conscious patience that seemed to say she waited ; but it was 
 nevertheless she who at last made the movement representing 
 a snap of their tension. She got up and stood by the fire, into 
 which she looked a minute ; then came round and approached 
 the window as if to see what was really going on. At this Mrs. 
 Dyott wrote with refreshed intensity. Her little pile of letters had 
 grown, and if a look of determination was compatible with her 
 fair and slightly faded beauty, the habit of attending to her 
 business could always keep pace with any excursion of her 
 thought. Yet she was the first who spoke. 
 
 " I trust your book has been interesting." 
 
 "Well enough; a little mild." 
 
 A louder throb of the tempest had blurred the sound of the 
 words. "A little wild?" 
 
 " Dear, no timid and tame ; unless I've quite lost my sense." 
 
 "Perhaps you have," Mrs. Dyott placidly suggested "reading 
 so many." 
 
 Her companion made a motion of feigned despair. " Ah, you 
 take away my courage for going to my room, as I was just 
 meaning to, for another." 
 
 " Another French one ? " 
 
 " I'm afraid." 
 
 " Do you carry them by the dozen " 
 
 " Into innocent British homes ? " Maud tried to remember. 
 " I believe I brought three seeing them in a shop window as 
 I passed through town. It never rains but it pours ! But I've 
 already read two." 
 
 " And are they the only ones you do read ? " 
 
 " French ones ? " Maud considered. " Oh, no. D'Annunzio." 
 
 " And what's that ? " Mrs. Dyott asked as she affixed a stamp. 
 
 " Oh, you dear thing ! " Her friend was amused, yet almost 
 showed pity. " I know you don't read," Maud went on ; " but 
 why should you ? You live ! " 
 
 "Yes wretchedly enough," Mrs. Dyott returned, getting her 
 letters together. She left her place, holding them as a neat, 
 achieved handful, and came over to the fire, while Mrs. Blessing- 
 bourne turned once more to the window, where she was met 
 by another flurry. 
 
 Maud spoke then as if moved only by the elements. "Do 
 you expect him through all this ? " 
 
THE STORY IN IT 125 
 
 Mrs. Dyott just waited, and it had the effect, indescribably, 
 of making everything that had gone before seem to have led up 
 to the question. This effect was even deepened by the way she 
 then said, " Whom do you mean ? " 
 
 "Why, I thought you mentioned at luncheon that Colonel 
 Voyt was to walk over. Surely he can't." 
 
 " Do you care very much ? " Mrs. Dyott asked. 
 
 Her friend now hesitated. " It depends on what you call 
 * much.' If you mean should I like to see him then certainly." 
 
 " Well, my dear, I think he understands you're here." 
 
 " So that as he evidently isn't coming," Maud laughed, " it's 
 particularly flattering ! Or rather," she added, giving up the 
 prospect again, " it would be, I think, quite extraordinarily 
 flattering if he did. Except that, of course," she subjoined, 
 " he might come partly for you." 
 
 " * Partly ' is charming. Thank you for * partly.' If you are 
 going upstairs, will you kindly," Mrs. Dyott pursued, "put these 
 into the box as you pass ? " 
 
 The younger woman, taking the little pile of letters, con- 
 sidered them with envy. "Nine! You are good. You're 
 always a living reproach ! " 
 
 Mrs. Dyott gave a sigh. " I don't do it on purpose. The 
 only thing, this afternoon," she went on, reverting to the other 
 question, " would be their not having come down." 
 
 " And as to that you don't know." 
 
 " No I don't know." But she caught even as she spoke 
 a rat-tat-tat of the knocker, which struck her as a sign. "Ah, 
 there ! " 
 
 " Then I go." And Maud whisked out. 
 
 Mrs. Dyott, left alone, moved with an air of selection to the 
 window, and it was as so stationed, gazing out at the wild 
 weather, that the visitor, whose delay to appear spoke of the 
 wiping of boots and the disposal of drenched mackintosh and 
 cap, finally found her. He was tall, lean, fine, with little in him, 
 on the whole, to confirm the titular in the " Colonel Voyt " by 
 which he was announced. But he had left the army, and his 
 reputation for gallantry mainly depended now on his fighting 
 Liberalism in the House of Commons. Even these facts, how- 
 ever, his aspect scantly matched ; partly, no doubt, because he 
 looked, as was usually said, un-English. His black hair, 
 cropped close, was lightly powdered with silver, and his dense 
 glossy beard, that of an emir or a caliph, and grown for civil 
 reasons, repeated its handsome colour and its somewhat foreign 
 effect. His nose had a strong and shapely arch, and the dark 
 
126 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 grey of his eyes was tinted with blue. It had been said of him 
 in relation to these signs that he would have struck you as 
 a Jew had he not, in spite of his nose, struck you so much as an 
 Irishman. Neither responsibility could in fact have been fixed 
 upon him, and just now, at all events, he was only a pleasant, 
 weather-washed, wind-battered Briton, who brought in from 
 a struggle with the elements that he appeared quite to have 
 enjoyed a certain amount of unremoved mud and an unusual 
 quantity of easy expression. It was exactly the silence ensuing 
 on the retreat of the servant and the closed door that marked 
 between him and his hostess the degree of this ease. They met, 
 as it were, twice : the first time while the servant was there and 
 the second as soon as he was not. The difference was great 
 between the two encounters, though we must add in justice to 
 the second that its marks were at first mainly negative. This 
 communion consisted only in their having drawn each other 
 for a minute as close as possible as possible, that is, with no 
 help but the full clasp of hands. Thus they were mutually held, 
 and the closeness was at any rate such that, for a little, though it 
 took account of dangers, it did without words. When words 
 presently came the pair were talking by the fire, and she had 
 rung for tea. He had by this time asked if the note he had 
 despatched to her after breakfast had been safely delivered. 
 
 "Yes, before luncheon. But I'm always in a state when 
 except for some extraordinary reason you send such things by 
 hand. I knew, without it, that you had come. It never fails. 
 I'm sure when you're there I'm sure when you're not." 
 
 He wiped, before the glass, his wet moustache. " I see. But 
 this morning I had an impulse." 
 
 " It was beautiful. But they make me as uneasy, sometimes, 
 your impulses, as if they were calculations ; make me wonder 
 what you have in reserve." 
 
 "Because when small children are too awfully good they die? 
 Well, I am a small child compared to you but I'm not dead yet. 
 I cling to life." 
 
 He had covered her with his smile, but she continued grave. 
 " I'm not half so much afraid when you're nasty." 
 
 " Thank you ! What then did you do," he asked, " with my 
 note?" 
 
 "You deserve that I should have spread it out on my 
 dressing-table or left it, better still, in Maud Blessingbourne's 
 room." 
 
 He wondered while he laughed. "Oh, but what does she 
 deserve ? " 
 
THE STORY IN IT 127 
 
 It was her gravity that continued to answer. " Yes it would 
 probably kill her." 
 
 " She believes so in you ? " 
 
 " She believes so in you. So don't be too nice to her." 
 
 He was still looking, in the chimney-glass, at the state of his 
 beard brushing from it, with his handkerchief, the traces of 
 wind and wet. " If she also then prefers me when I'm nasty, 
 it seems to me I ought to satisfy her. Shall I now, at any rate, 
 see her?" 
 
 " She's so like a pea on a pan over the possibility of it that 
 she's pulling herself together in her room." 
 
 "Oh then, we must try and keep her together. But why, 
 graceful, tender, pretty too quite, or almost as she is, doesn't 
 she remarry ? " 
 
 Mrs. Dyott appeared and as if the first time to look for the 
 reason. " Because she likes too many men." 
 
 It kept up his spirits. " And how many may a lady like ? " 
 
 " In order not to like any of them too much ? Ah, that, you 
 know, I never found out and it's too late now. When," she 
 presently pursued, " did you last see her ? " 
 
 He really had to think. "Would it have been since last 
 November or so? somewhere or other where we spent three 
 days." 
 
 "Oh, at Surredge? I know all about that. I thought you 
 also met afterwards." 
 
 He had again to recall. " So we did ! Wouldn't it have been 
 somewhere at Christmas ? But it wasn't by arrangement ! " he 
 laughed, giving with his forefinger a little pleasant nick to his 
 hostess's chin. Then as if something in the way she received 
 this attention put him back to his question of a moment before, 
 " Have you kept my note ? " 
 
 She held him with her pretty eyes. " Do you want it back ? " 
 
 "Ah, don't speak as if I did take things !" 
 
 She dropped her gaze to the fire. " No, you don't ; not even 
 the hard things a really generous nature often would." She 
 quitted, however, as if to forget that, the chimney-place. " I put 
 it there!" 
 
 " You've burnt it ? Good ! " It made him easier, but he 
 noticed the next moment on a table the lemon-coloured volume 
 left there by Mrs. Blessingbourne, and, taking it up for a look, 
 immediately put it down. " You might, while you were about it, 
 have burnt that too." 
 
 "You've read it?" 
 
 " Dear, yes. And you ? " 
 
128 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " No," said Mrs. Dyott ; " it wasn't for me Maud brought it." 
 
 It pulled her visitor up. " Mrs. Blessingbourne brought it? " 
 
 "For such a day as this." But she wondered. "How you 
 look ! Is it so awful ? " 
 
 " Oh, like his others." Something had occurred to him ; his 
 thought was already far. " Does she know ? " 
 
 "Know what?" 
 
 "Why, anything." 
 
 But the door opened too soon for Mrs. Dyott, who could only 
 murmur quickly 
 
 " Take care ! " 
 
 II 
 
 IT was in fact Mrs. Blessingbourne, who had under her arm 
 the book she had gone up for a pair of covers that this time 
 showed a pretty, a candid blue. She was followed next minute 
 by the servant, who brought in tea, the consumption of which, 
 with the passage of greetings, inquiries and other light civilities 
 between the two visitors, occupied a quarter of an hour. Mrs. 
 Dyott meanwhile, as a contribution to so much amenity, men- 
 tioned to Maud that her fellow -guest wished to scold her for 
 the books she read a statement met by this friend with the 
 remark that he must first be sure about them. But as soon 
 as he had picked up the new volume he broke out into a frank 
 " Dear, dear ! " 
 
 " Have you read that too ? " Mrs. Dyott inquired. " How 
 much you'll have to talk over together ! The other one," she 
 explained to him, " Maud speaks of as terribly tame." 
 
 "Ah, I must have that out with her! You don't feel the 
 extraordinary force of the fellow ? " Voyt went on to Mrs. 
 Blessingbourne. 
 
 And so, round the hearth, they talked talked soon, while 
 they warmed their toes, with zest enough to make it seem as 
 happy a chance as any of the quieter opportunities their im- 
 prisonment might have involved. Mrs. Blessingbourne did feel, 
 it then appeared, the force of the fellow, but she had her 
 reserves and reactions, in which Voyt was much interested. 
 Mrs. Dyott rather detached herself, mainly gazing, as she leaned 
 back, at the fire; she intervened, however, enough to relieve 
 Maud of the sense of being listened to. That sense, with Maud, 
 was too apt to convey that one was listened to for a fool. " Yes, 
 when I read a novel I mostly read a French one," she had said 
 to Voyt in answer to a question about her usual practice ; " for 
 I seem with it to get hold more of the real thing to get more 
 
THE STORY IN IT 129 
 
 life for my money. Only I'm not so infatuated with them 
 but that sometimes for months and months on end I don't 
 read any fiction at all." 
 
 The two books were now together beside them. " Then when 
 you begin again you read a mass ? " 
 
 " Dear, no. I only keep up with three or four authors." 
 
 He laughed at this over the cigarette he had been allowed 
 to light. " I like your ' keeping up,' and keeping up in particular 
 with * authors.' " 
 
 " One must keep up with somebody," Mrs. Dyott threw off. 
 
 " I dare say I'm ridiculous," Mrs. Blessingbourne conceded 
 without heeding it; "but that's the way we express ourselves 
 in my part of the country." 
 
 " I only alluded," said Voyt, " to the tremendous conscience 
 of your sex. It's more than mine can keep up with. You 
 take everything too hard. But if you can't read the novel 
 of British and American manufacture, heaven knows I'm at one 
 with you. It seems really to show our sense of life as the sense 
 of puppies and kittens." 
 
 "Well," Maud more patiently returned, "I'm told all sorts 
 of people are now doing wonderful things; but somehow I 
 remain outside." 
 
 "Ah, it's they, it's our poor twangers and twaddlers who 
 remain outside. They pick up a living in the street. And who 
 indeed would want them in ? " 
 
 Mrs. Blessingbourne seemed unable to say, and yet at the 
 same time to have her idea. The subject, in truth, she evidently 
 found, was not so easy to handle. " People lend me things, and 
 I try ; but at the end of fifty pages " 
 
 " There you are ! Yes heaven help us ! " 
 
 " But what I mean," she went on, " isn't that I don't get wofully 
 weary of the eternal French thing. What's their sense of life ? " 
 
 "Ah, voila!" Mrs. Dyott softly sounded. 
 
 "Oh, but it is one; you can make it out," Voyt promptly 
 declared. " They do what they feel, and they feel more things 
 than we. They strike so many more notes, and with so different 
 a hand. When it comes to any account of a relation, say, 
 between a man and a woman I mean an intimate or a curious 
 or a suggestive one where are we compared to them? They 
 don't exhaust the subject, no doubt," he admitted ; " but we don't 
 touch it, don't even skim it. It's as if we denied its existence, 
 its possibility. You'll doubtless tell me, however," he went on, 
 " that as all such relations are for us, at the most, much simpler, 
 we can only have all round less to say about them." 
 
130 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 She met this imputation with the quickest amusement. " I 
 beg your pardon. I don't think I shall tell you anything of the 
 sort. I don't know that I even agree with your premise." 
 
 "About such relations?" He looked agreeably surprised. 
 " You think we make them larger ? or subtler ? " 
 
 Mrs. Blessingbourne leaned back, not looking, like Mrs. Dyott, 
 at the fire, but at the ceiling. " I don't know what I think." 
 
 "It's not that she doesn't know," Mrs. Dyott remarked. "It's 
 only that she doesn't say." 
 
 But Voyt had this time no eye for their hostess. For a 
 moment he watched Maud. " It sticks out of you, you know, 
 that you've yourself written something. Haven't you and pub- 
 lished? I've a notion I could TQz&you" 
 
 "When I do publish," she said without moving, "you'll be 
 the last one I shall tell. I have" she went on, "a lovely subject, 
 but it would take an amount of treatment ! " 
 
 "Tell us then at least what it is." 
 
 At this she again met his eyes. "Oh, to tell it would be 
 to express it, and that's just what I can't do. What I meant 
 to say just now," she added, " was that the French, to my sense, 
 give us only again and again, for ever and ever, the same couple. 
 There they are once more, as one has had them to satiety, in 
 that yellow thing, and there I shall certainly again find them 
 in the blue." 
 
 "Then why do you keep reading about them?" Mrs. Dyott 
 demanded. 
 
 Maud hesitated. " I don't ! " she sighed. " At all events, I 
 sha'n't any more. I give it up." 
 
 "You've been looking for something, I judge," said Colonel 
 Voyt, "that you're not likely to find. It doesn't exist." 
 
 " What is it ? " Mrs. Dyott inquired. 
 
 "I never look," Maud remarked, "for anything but an interest." 
 
 "Naturally. But your interest," Voyt replied, "is in some- 
 thing different from life." 
 
 " Ah, not a bit ! I love life in art, though I hate it anywhere 
 else. It's the poverty of the life those people show, and the 
 awful bounders, of both sexes, that they represent." 
 
 " Oh, now we have you ! " her interlocutor laughed. " To 
 me, when all's said and done, they seem to be as near as art 
 can come in the truth of the truth. It can only take what 
 life gives it, though it certainly may be a pity that that isn't 
 better. Your complaint of their monotony is a complaint of 
 their conditions. When you say we get always the same couple 
 what do you mean but that we get always the same passion? 
 
THE STORY IN IT 131 
 
 Of course we do ! " Voyt declared. " If what you're looking 
 for is another, that's what you won't anywhere find." 
 
 Maud for a while said nothing, and Mrs. Dyott seemed to 
 wait. "Well, I suppose I'm looking, more than anything else, 
 for a decent woman." 
 
 "Oh then, you mustn't look for her in pictures of passion. 
 That's not her element nor her whereabouts." 
 
 Mrs. Blessingbourne weighed the objection. "Doesn't it 
 depend on what you mean by passion ? " 
 
 " I think one can mean only one thing : the enemy to 
 behaviour." 
 
 " Oh, I can imagine passions that are, on the contrary', friends 
 to it." 
 
 Her interlocutor thought. " Doesn't it depend perhaps on 
 what you mean by behaviour ? " 
 
 "Dear, no. Behaviour is just behaviour the most definite 
 thing in the world." 
 
 "Then what do you mean by the 'interest' you just now 
 spoke of? The picture of that definite thing?" 
 
 " Yes call it that. Women aren't always vicious, even when 
 they're " 
 
 " When they're what ? " Voyt asked. 
 
 " When they're unhappy. They can be unhappy and good." 
 
 "That one doesn't for a moment deny. But can they be 
 'good' and interesting?" 
 
 "That must be Maud's subject ! " Mrs. Dyott explained. " To 
 show a woman who is. I'm afraid, my dear," she continued, 
 "you could only show yourself." 
 
 "You'd show then the most beautiful specimen conceivable" 
 and Voyt addressed himself to Maud. " But doesn't it prove 
 that life is, against your contention, more interesting than art? 
 Life you embellish and elevate; but art would find itself able 
 to do nothing with you, and, on such impossible terms, would 
 ruin you." 
 
 The colour in her faint consciousness gave beauty to her 
 stare. "'Ruin' me?" 
 
 "He means," Mrs. Dyott again indicated, "that you would 
 ruin 'art.'" 
 
 " Without, on the other hand "Voyt seemed to assent" its 
 giving at all a coherent impression of you." 
 
 " She wants her romance cheap ! " said Mrs. Dyott. 
 
 " Oh, no I should be willing to pay for it. I don't see why 
 the romance since you give it that name should be all, as the 
 French inveterately make it, for the women who are bad." 
 
132 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " Oh, they pay for it ! " said Mrs. Dyott. 
 
 "><?they?" 
 
 "So, at least" Mrs. Dyott a little corrected herself " one 
 has gathered (for I don't read your books, you know !) that 
 they're usually shown as doing." 
 
 Maud wondered, but looking at Voyt, "They're shown often, 
 no doubt, as paying for their badness. But are they shown as 
 paying for their romance ? " 
 
 " My dear lady," said Voyt, " their romance is their badness. 
 There isn't any other. It's a hard law, if you will, and a strange, 
 but goodness has to go without that luxury. Isn't to be good 
 just exactly, all round, to go without?" He put it before her 
 kindly and clearly regretfully too, as if he were sorry the truth 
 should be so sad. He and she, his pleasant eyes seemed to 
 say, would, had they had the making of it, have made it better. 
 " One has heard it before at least / have ; one has heard your 
 question put. But always, when put to a mind not merely 
 muddled, for an inevitable answer. 'Why don't you, cher 
 monsieur, give us the drama of virtue?' 'Because, chere 
 madame, the high privilege of virtue is precisely to avoid drama.' 
 The adventures of the honest lady? The honest lady hasn't 
 can't possibly have adventures." 
 
 Mrs. Blessingbourne only met his eyes at first, smiling with a 
 certain intensity. " Doesn't it depend a little on what you call 
 adventures ? " 
 
 " My poor Maud," said Mrs. Dyott, as if in compassion for 
 sophistry so simple, " adventures are just adventures. That's all 
 you can make of them ! " 
 
 But her friend went on, for their companion, as if without 
 hearing. "Doesn't it depend a good deal on what you call 
 drama ? " Maud spoke as one who had already thought it out. 
 " Doesn't it depend on what you call romance ? " 
 
 Her listener gave these arguments his very best attention. " Of 
 course you may call things anything you like speak of them as 
 one thing and mean quite another. But why should it depend 
 on anything? Behind these words we use the adventure, the 
 novel, the drama, the romance, the situation, in short, as we most 
 comprehensively say behind them all stands the same sharp 
 fact that they all, in their different ways, represent." 
 
 " Precisely ! " Mrs. Dyott was full of approval. 
 
 Maud, however, was full of vagueness. " What great fact ? " 
 
 " The fact of a relation. The adventure's a relation ; the 
 relation's an adventure. The romance, the novel, the drama are 
 the picture of one. The subject the novelist treats is the rise, 
 
THE STORY IN IT 133 
 
 the formation, the development, the climax, and for the most part 
 the decline, of one. And what is the honest lady doing on that 
 side of the town ? " 
 
 Mrs. Dyott was more pointed. "She doesn't so much as form 
 a relation." 
 
 But Maud bore up. " Doesn't it depend, again, on what you 
 call a relation ? " 
 
 " Oh," said Mrs. Dyott, " if a gentleman picks up her pocket- 
 handkerchief " 
 
 "Ah, even that's one," their friend laughed, "if she has thrown 
 it to him. We can only deal with one that is one." 
 
 " Surely," Maud replied. " But if it's an innocent one ? " 
 
 " Doesn't it depend a good deal," Mrs. Dyott asked, " on what 
 you call innocent ? " 
 
 " You mean that the adventures of innocence have so often 
 been the material of fiction ? Yes," Voyt replied ; " that's exactly 
 what the bored reader complains of. He has asked for bread 
 and been given a stone. What is it but, with absolute directness, 
 a question of interest, or, as people say, of the story ? What's a 
 situation undeveloped but a subject lost ? If a relation stops, 
 where's the story? If it doesn't stop, where 's the innocence? 
 It seems to me you must choose. It would be very pretty if it 
 were otherwise, but that's how we flounder. Art is our flounder- 
 ings shown." 
 
 Mrs. Blessingbourne and with an air of deference scarce 
 supported perhaps by its sketchiness kept her deep eyes on this 
 definition. " But sometimes we flounder out." 
 
 It immediately touched in Colonel Voyt the spring of a genial 
 derision. " That's just where I expected you would ! One always 
 sees it come." 
 
 "He has, you notice," Mrs. Dyott parenthesised to Maud, 
 "seen it come so often; and he has always waited for it and 
 met it." 
 
 " Met it, dear lady, simply enough ! It's the old story, Mrs. 
 Blessingbourne. The relation is innocent that the heroine gets 
 out of. The book is innocent that's the story of her getting 
 out. But what the devil in the name of innocence was she 
 doing in ? " 
 
 Mrs. Dyott promptly echoed the question. " You have to be 
 in, you know, to get out. So there you are already with your 
 relation. It's the end of your goodness." 
 
 " And the beginning," said Voyt, " of your play ! " 
 
 " Aren't they all, for that matter, even the worst," Mrs. Dyott 
 pursued, "supposed some time or other to get out? But if, 
 
134 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 meanwhile, they've been in, however briefly, long enough to 
 adorn a tale " 
 
 " They've been in long enough to point a moral. That is to 
 point ours ! " With which, and as if a sudden flush of warmer 
 light had moved him, Colonel Voyt got up. The veil of the 
 storm had parted over a great red sunset. 
 
 Mrs. Dyott also was on her feet, and they stood before his 
 charming antagonist, who, with eyes lowered and a somewhat 
 fixed smile, had not moved. "We've spoiled her subject ! " the 
 elder lady sighed. 
 
 " Well," said Voyt, " it's better to spoil an artist's subject than 
 to spoil his reputation. I mean," he explained to Maud with his 
 indulgent manner, " his appearance of knowing what he has got 
 hold of, for that, in the last resort, is his happiness." 
 
 She slowly rose at this, facing him with an aspect as hand- 
 somely mild as his own. " You can't spoil my happiness." 
 
 He held her hand an instant as he took leave. "I wish I 
 could add to it ! " 
 
 III 
 
 WHEN he had quitted them and Mrs. Dyott had candidly asked 
 if her friend had found him rude or crude, Maud replied 
 though not immediately that she had feared showing only 
 too much that she found him charming. But if Mrs. Dyott 
 took this, it was to weigh the sense. "How could you show 
 it too much?" 
 
 " Because I always feel that that's my only way of showing 
 anything. It's absurd, if you like," Mrs. Blessingbourne pursued, 
 "but I never know, in such intense discussions, what strange 
 impression I may give." 
 
 Her companion looked amused. "Was it intense?" 
 
 "/was," Maud frankly confessed. 
 
 "Then it's a pity you were so wrong. Colonel Voyt, you 
 know, is right." Mrs. Blessingbourne at this gave one of the 
 slow, soft, silent headshakes to which she often resorted and 
 which, mostly accompanied by the light of cheer, had somehow, 
 in spite of the small obstinacy that smiled in them, a special 
 grace. With this grace, for a moment, her friend, looking her up 
 and down, appeared impressed, yet not too much so to take, the 
 next minute, a decision. " Oh, my dear, I'm sorry to differ from 
 anyone so lovely for you're awfully beautiful to-night, and your 
 frock's the very nicest I've ever seen you wear. But he's as right 
 as he can be." 
 
 Maud repeated her motion. " Not so right, at all events, as 
 
THE STORY IN IT 135 
 
 he thinks he is. Or perhaps I can say," she went on, after an 
 instant, " that I'm not so wrong. I do know a little what I'm 
 talking about." 
 
 Mrs. Dyott continued to study her. " You are vexed. You 
 naturally don't like it such destruction." 
 
 "Destruction?" 
 
 " Of your illusion." 
 
 "I have no illusion. If I had, moreover, it wouldn't be 
 destroyed. I have, on the whole, I think, my little decency." 
 
 Mrs. Dyott stared. "Let us grant it for argument. What, 
 then?" 
 
 " Well, I've also my little drama." 
 
 "An attachment?" 
 
 " An attachment." 
 
 "That you shouldn't have?" 
 
 " That I shouldn't have." 
 
 "A passion?" 
 
 " A passion." 
 
 "Shared?" 
 
 " Ah, thank goodness, no ! " 
 
 Mrs. Dyott continued to gaze. "The object's unaware ?" 
 
 "Utterly." 
 
 Mrs. Dyott turned it over. "Are you sure?" 
 
 " Sure." 
 
 " That's what you call your decency ? But isn't it," Mrs. Dyott 
 asked, " rather his?" 
 
 " Dear, no. It's only his good fortune." 
 
 Mrs. Dyott laughed. "But yours, darling your good fortune: 
 where does that come in ? " 
 
 " Why, in my sense of the romance of it." 
 
 " The romance of what ? Of his not knowing ? " 
 
 "Of my not wanting him to. If I did" Maud had touch- 
 ingly worked it out " where would be my honesty ? " 
 
 The inquiry, for an instant, held her friend ; yet only, it 
 seemed, for a stupefaction that was almost amusement. "Can 
 you want or not want as you like ? Where in the world, if you 
 don't want, is your romance ? " 
 
 Mrs. Blessingbourne still wore her smile, and she now, with a 
 light gesture that matched it, just touched the region of her heart. 
 "There!" 
 
 Her companion admiringly marvelled. " A lovely place for it, 
 no doubt ! but not quite a place, that I can see, to make the 
 sentiment a relation." 
 
 " Why not ? What more is required for a relation for me ? " 
 
136 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " Oh, all sorts of things, I should say ! And many more, added 
 to those, to make it one for the person you mention." 
 
 "Ah, that I don't pretend it either should be or can be. I 
 only speak for myself." 
 
 It was said in a manner that made Mrs. Dyott, with a visible 
 mixture of impressions, suddenly turn away. She indulged in a 
 vague movement or two, as if to look for something ; then again 
 found herself near her friend, on whom with the same abruptness, 
 in fact with a strange sharpness, she conferred a kiss that might 
 have represented either her tribute to exalted consistency or her 
 idea of a graceful close of the discussion. "You deserve that 
 one should speaker you ! " 
 
 Her companion looked cheerful and secure. " How can you, 
 without knowing ?" 
 
 " Oh, by guessing ! It's not ? " 
 
 But that was as far as Mrs. Dyott could get. " It's not," said 
 Maud, "anyone you've ever seen." 
 
 " Ah then, I give you up ! " 
 
 And Mrs. Dyott conformed, for the rest of Maud's stay, to 
 the spirit of this speech. It was made on a Saturday night, and 
 Mrs. Blessingbourne remained till the Wednesday following, an 
 interval during which, as the return of fine weather was confirmed 
 by the Sunday, the two ladies found a wider range of action. 
 There were drives to be taken, calls made, objects of interest 
 seen, at a distance ; with the effect of much easy talk and still 
 more easy silence. There had been a question of Colonel Voyt's 
 probable return on the Sunday, but the whole time passed with- 
 out a sign from him, and it was merely mentioned by Mrs. Dyott, 
 in explanation, that he must have been suddenly called, as he 
 was so liable to be, to town. That this in fact was what had 
 happened he made clear to her on Thursday afternoon, when, 
 walking over again late, he found her alone. The consequence of 
 his Sunday letters had been his taking, that day, the 4.15. Mrs. 
 Voyt had gone back on Thursday, and he now, to settle on the 
 spot the question of a piece of work begun at his place, had 
 rushed down for a few hours in anticipation of the usual col- 
 lective move for the week's end. He was to go up again by the 
 late train, and had to count a little a fact accepted by his 
 hostess with the hard pliancy of practice his present happy 
 moments. Too few as these were, however, he found time to 
 make of her an inquiry or two not directly bearing on their 
 situation. The first was a recall of the question for which Mrs. 
 Blessingbourne's entrance on the previous Saturday had arrested 
 her answer. Did that lady know of anything between them ? 
 
THE STORY IN IT 137 
 
 "No. I'm sure. There's one thing she does know," Mrs. 
 Dyott went on; "but it's quite different and not so very 
 wonderful." 
 
 "What, then, is it?" 
 
 "Well, that she's herself in love." 
 
 Voyt showed his interest. " You mean she told you ? " 
 
 " I got it out of her." 
 
 He showed his amusement. " Poor thing ! And with whom ?" 
 
 "With you." 
 
 His surprise, if the distinction might be made, was less than 
 his wonder. "You got that out of her too?" 
 
 " No it remains in. Which is much the best way for it. For 
 you to know it would be to end it." 
 
 He looked rather cheerfully at sea. " Is that then why you 
 tell me?" 
 
 " I mean for her to know you know it. Therefore it's in your 
 interest not to let her." 
 
 " I see," Voyt after a moment returned. " Your real calcula- 
 tion is that my interest will be sacrificed to my vanity so that, 
 if your other idea is just, the flame will in fact, and thanks to 
 her morbid conscience, expire by her taking fright at seeing me 
 so pleased. But I promise you," he declared, " that she sha'n't see 
 it. So there you are ! " She kept her eyes on him and had 
 evidently to admit, after a little, that there she was. Distinct as 
 he had made the case, however, he was not yet quite satisfied. 
 " Why are you so sure that I'm the man ? " 
 
 " From the way she denies you." 
 
 "You put it to her?" 
 
 "Straight. If you hadn't been she would, of course, have 
 confessed to you to keep me in the dark about the real one." 
 
 Poor Voyt laughed out again. " Oh, you dear souls ! " 
 
 " Besides," his companion pursued, " I was not in want of that 
 evidence." 
 
 " Then what other had you ? " 
 
 " Her state before you came which was what made me ask 
 you how much you had seen her. And her state after it," Mrs. 
 Dyott added. "And her state," she wound up, "while you were 
 here." 
 
 " But her state while I was here was charming." 
 
 "Charming. That's just what I say." 
 
 She said it in a tone that placed the matter in its right light 
 a light in which they appeared kindly, quite tenderly, to watch 
 Maud wander away into space with her lovely head bent under a 
 theory rather too big for it. Voyt's last word, however, was that 
 
138 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 there was just enough in it in the theory for them to allow 
 that she had not shown herself, on the occasion of their talk, 
 wholly bereft of sense. Her consciousness, if they let it alone 
 as they of course after this mercifully must was, in the last 
 analysis, a kind of shy romance. Not a romance like their own, 
 a thing to make the fortune of any author up to the mark one 
 who should have the invention or who could have the courage ; 
 but a small, scared, starved, subjective satisfaction that would do 
 her no harm and nobody else any good. Who but a duffer 
 he stuck to his contention would see the shadow of a " story " 
 in it? 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 i 
 
 WHAT determined the speech that startled him in the 
 course of their encounter scarcely matters, being prob- 
 ably but some words spoken by himself quite without intention 
 spoken as they lingered and slowly moved together after their 
 renewal of acquaintance. He had been conveyed by friends, an 
 hour or two before, to the house at which she was staying ; the 
 part}- of visitors at the other house, of whom he was one, and 
 thanks to whom it was his theory, as always, that he was lost in 
 the crowd, had been invited over to luncheon. There had been 
 after luncheon much dispersal, all in the interest of the original 
 motive, a view of Weatherend itself and the fine things, intrinsic 
 features, pictures, heirlooms, treasures of all the arts, that made 
 the place almost famous ; and the great rooms were so numerous 
 that guests could wander at their will, hang back from the prin- 
 cipal group, and, in cases where they took such matters with the 
 last seriousness, give themselves up to mysterious appreciations 
 and measurements. There were persons to be observed, singly 
 or in couples, bending toward objects in out-of-the-way corners 
 with their hands on their knees and their heads nodding quite as 
 with the emphasis of an excited sense of smell. When they were 
 two they either mingled their sounds of ecstasy or melted into 
 silences of even deeper import, so that there were aspects of the 
 occasion that gave it for Marcher much the air of the "look 
 round," previous to a sale highly advertised, that excites or 
 quenches, as may be, the dream of acquisition. The dream of 
 acquisition at Weatherend would have had to be wild indeed, 
 and John Marcher found himself, among such suggestions, dis- 
 concerted almost equally by the presence of those who knew too 
 much and by that of those who knew nothing. The great rooms 
 caused so much poetry and history to press upon him that he 
 needed to wander apart to feel in a proper relation with them, 
 though his doing so was not, as happened, like the gloating of 
 some of his companions, to be compared to the movements of a 
 
140 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 dog sniffing a cupboard. It had an issue promptly enough in a 
 direction that was not to have been calculated. 
 
 It led, in short, in the course of the October afternoon, to his 
 closer meeting with May Bartram, whose face, a reminder, yet not 
 quite a remembrance, as they sat, much separated, at a very long 
 table, had begun merely by troubling him rather pleasantly. It 
 affected him as the sequel of something of which he had lost the 
 beginning. He knew it, and for the time quite welcomed it, 
 as a continuation, but didn't know what it continued, which 
 was an interest, or an amusement, the greater as he was also 
 somehow aware yet without a direct sign from her that the 
 young woman herself had not lost the thread. She had not lost 
 it, but she wouldn't give it back to him, he saw, without some 
 putting forth of his hand for it; and he not only saw that, but 
 saw several things more, things odd enough in the light of the 
 fact that at the moment some accident of grouping brought them 
 face to face he was still merely fumbling with the idea that any 
 contact between them in the past would have had no importance. 
 If it had had no importance he scarcely knew why his actual 
 impression of her should so seem to have so much ; the answer to 
 which, however, was that in such a life as they all appeared to be 
 leading for the moment one could but take things as they came. 
 He was satisfied, without in the least being able to say why, that 
 this young lady might roughly have ranked in the house as a poor 
 relation ; satisfied also that she was not there on a brief visit, but 
 was more or less a part of the establishment almost a working, 
 a remunerated part. Didn't she enjoy at periods a protection 
 that she paid for by helping, among other services, to show the 
 place and explain it, deal with the tiresome people, answer ques- 
 tions about the dates of the buildings, the styles of the furniture, 
 the authorship of the pictures, the favourite haunts of the 
 ghost ? It wasn't that she looked as if you could have given 
 her shillings it was impossible to look less so. Yet when she 
 finally drifted toward him, distinctly handsome, though ever so 
 much older older than when he had seen her before it might 
 have been as an effect of her guessing that he had, within the 
 couple of hours, devoted more imagination to her than to all the 
 others put together, and had thereby penetrated to a kind of 
 truth that the others were too stupid for. She was there on 
 harder terms than anyone; she was there as a consequence of 
 things suffered, in one way and another, in the interval of years ; 
 and she remembered him very much as she was remembered 
 only a good deal better. 
 
 By the time they at last thus came to speech they were alone in 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 141 
 
 one of the rooms remarkable for a fine portrait over the chimney- 
 place ou t of which their friends had passed, and the charm of it 
 was that even before they had spoken they had practically arranged 
 with each other to stay behind for talk. The charm, happily, was 
 in other things too ; it was partly in there being scarce a spot at 
 Weatherend without something to stay behind for. It was in the 
 way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned ; 
 in the way the red light, breaking at the close from under a low, 
 sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old 
 wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour. It was most of all 
 perhaps in the way she came to him as if, since she had been 
 turned on to deal with the simpler sort, he might, should he 
 choose to keep the whole thing down, just take her mild attention 
 for a part of her general business. As soon as he heard her 
 voice, however, the gap was filled up and the missing link 
 supplied; the slight irony he divined in her attitude lost its 
 advantage. He almost jumped at it to get there before her. " I 
 met you years and years ago in Rome. I remember all about 
 it." She confessed to disappointment she had been so sure he 
 didn't ; and to prove how well he did he began to pour forth the 
 particular recollections that popped up as he called for them. 
 Her face and her voice, all at his service now, worked the miracle 
 the impression operating like the torch of a lamplighter who 
 touches into flame, one by one, a long row of gas jets. Marcher 
 flattered himself that the illumination was brilliant, yet he was 
 really still more pleased on her showing him, with amusement, 
 that in his haste to make everything right he had got most things 
 rather wrong. It hadn't been at Rome it had been at Naples ; 
 and it hadn't been seven years before it had been more nearly 
 ten. She hadn't been either with her uncle and aunt, but with 
 her mother and her brother ; in addition to which it was not with 
 the Pembles that he had been, but with the Boyers, coming down 
 in their company from Rome a point on which she insisted, 
 a little to his confusion, and as to which she had her evidence in 
 hand. The Boyers she had known, but she didn't know the 
 Pembles, though she had heard of them, and it was the people he 
 was with who had made them acquainted. The incident of the 
 thunderstorm that had raged round them with such violence as to 
 drive them for refuge into an excavation this incident had not 
 occurred at the Palace of the Caesars, but at Pompeii, on an 
 occasion when they had been present there at an important find. 
 He accepted her amendments, he enjoyed her corrections, 
 though the moral of them was, she pointed out, that he really 
 didn't remember the least thing about her ; and he only Jelt it as 
 
142 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 a drawback that when all was made conformable to the truth there 
 didn't appear much of anything left. They lingered together 
 still, she neglecting her office for from the moment he was so 
 clever she had no proper right to him and both neglecting the 
 house, just waiting as to see if a memory or two more wouldn't 
 again breathe upon them. It had not taken them many minutes, 
 after all, to put down on the table, like the cards of a pack, those 
 that constituted their respective hands ; only what came out was 
 that the pack was unfortunately not perfect that the past, 
 invoked, invited, encouraged, could give them, naturally, no more 
 than it had. It had made them meet her at twenty, him at 
 twenty-five ; but nothing was so strange, they seemed to say to each 
 other, as that, while so occupied, it hadn't done a little more for 
 them. They looked at each other as with the feeling of an 
 occasion missed; the present one would have been so much 
 better if the other, in the far distance, in the foreign land, hadn't 
 been so stupidly meagre. There weren't, apparently, all counted, 
 more than a dozen little old things that had succeeded in coming 
 to pass between them ; trivialities of youth, simplicities of fresh- 
 ness, stupidities of ignorance, small possible germs, but too 
 deeply buried too deeply (didn't it seem?) to sprout after so 
 many years. Marcher said to himself that he ought to have 
 rendered her some service saved her from a capsized boat in the 
 Bay, or at least recovered her dressing-bag, filched from her cab, 
 in the streets of Naples, by a lazzarone with a stiletto. Or it 
 would have been nice if he could have been taken with fever, 
 alone, at his hotel, and she could have come to look after him, to 
 write to his people, to drive him out in convalescence. Then 
 they would be in possession of the something or other that their 
 actual show seemed to lack. It yet somehow presented itself, 
 this show, as too good to be spoiled ; so that they were reduced 
 for a few minutes more to wondering a little helplessly why 
 since they seemed to know a certain number of the same people 
 their reunion had been so long averted. They didn't use that 
 name for it, but their delay from minute to minute to join the 
 others was a kind of confession that they didn't quite want it to 
 be a failure. Their attempted supposition of reasons for their not 
 having met but showed how little they knew of each other. 
 There came in fact a moment when Marcher felt a positive pang. 
 It was vain to pretend she was an old friend, for all the com- 
 munities were wanting, in spite of which it was as an old friend that 
 he saw she would have suited him. He had new ones enough 
 was surrounded with them, for instance, at that hour at the other 
 house ; as a new one he probably wouldn't have so much as 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 143' 
 
 noticed her. He would have liked to invent something, get her 
 to make-believe with him that some passage of a romantic or 
 critical kind had originally occurred. He was really almost reach- 
 ing out in imagination as against time for something that 
 would do, and saying to himself that if it didn't come this new 
 incident would simply and rather awkwardly close. They would 
 separate, and now for no second or for no third chance. They 
 would have tried and not succeeded. Then it was, just at the 
 turn, as he afterwards made it out to himself, that, everything else 
 failing, she herself decided to take up the case and, as it were, 
 save the situation. He felt as soon as she spoke that she had 
 been consciously keeping back what she said and hoping to get 
 on without it; a scruple in her that immensely touched him when, 
 by the end of three or four minutes more, he was able to measure 
 it. What she brought out, at any rate, quite cleared the air and 
 supplied the link the link it was such a mystery he should 
 frivolously have managed to lose. 
 
 " You know you told me something that I've never for- 
 gotten and that again and again has made me think of you since; 
 it was that tremendously hot day when we went to Sorrento, 
 across the bay, for the breeze. What I allude to was what you 
 said to me, on the way back, as we sat, under the awning of the 
 boat, enjoying the cool. Have you forgotten ? " 
 
 He had forgotten, and he was even more surprised than 
 ashamed. But the great thing was that he saw it was no vulgar 
 reminder of any "sweet" speech. The vanity of women had 
 long memories, but she was making no claim on him of a com- 
 pliment or a mistake. With another woman, a totally different 
 one, he might have feared the recall possibly even some imbecile 
 "offer." So, in having to say that he had indeed forgotten, he 
 was conscious rather of a loss than of a gain ; he already saw an 
 interest in the matter of her reference. " I try to think but I 
 give it up. Yet I remember the Sorrento day." 
 
 "I'm not very sure you do," May Bartram after a moment 
 said; "and I'm not very sure I ought to want you to. It's 
 dreadful to bring a person back, at any time, to what he was ten 
 years before. If you've lived away from it," she smiled, "so 
 much the better." 
 
 " Ah, if you haven't why should I ? " he asked. 
 
 " Lived away, you mean, from what I myself was ? " 
 
 " From what / was. I was of course an ass," Marcher went 
 on ; " but I would rather know from you just the sort of ass I 
 was than from the moment you have something in your mind 
 not know anything." 
 
144 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 Still, however, she hesitated. " But if you've completely 
 ceased to be that sort ?" 
 
 " Why, I can then just so all the more bear to know. Besides, 
 perhaps I haven't." 
 
 " Perhaps. Yet if you haven't," she added, " I should suppose 
 you would remember. Not indeed that / in the least connect 
 with my impression the invidious name you use. If I had only 
 thought you foolish," she explained, "the thing I speak of 
 wouldn't so have remained with me. It was about yourself." 
 She waited, as if it might come to him ; but as, only meeting her 
 eyes in wonder, he gave no sign, she burnt her ships. " Has it 
 ever happened ? " 
 
 Then it was that, while he continued to stare, a light broke 
 for him and the blood slowly came to his face, which began to 
 
 burn with recognition. " Do you mean I told you ? " But 
 
 he faltered, lest what came to him shouldn't be right, lest he 
 should only give himself away. 
 
 "It was something about yourself that it was natural one 
 shouldn't forget that is if one remembered you at all. That's 
 why I ask you," she smiled, " if the thing you then spoke of has 
 ever come to pass ? " 
 
 Oh, then he saw, but he was lost in wonder and found himself 
 embarrassed. This, he also saw, made her sorry for him, as if 
 her allusion had been a mistake. It took him but a moment, 
 however, to feel that it had not been, much as it had been a 
 surprise. After the first little shock of it her knowledge on the 
 contrary began, even if rather strangely, to taste sweet to him. 
 She was the only other person in the world then who would 
 have it, and she had had it all these years, while the fact of his 
 having so breathed his secret had unaccountably faded from him. 
 No wonder they couldn't have met as if nothing had happened. 
 " I judge," he finally said, " that I know what you mean. Only 
 I had strangely enough lost the consciousness of having taken 
 you so far into my confidence." 
 
 " Is it because you've taken so many others as well ? " 
 
 " I've taken nobody. Not a creature since then." 
 
 " So that I'm the only person who knows ? " 
 
 "The only person in the world." 
 
 "Well," she quickly replied, "I myself have never spoken. 
 I've never, never repeated of you what you told me." She looked 
 at him so that he perfectly believed her. Their eyes met over it 
 in such a way that he was without a doubt. " And I never will." 
 
 She spoke with an earnestness that, as if almost excessive, put 
 him at ease about her possible derision. Somehow the whole 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 145 
 
 question was a new luxury to him that is, from the moment 
 she was in possession. If she didn't take the ironic view she 
 clearly took the sympathetic, and that was what he had had, in 
 all the long time, from no one whomsoever. What he felt was 
 that he couldn't at present have begun to tell her and yet could 
 profit perhaps exquisitely by the accident of having done so of 
 old. " Please don't then. We're just right as it is." 
 
 " Oh, I am," she laughed, " if you are ! " To which she added : 
 " Then you do still feel in the same way ? " 
 
 It was impossible to him not to take to himself that she was 
 really interested, and it all kept coming as a sort of revelation. 
 He had thought of himself so long as abominably alone, and, 
 lo, he wasn't alone a bit. He hadn't been, it appeared, for an 
 hour since those moments on the Sorrento boat. It was she 
 who had been, he seemed to see as he looked at her she who 
 had been made so by the graceless fact of his lapse of fidelity. 
 To tell her what he had told her what had it been but to ask 
 something of her? something that she had given, in her charity, 
 without his having, by a remembrance, by a return of the spirit, 
 failing another encounter, so much as thanked her. What he had 
 asked of her had been simply at first not to laugh at him. She 
 had beautifully not done so for ten years, and she was not doing 
 so now. So he had endless gratitude to make up. Only for that 
 he must see just how he had figured to her. " What, exactly, was 
 the account I gave ? " 
 
 " Of the way you did feel ? Well, it was very simple. You said 
 you had had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within 
 you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, 
 possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to 
 happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and 
 the conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you." 
 
 " Do you call that very simple ? " John Marcher asked. 
 
 She thought a moment. " It was perhaps because I seemed, 
 as you spoke, to understand it." 
 
 " You do understand it ? " he eagerly asked. 
 
 Again she kept her kind eyes on him. "You still have the 
 belief?" 
 
 " Oh ! " he exclaimed helplessly. There was too much to say. 
 
 "Whatever it is to be," she clearly made out, "it hasn't yet 
 come." 
 
 He shook his head in complete surrender now. " It hasn't yet 
 come. Only, you know, it isn't anything I'm to do, to achieve in 
 the world, to be distinguished or admired for. I'm not such an 
 ass as that. It would be much better, no doubt, if I were." 
 
146 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " It's to be something you're merely to suffer ? " 
 
 "Well, say to wait for to have to meet, to face, to see 
 suddenly break out in my life; possibly destroying all further 
 consciousness, possibly annihilating me ; possibly, on the other 
 hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all my 
 world and leaving me to the consequences, however they shape 
 themselves." 
 
 She took this in, but the light in her eyes continued for him 
 not to be that of mockery. " Isn't what you describe perhaps 
 but the expectation or, at any rate, the sense of danger, familiar 
 to so many people of falling in love ? " 
 
 John Marcher thought. " Did you ask me that before ? " 
 
 "No I wasn't so free-and-easy then. But it's what strikes 
 me now." 
 
 "Of course," he said after a moment, "it strikes you. Of 
 course it strikes me. Of course what's in store for me may be 
 no more than that. The only thing is," he went on, " that I 
 think that if it had been that, I should by this time know." 
 
 " Do you mean because you've been in love ? " And then as 
 he but looked at her in silence : " You've been in love, and it 
 hasn't meant such a cataclysm, hasn't proved the great affair ? " 
 
 " Here I am, you see. It hasn't been overwhelming." 
 
 "Then it hasn't been love," said May Bartram. 
 
 "Well, I at least thought it was. I took it for that I've 
 taken it till now. It was agreeable, it was delightful, it was 
 miserable," he explained. "But it wasn't strange. It wasn't 
 what my affair's to be." 
 
 "You want something all to yourself something that nobody 
 else knows or has known ? " 
 
 "It isn't a question of what I 'want' God knows I don't 
 want anything. It's only a question of the apprehension that 
 haunts me that I live with day by day." 
 
 He said this so lucidly and consistently that, visibly, it further 
 imposed itself. If she had not been interested before she would 
 have been interested now. " Is it a sense of coming violence ? " 
 
 Evidently now too, again, he liked to talk of it. " I don't 
 think of it as when it does come necessarily violent. I only 
 think of it as natural and as of course, above all, unmistakeable. 
 I think of it simply as the thing. The thing will of itself appear 
 natural." 
 
 "Then how will it appear strange?" 
 
 Marcher bethought himself. " It won't to me" 
 
 " To whom then ? " 
 
 " Well," he replied, smiling at last, " say to you." 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 147 
 
 " Oh then, I'm to be present ? " 
 
 " Why, you are present since you know." 
 
 " I see." She turned it over. " But I mean at the 
 catastrophe.'* 
 
 At this, for a minute, their lightness gave way to their gravity ; 
 it was as if the long look they exchanged held them together. 
 " It will only depend on yourself if you'll watch with me." 
 
 " Are you afraid ? " she asked. 
 
 " Don't leave me now" he went on. 
 
 " Are you afraid ? " she repeated. 
 
 " Do you think me simply out of my mind ? " he pursued in- 
 stead of answering. "Do I merely strike you as a harmless 
 lunatic ? " 
 
 "No," said MayUartram. " I understand you. I believe you." 
 
 "You mean you feel how my obsession poor old thing! may 
 correspond to some possible reality ? " 
 
 " To some possible reality." 
 
 " Then you will watch with me ? " 
 
 She hesitated, then for the third time put her question. " Are 
 you afraid ? " 
 
 " Did I tell you I was at Naples ? " 
 
 " No, you said nothing about it." 
 
 " Then I don't know. And I should like to know," said John 
 Marcher. " You'll tell me yourself whether you think so. If 
 you'll watch with me you'll see." 
 
 "Very good then." They had been moving by this time 
 across the room, and at the door, before passing out, they paused 
 as if for the full wind-up of their understanding. " I'll watch 
 with you," said May Bartram. 
 
 II 
 
 THE fact that she " knew " knew and yet neither chaffed him 
 nor betrayed him had in a short time begun to constitute 
 between them a sensible bond, which became more marked 
 when, within the year that followed their afternoon at Weather- 
 end, the opportunities for meeting multiplied. The event that 
 thus promoted these occasions was the death of the ancient lady, 
 her great-aunt, under whose wing, since losing her mother, she 
 had to such an extent found shelter, and who, though but the 
 widowed mother of the new successor to the property, had 
 succeeded thanks to a high tone and a high temper in not 
 forfeiting the supreme position at the great house. The de- 
 position of this personage arrived but with her death, which, 
 
148 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 followed by many changes, made in particular a difference for 
 the young woman in whom Marcher's expert attention had 
 recognised from the first a dependent with a pride that might 
 ache though it didn't bristle. Nothing for a long time had 
 made him easier than the thought that the aching must have 
 been much soothed by Miss Bartram's now finding herself able 
 to set up a small home in London. She had acquired property, 
 to an amount that made that luxury just possible, under her 
 aunt's extremely complicated will, and when the whole matter 
 began to be straightened out, which indeed took time, she 
 let him know that the happy issue was at last in view. He had 
 seen her again before that day, both because she had more 
 than once accompanied the ancient lady to town and because 
 he had paid another visit to the friends who so conveniently 
 made of Weatherend one of the charms of their own hospitality. 
 These friends had taken him back there ; he had achieved there 
 again with Miss Bartram some quiet detachment; and he had 
 in London succeeded in persuading her to more than one brief 
 absence from her aunt. They went together, on these latter 
 occasions, to the National Gallery and the South Kensington 
 Museum, where, among vivid reminders, they talked of Italy 
 at large not now attempting to recover, as at first, the taste 
 of their youth and their ignorance. That recovery, the first day 
 at Weatherend, had served its purpose well, had given them 
 quite enough ; so that they were, to Marcher's sense, no longer 
 hovering about the head-waters of their stream, but had felt their 
 boat pushed sharply off and down the current. 
 
 They were literally afloat together ; for our gentleman this was 
 marked, quite as marked as that the fortunate cause of it was 
 just the buried treasure of her knowledge. He had with his own 
 hands dug up this little hoard, brought to light that is to within 
 reach of the dim day constituted by their discretions and privacies 
 the object of value the hiding-place of which he had, after 
 putting it into the ground himself, so strangely, so long forgotten. 
 The exquisite luck of having again just stumbled on the spot 
 made him indifferent to any other question ; he would doubtless 
 have devoted more time to the odd accident of his lapse of 
 memory if he had not been moved to devote so much to the 
 sweetness, the comfort, as he felt, for the future, that this accident 
 itself had helped to keep fresh. It had never entered into his 
 plan that anyone should "know," and mainly for the reason 
 that it was not in him to tell anyone. That would have been 
 impossible, since nothing but the amusement of a cold world 
 would have waited on it. Since, however, a mysterious fate had 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 149 
 
 opened his mouth in youth, in spite of him, he would count 
 that a compensation and profit by it to the utmost. That the 
 right person should know tempered the asperity of his secret 
 more even than his shyness had permitted him to imagine ; and 
 May Bartram was clearly right, because well, because there she 
 was. Her knowledge simply settled it ; he would have been sure 
 enough by this time had she been wrong. There was that in his 
 situation, no doubt, that disposed him too much to see her as 
 a mere confidant, taking all her light for him from the fact the 
 fact only of her interest in his predicament, from her mercy, 
 sympathy, seriousness, her consent not to regard him as the 
 funniest of the funny. Aware, in fine, that her price for him was 
 just in her giving him this constant sense of his being admirably 
 spared, he was careful to remember that she had, after all, also 
 a life of her own, with things that might happen to her^ things 
 that in friendship one should likewise take account of. Some- 
 thing fairly remarkable came to pass with him, for that matter, 
 in this connection something represented by a certain passage 
 of his consciousness, in the suddenest way, from one extreme 
 to the other. 
 
 He had thought himself, so long as nobody knew, the most 
 disinterested person in the world, carrying his concentrated 
 burden, his perpetual suspense, ever so quietly, holding his 
 tongue about it, giving others no glimpse of it nor of its effect 
 upon his life, asking of them no allowance and only making 
 on his side all those that were asked. He had disturbed nobody 
 with the queerness of having to know a haunted man, though he 
 had had moments of rather special temptation on hearing people 
 say that they were " unsettled." If they were as unsettled as he 
 was he who had never been settled for an hour in his life they 
 would know what it meant. Yet it wasn't, all the same, for him 
 to make them, and he listened to them civilly enough. This 
 was why he had such good though possibly such rather colour- 
 less manners ; this was why, above all, he could regard himself, 
 in a greedy world, as decently as, in fact, perhaps even a little 
 sublimely unselfish. Our point is accordingly that he valued 
 this character quite sufficiently to measure his present danger 
 of letting it lapse, against which he promised himself to be much 
 on his guard. He was quite ready, none the less, to be selfish 
 just a little, since, surely, no more charming occasion for it 
 had come to him. "Just a little," in a word, was just as much as 
 Miss Bartram, taking one day with another, would let him. He 
 never would be in the least coercive, and he would keep well 
 before him the lines on which consideration for her the very 
 
150 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 highest ought to proceed. He would thoroughly establish the 
 heads under which her affairs, her requirements, her peculiarities 
 he went so far as to give them the latitude of that name 
 would come into their intercourse. All this naturally was a sign 
 of how much he took the intercourse itself for granted. There 
 was nothing more to be done about that. It simply existed ; had 
 sprung into being with her first penetrating question to him 
 in the autumn light there at Weatherend. The real form it 
 should have taken on the basis that stood out large was the form 
 of their marrying. But the devil in this was that the very basis 
 itself put marrying out of the question. His conviction, his 
 apprehension, his obsession, in short, was not a condition he 
 could invite a woman to share ; and that consequence of it was 
 precisely what was the matter with him. Something or other lay 
 in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and 
 the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle. It signified little 
 whether the crouching beast were destined to slay him or to 
 be slain. The definite point was the inevitable spring of the 
 creature; and the definite lesson from that was that a man 
 of feeling didn't cause himself to be accompanied by a lady 
 on a tiger-hunt. Such was the image under which he had ended 
 by figuring his life. 
 
 They had at first, none the less, in the scattered hours spent 
 together, made no allusion to that view of it ; which was a sign 
 he was handsomely ready to give that he didn't expect, that he 
 in fact didn't care always to be talking about it. Such a feature 
 in one's outlook was really like a hump on one's back. The 
 difference it made every minute of the day existed quite in- 
 dependently of discussion. One discussed, of course, like a 
 hunchback, for there was always, if nothing else, the hunchback 
 face. That remained, and she was watching him ; but people 
 watched best, as a general thing, in silence, so that such would 
 be predominantly the manner of their vigil. Yet he didn't want, 
 at the same time, to be solemn ; solemn was what he imagined 
 he too much tended to be with other people. The thing to 
 be, with the one person who knew, was easy and natural to make 
 the reference rather than be seeming to avoid it, to avoid it rather 
 than be seeming to make it, and to keep it, in any case, familiar, 
 facetious even, rather than pedantic and portentous. Some such 
 consideration as the latter was doubtless in his mind, for instance, 
 when he wrote pleasantly to Miss Bartram that perhaps the great 
 thing he had so long felt as in the lap of the gods was no more 
 than this circumstance, which touched him so nearly, of her 
 acquiring a house in London. It was the first allusion they had 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 151 
 
 yet again made, needing any other hitherto so little ; but when she 
 replied, after having given him the news, that she was by no 
 means satisfied with such a trifle, as the climax to so special 
 a suspense, she almost set him wondering if she hadn't even 
 a larger conception of singularity for him than he had for himself. 
 He was at all events destined to become aware little by little, as 
 time went by, that she was all the while looking at his life, 
 judging it, measuring it, in the light of the thing she knew, which 
 grew to be at last, with the consecration of the years, never 
 mentioned between them save as " the real truth " about him. 
 That had always been his own form of reference to it, but she 
 adopted the form so quietly that, looking back at the end of a 
 period, he knew there was no moment at which it was traceable 
 that she had, as he might say, got inside his condition, or ex- 
 changed the attitude of beautifully indulging for that of still 
 more beautifully believing him. 
 
 It was always open to him to accuse her of seeing him but as 
 the most harmless of maniacs, and this, in the long run since 
 it covered so much ground was his easiest description of their 
 friendship. He had a screw loose for her, but she liked him 
 in spite of it, and was practically, against the rest of the world, 
 his kind, wise keeper, unremunerated, but fairly amused and, in 
 the absence of other near ties, not disreputably occupied. The 
 rest of the world of course thought him queer, but she, she only, 
 knew how, and above all why, queer ; which was precisely what 
 enabled her to dispose the concealing veil in the right folds. 
 She took his gaiety from him since it had to pass with them 
 for gaiety as she took everything else \ but she certainly so far 
 justified by her unerring touch his finer sense of the degree to 
 which he had ended by convincing her. She at least never spoke 
 of the secret of his life except as " the real truth about you," 
 and she had in fact a wonderful way of making it seem, as such, 
 the secret of her own life too. That was in fine how he so 
 constantly felt her as allowing for him ; he couldn't on the whole 
 call it anything else. He allowed for himself, but she, exactly, 
 allowed still more; partly because, better placed for a sight of 
 the matter, she traced his unhappy perversion through portions 
 of its course into which he could scarce follow it. He knew 
 how he felt, but, besides knowing that, she knew how he looked 
 as well ; he knew each of the things of importance he was in- 
 sidiously kept from doing, but she could add up the amount 
 they made, understand how much, with a lighter weight on his 
 spirit, he might have done, and thereby establish how, clever as 
 he was, he fell short. Above all she was in the secret of the 
 
152 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 difference between the forms he went through those of his 
 little office under Government, those of caring for his modest 
 patrimony, for his library, for his garden in the country, for the 
 people in London whose invitations he accepted and repaid 
 and the detachment that reigned beneath them and that made 
 of all behaviour, all that could in the least be called behaviour, 
 a long act of dissimulation. What it had come to was that he 
 wore a mask painted with the social simper, out of the eye-holes 
 of which there looked eyes of an expression not in the least 
 matching the other features. This the stupid world, even after 
 years, had never more than half discovered. It was only May 
 Bartram who had, and she achieved, by an art indescribable, the 
 feat of at once or perhaps it was only alternately meeting the 
 eyes from in front and mingling her own vision, as from over his 
 shoulder, with their peep through the apertures. 
 
 So, while they grew older together, she did watch with him, 
 and so she let this association give shape and colour to her own 
 existence. Beneath her forms as well detachment had learned to 
 sit, and behaviour had become for her, in the social sense, a false 
 account of herself. There was but one account of her that 
 would have been true all the while, and that she could give, 
 directly, to nobody, least of all to John Marcher. Her whole 
 attitude was a virtual statement, but the perception of that only 
 seemed destined to take its place for him as one of the many 
 things necessarily crowded out of his consciousness. If she 
 had, moreover, like himself, to make sacrifices to their real truth, 
 it was to be granted that her compensation might have affected 
 her as more prompt and more natural. They had long periods, 
 in this London time, during which, when they were together, 
 a stranger might have listened to them without in the least 
 pricking up his ears; on the other hand, the real truth was 
 equally liable at any moment to rise to the surface, and the 
 auditor would then have wondered indeed what they were talking 
 about. They had from an early time made up their mind that 
 society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the margin that this gave 
 them had fairly become one of their commonplaces. Yet there 
 were still moments when the situation turned almost fresh 
 usually under the effect of some expression drawn from herself. 
 Her expressions doubtless repeated themselves, but her intervals 
 were generous. "What saves us, you know, is that we answer 
 so completely to so usual an appearance : that of the man and 
 woman whose friendship has become such a daily habit, or 
 almost, as to be at last indispensable." That, for instance, was 
 a remark she had frequently enough had occasion to make, 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 153 
 
 though she had given it at different times different developments. 
 What we are especially concerned with is the turn it happened 
 to take from her one afternoon when he had come to see her 
 in honour of her birthday. This anniversary had fallen on 
 a Sunday, at a season of thick fog and general outward gloom ; 
 but he had brought her his customary offering, having known 
 her now long enough to have established a hundred little 
 customs. It was one of his proofs to himself, the present he 
 made her on her birthday, that he had not sunk into real 
 selfishness. It was mostly nothing more than a small trinket, 
 but it was always fine of its kind, and he was regularly careful 
 to pay for it more than he thought he could afford. "Our 
 habit saves you, at least, don't you see ? because it makes you, 
 after all, for the vulgar, indistinguishable from other men. 
 What's the most inveterate mark of men in general? Why, the 
 capacity to spend endless time with dull women to spend it, 
 I won't say without being bored, but without minding that they 
 are, without being driven off at a tangent by it ; which comes to 
 the same thing. I'm your dull woman, a part of the daily bread 
 for which you pray at church. That covers your tracks more 
 than anything." 
 
 "And what covers yours?" asked Marcher, whom his dull 
 woman could mostly to this extent amuse. " I see of course 
 what you mean by your saving me, in one way and another, so 
 far as other people are concerned I've seen it all along. Only, 
 what is it that saves you ? I often think, you know, of that." 
 
 She looked as if she sometimes thought of that too, but in 
 rather a different way. "Where other people, you mean, are 
 concerned ? " 
 
 "Well, you're really so in with me, you know as a sort of 
 result of my being so in with yourself. I mean of my having 
 such an immense regard for you, being so tremendously grateful 
 for all you've done for me. I sometimes ask myself if it's quite 
 fair. Fair I mean to have so involved and since one may say it 
 interested you. I almost feel as if you hadn't really had time 
 to do anything else." 
 
 "Anything else but be interested?" she asked. "Ah, what 
 else does one ever want to be ? If I've been ' watching ' with 
 you, as we long ago agreed that I was to do, watching is always 
 in itself an absorption." 
 
 " Oh, certainly," John Marcher said, " if you hadn't had your 
 
 curiosity ! Only, doesn't it sometimes come to you, as time 
 
 goes on, that your curiosity is not being particularly repaid ? " 
 
 May Bartram had a pause. " Do you ask that, by any chance, 
 
154 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 because you feel at all that yours isn't? I mean because you 
 have to wait so long." 
 
 Oh, he understood what she meant. "For the thing to 
 happen that never does happen? For the beast to jump out? 
 No, I'm just where I was about it. It isn't a matter as to which 
 I can choose^ I can decide for a change. It isn't one as to which 
 there can be a change. It's in the lap of the gods. One's in 
 the hands of one's law there one is. As to the form the law 
 will take, the way it will operate, that's its own affair." 
 
 "Yes," Miss Bartram replied; "of course one's fate is coming, 
 of course it has come, in its own form and its own way, all the 
 while. Only, you know, the form and the way in your case were 
 to have been well, something so exceptional and, as one may 
 say, so particularly your own." 
 
 Something in this made him look at her with suspicion. "You 
 say 'were to have been,' as if in your heart you had begun to 
 doubt." 
 
 " Oh ! " she vaguely protested. 
 
 "As if you believed," he went on, "that nothing will now 
 take place." 
 
 She shook her head slowly, but rather inscrutably. "You're 
 far from my thought." 
 
 He continued to look at her. " What then is the matter with 
 you?" 
 
 "Well," she said after another wait, "the matter with me is 
 simply that I'm more sure than ever my curiosity, as you call it, 
 will be but too well repaid." 
 
 They were frankly grave now; he had got up from his seat, 
 had turned once more about the little drawing-room to which, 
 year after year, he brought his inevitable topic ; in which he had, 
 as he might have said, tasted their intimate community with 
 every sauce, where every object was as familiar to him as the 
 things of his own house and the very carpets were worn with his 
 fitful walk very much as the desks in old counting-houses are 
 worn by the elbows of generations of clerks. The generations 
 of his nervous moods had been at work there, and the place was 
 the written history of his whole middle life. Under the impres- 
 sion of what his friend had just said he knew himself, for some 
 reason, more aware of these things, which made him, after a 
 moment, stop again before her. "Is it, possibly, that you've 
 grown afraid?" 
 
 "Afraid?" He thought, as she repeated the word, that his 
 question had made her, a little, change colour ; so that, lest he 
 should have touched on a truth, he explained very kindly, "You 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 155 
 
 remember that that was what you asked me long ago that first 
 day at Weatherend." 
 
 "Oh yes, and you told me you didn't know that I was to 
 see for myself. We've said little about it since, even in so long 
 a time." 
 
 "Precisely," Marcher interposed "quite as if it were too 
 delicate a matter for us to make free with. Quite as if we might 
 find, on pressure, that I am afraid. For then," he said, "we 
 shouldn't, should we? quite know what to do." 
 
 She had for the time no answer to this question. "There 
 have been days when I thought you were. Only, of course," 
 she added, " there have been days when we have thought almost 
 anything." 
 
 " Everything. Oh ! " Marcher softly groaned as with a gasp, 
 half spent, at the face, more uncovered just then than it had 
 been for a long while, of the imagination always with them. It 
 had always had its incalculable moments of glaring out, quite as 
 with the very eyes of the very Beast, and, used as he was to 
 them, they could still draw from him the tribute of a sigh that 
 rose from the depths of his being. All that they had thought, 
 first and last, rolled over him ; the past seemed to have been re- 
 duced to mere barren speculation. This in fact was what the 
 place had just struck him as so full of the simplification of 
 everything but the state of suspense That remained only by 
 seeming to hang in the void surrounding it. Even his original 
 fear, if fear it had been, had lost itself in the desert. " I judge, 
 however," he continued, "that you see I'm not afraid now." 
 
 "What I see is, as I make it out, that you've achieved some- 
 thing almost unprecedented in the way of getting used to danger. 
 Living with it so long and so closely, you've lost your sense of it ; 
 you know it's there, but you're indifferent, and you cease even, as 
 of old, to have to whistle in the dark. Considering what the 
 danger is," May Bartram wound up, "I'm bound to say that 
 I don't think your attitude could well be surpassed." 
 
 John Marcher faintly smiled. " It's heroic ? " 
 
 " Certainly call it that." 
 
 He considered. " I am, then, a man of courage ? " 
 
 " That's what you were to show me." 
 
 He still, however, wondered. " But doesn't the man of 
 courage know what he's afraid of or not afraid of? I don't 
 know that, you see. I don't focus it. I can't name it. I only 
 know I'm exposed." 
 
 "Yes, but exposed how shall I say? so directly. So inti- 
 mately. That's surely enough." 
 
156 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " Enough to make you feel, then as what we may call the 
 end of our watch that I'm not afraid ? " 
 
 "You're not afraid. But it isn't," she said, "the end of our 
 watch. That is it isn't the end of yours. You've everything 
 still to see." 
 
 " Then why haven't you ? " he asked. He had had, all along, 
 to-day, the sense of her keeping something back, and he still had 
 it. As this was his first impression of that, it made a kind of 
 date. The case was the more marked as she didn't at first 
 answer; which in turn made him go on. "You know some- 
 thing I don't." Then his voice, for that of a man of courage, 
 trembled a little. " You know what's to happen." Her silence, 
 with the face she showed, was almost a confession it made him 
 sure. "You know, and you're afraid to tell me. It's so bad 
 that you're afraid I'll find out." 
 
 All this might be true, for she did look as if, unexpectedly to 
 her, he had crossed some mystic line that she had secretly 
 drawn round her. Yet she might, after all, not have worried ; 
 and the real upshot was that he himself, at all events, needn't. 
 "You'll never find out." 
 
 Ill 
 
 IT was all to have made, none the less, as I have said, a date ; as 
 came out in the fact that again and again, even after long 
 intervals, other things that passed between them wore, in relation 
 to this hour, but the character of recalls and results. Its 
 immediate effect had been indeed rather to lighten insistence 
 almost to provoke a reaction ; as if their topic had dropped by 
 its own weight and as if moreover, for that matter, Marcher had 
 been visited by one of his occasional warnings against egotism. 
 He had kept up, he felt, and very decently on the whole, his 
 consciousness of the importance of not being selfish, and it was 
 true that he had never sinned in that direction without promptly 
 enough trying to press the scales the other way. He often 
 repaired his fault, the season permitting, by inviting his friend to 
 accompany him to the opera; and it not infrequently thus 
 happened that, to show he didn't wish her to have but one sort 
 of food for her mind, he was the cause of her appearing there 
 with him a dozen nights in the month. It even happened that, 
 seeing her home at such times, he occasionally went in with her 
 to finish, as he called it, the evening, and, the better to make his 
 point, sat down to the frugal but always careful little supper that 
 awaited his pleasure. His point was made, he thought, by his 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 157 
 
 not eternally insisting with Tier on himself; made for instance, 
 at such hours, when it befell that, her piano at hand and each of 
 them familiar with it, they went over passages of the opera 
 together. It chanced to be on one of these occasions, however, 
 that he reminded her of her not having answered a certain ques- 
 tion he had put to her during the talk that had taken place 
 between them on her last birthday. "What is it that saves 
 you ? " saved her, he meant, from that appearance of variation 
 from the usual human type. If he had practically escaped 
 remark, as she pretended, by doing, in the most important 
 particular, what most men do find the answer to life in patching 
 up an alliance of a sort with a woman no better than himself 
 how had she escaped it, and how could the alliance, such as it 
 was, since they must suppose it had been more or less noticed, 
 have failed to make her rather positively talked about ? 
 
 "I never said," May Bartram replied, "that it hadn't made 
 me talked about." 
 
 " Ah well then, you're not ' saved.' " 
 
 "It has not been a question for me. If you've had your 
 woman, I've had," she said, " my man." 
 
 " And you mean that makes you all right ? " 
 
 She hesitated. "I don't know why it shouldn't make me 
 humanly, which is what we're speaking of as right as it makes 
 you." 
 
 " I see," Marcher returned. " ' Humanly/ no doubt, as show- 
 ing that you're living for something. Not, that is, just for me 
 and my secret." 
 
 May Bartram smiled. " I don't pretend it exactly shows that 
 I'm not living for you. It's my intimacy with you that's in 
 question." 
 
 He laughed as he saw what she meant. "Yes, but since, as 
 you say, I'm only, so far as people make out, ordinary, you're 
 aren't you? no more than ordinary either. You help me to 
 pass for a man like another. So if I am, as I understand you, 
 you're not compromised. Is that it ? " 
 
 She had another hesitation, but she spoke clearly enough. 
 " That's it. It's all that concerns me to help you to pass for 
 a man like another." 
 
 He was careful to acknowledge the remark handsomely. 
 " How kind, how beautiful, you are to me ! How shall I ever 
 repay you ? " 
 
 She had her last grave pause, as if there might be a choice of 
 ways. But she chose. " By going on as you are." 
 
 It was into this going on as he was that they relapsed, and 
 
158 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 really for so long a time that the day inevitably came for a 
 further sounding of their depths. It was as if these depths, 
 constantly bridged over by a structure that was firm enough 
 in spite of its lightness and of its occasional oscillation in the 
 somewhat vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the interest of 
 their nerves, a dropping of the plummet and a measurement 
 of the abyss. A difference had been made moreover, once for 
 all, by the fact that she had, all the while, not appeared to feel 
 the need of rebutting his charge of an idea within her that she 
 didn't dare to express, uttered just before one of the fullest of 
 their later discussions ended. It had come up for him then 
 that she " knew " something and that what she knew was bad 
 too bad to tell him. When he had spoken of it as visibly so 
 bad that she was afraid he might find it out, her reply had left 
 the matter too equivocal to be let alone and yet, for Marcher's 
 special sensibility, almost too formidable again to touch. He 
 circled about it at a distance that alternately narrowed and 
 widened and that yet was not much affected by the consciousness 
 in him that there was nothing she could " know," after all, any 
 better than he did. She had no source of knowledge that he 
 hadn't equally except of course that she might have finer 
 nerves. That was what women had where they were interested ; 
 they made out things, where people were concerned, that the 
 people often couldn't have made out for themselves. Their 
 nerves, their sensibility, their imagination, were conductors and 
 revealers, and the beauty of May Bartram was in particular that 
 she had given herself so to his case. He felt in these days what, 
 oddly enough, he had never felt before, the growth of a dread of 
 losing her by some catastrophe some catastrophe that yet 
 wouldn't at all be the catastrophe : partly because she had, 
 almost of a sudden, begun to strike him as useful to him as 
 never yet, and partly by reason of an appearance of uncertainty 
 in her health, coincident and equally new. It was characteristic 
 of the inner detachment he had hitherto so successfully culti- 
 vated and to which our whole account of him is a reference, it 
 was characteristic that his complications, such as they were, had 
 never yet seemed so as at this crisis to thicken about him, even 
 to the point of making him ask himself if he were, by any 
 chance, of a truth, within sight or sound, within touch or reach, 
 within the immediate jurisdiction of the thing that waited. 
 
 When the day came, as come it had to, that his friend con- 
 fessed to him her fear of a deep disorder in her blood, he felt 
 somehow the shadow of a change and the chill of a shock. 
 He immediately began to imagine aggravations and disasters, 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 159 
 
 and above all to think of her peril as the direct menace for 
 himself of personal privation. This indeed gave him one of 
 those partial recoveries of equanimity that were agreeable to 
 him it showed him that what was still first in his mind was the 
 loss she herself might suffer. "What if she should have to 
 
 die before knowing, before seeing ?" It would have been 
 
 brutal, in the early stages of her trouble, to put that question 
 to her; but it had immediately sounded for him to his own 
 concern, and the possibility was what most made him sorry 
 for her. If she did "know," moreover, in the sense of her 
 having had some what should he think ? mystical, irresistible 
 light, this would make the matter not better, but worse, inasmuch 
 as her original adoption of his own curiosity had quite become 
 the basis of her life. She had been living to see what would 
 be to be seen, and it would be cruel to her to have to give 
 up before the accomplishment of the vision. These reflections, 
 as I say, refreshed his generosity; yet, make them as he might, 
 he saw himself, with the lapse of the period, more and more 
 disconcerted. It lapsed for him with a strange, steady sweep, 
 and the oddest oddity was that it gave him, independently of 
 the threat of much inconvenience, almost the only positive 
 surprise his career, if career it could be called, had yet offered 
 him. She kept the house as she had never done; he had to 
 go to her to see her she could meet him nowhere now, though 
 there was scarce a corner of their loved old London in which 
 she had not in the past, at one time or another, done so ; and 
 he found her always seated by her fire in the deep, old-fashioned 
 chair she was less and less able to leave. He had been struck 
 one day, after an absence exceeding his usual measure, with 
 her suddenly looking much older to him than he had ever 
 thought of her being; then he recognised that the suddenness 
 was all on his side he had just been suddenly struck. She 
 looked older because inevitably, after so many years, she was 
 old, or almost ; which was of course true in still greater measure 
 of her companion. If she was old, or almost, John Marcher 
 assuredly was, and yet it was her showing of the lesson, not his 
 own, that brought the truth home to him. His surprises began 
 here; when once they had begun they multiplied; they came 
 rather with a rush : it was as if, in the oddest way in the world, 
 they had all been kept back, sown in a thick cluster, for the 
 late afternoon of life, the time at which, for people in general, 
 the unexpected has died out. 
 
 One of them was that he should have caught himself for 
 he had so done really wondering if the great accident would 
 
i6o THE BETTER SORT 
 
 take form now as nothing more than his being condemned to 
 see this charming woman, this admirable friend, pass away from 
 him. He had never so unreservedly qualified her as while 
 confronted in thought with such a possibility ; in spite of which 
 there was small doubt for him that as an answer to his long 
 riddle the mere effacement of even so fine a feature of his 
 situation would be an abject anticlimax. It would represent, 
 as connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity under the 
 shadow of which his existence could only become the most 
 grotesque of failures. He had been far from holding it a failure 
 long as he had waited for the appearance that was to make 
 it a success. He had waited for a quite other thing, not for 
 such a one as that. The breath of his good faith came short, 
 however, as he recognised how long he had waited, or how 
 long, at least, his companion had. That she, at all events, 
 might be recorded as having waited in vain this affected him 
 sharply, and all the more because of his at first having done 
 little more than amuse himself with the idea. It grew more 
 grave as the gravity of her condition grew, and the state of mind 
 it produced in him, which he ended by watching, himself, as if 
 it had been some definite disfigurement of his outer person, may 
 pass for another of his surprises. This conjoined itself still with 
 another, the really stupefying consciousness of a question that 
 he would have allowed to shape itself had he dared. What did 
 everything mean what, that is, did she mean, she and her vain 
 waiting and her probable death and the soundless admonition 
 of it all unless that, at this time of day, it was simply, it was 
 overwhelmingly too late? He had never, at any stage of his 
 queer consciousness, admitted the whisper of such a correction ; 
 he had never, till within these last few months, been so false 
 to his conviction as not to hold that what was to come to him 
 had time, whether he struck himself as having it or not. That 
 at last, at last, he certainly hadn't it, to speak of, or had it but 
 in the scantiest measure such, soon enough, as things went 
 with him, became the inference with which his old obsession 
 had to reckon : and this it was not helped to do by the more and 
 more confirmed appearance that the great vagueness casting 
 the long shadow in which he had lived had, to attest itself, 
 almost no margin left. Since it was in Time that he was to 
 have met his fate, so it was in Time that his fate was to have 
 acted; and as he waked up to the sense of no longer being 
 young, which was exactly the sense of being stale, just as that, 
 in turn, was the sense of being weak, he waked up to another 
 matter beside. It all hung together ; they were subject, he and the 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 161 
 
 great vagueness, to an equal and indivisible law. When the possi- 
 bilities themselves had, accordingly, turned stale, when the secret 
 of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, 
 that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn't have been failure 
 to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged ; it was failure not 
 to be anything. And so, in the dark valley into which his path 
 had taken its unlooked-for twist, he wondered not a little as 
 he groped. He didn't care what awful crash might overtake 
 him, with what ignominy or what monstrosity he might yet be 
 associated since he wasn't, after all, too utterly old to suffer 
 if it would only be decently proportionate to the posture he 
 had kept, all his life, in the promised presence of it. He had 
 but one desire left that he shouldn't have been " sold." 
 
 IV 
 
 THEN it was that one afternoon, while the spring of the year was 
 young and new, she met, all in her own way, his frankest betrayal 
 of these alarms. He had gone in late to see her, but evening 
 had not settled, and she was presented to him in that long, 
 fresh light of waning April days which affects us often with a 
 sadness sharper than the greyest hours of autumn. The week 
 had been warm, the spring was supposed to have begun early, 
 and May Bartram sat, for the first time in the year, without a fire, 
 a fact that, to Marcher's sense, gave the scene of which she 
 formed part a smooth and ultimate look, an air of knowing, in 
 its immaculate order and its cold, meaningless cheer, that it would 
 never see a fire again. Her own aspect he could scarce have 
 said why intensified this note. Almost as white as wax, with 
 the marks and signs in her face as numerous and as fine as if 
 they had been etched by a needle, with soft white draperies 
 relieved by a faded green scarf, the delicate tone of which had 
 been consecrated by the years, she was the picture of a serene, 
 exquisite, but impenetrable sphinx, whose head, or indeed all 
 whose person, might have been powdered with silver. She was 
 a sphinx, yet with her white petals and green fronds she might 
 have been a lily too only an artificial lily, wonderfully imitated 
 and constantly kept, without dust or stain, though not exempt 
 from a slight droop and a complexity of faint creases, under some 
 clear glass bell. The perfection of household care, of high 
 polish and finish, always reigned in her rooms, but they especially 
 looked to Marcher at present as if everything had been wound 
 up, tucked in, put away, so that she might sit with folded hands 
 and with nothing more to do. She was " out of it," to his vision ; 
 
162 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 her work was over ; she communicated with him as across some 
 gulf, or from some island of rest that she had already reached, 
 and it made him feel strangely abandoned. Was it or, rather, 
 wasn't it that if for so long she had been watching with him the 
 answer to their question had swum into her ken and taken on its 
 name, so that her occupation was verily gone ? He had as much 
 as charged her with this in saying to her, many months before, 
 that she even then knew something she was keeping from him. 
 It was a point he had never since ventured to press, vaguely 
 fearing, as he did, that it might become a difference, perhaps 
 a disagreement, between them. He had in short, in this later 
 time, turned nervous, which was what, in all the other years, he 
 had never been ; and the oddity was that his nervousness should 
 have waited till he had begun to doubt, should have held off so 
 long as he was sure. There was something, it seemed to him, 
 that the wrong word would bring down on his head, something 
 that would so at least put an end to his suspense. But he wanted 
 not to speak the wrong word ; that would make everything ugly. 
 He wanted the knowledge he lacked to drop on him, if drop it 
 could, by its own august weight. If she was to forsake him it 
 was surely for her to take leave. This was why he didn't ask her 
 again, directly, what she knew ; but it was also why, approaching 
 the matter from another side, he said to her in the course of his 
 visit : " What do you regard as the very worst that, at this time of 
 day, can happen to me ? " 
 
 He had asked her that in the past often enough; they had, 
 with the odd, irregular rhythm of their intensities and avoidances, 
 exchanged ideas about it and then had seen the ideas washed 
 away by cool intervals, washed like figures traced in sea-sand. It 
 had ever been the mark of their talk that the oldest allusions in 
 it required but a little dismissal and reaction to come out again, 
 sounding for the hour as new. She could thus at present meet 
 his inquiry quite freshly and patiently. " Oh yes, I've repeatedly 
 thought, only it always seemed to me of old that I couldn't 
 quite make up my mind. I thought of dreadful things, between 
 which it was difficult to choose ; and so must you have done." 
 
 " Rather ! I feel now as if I had scarce done anything else. 
 I appear to myself to have spent my life in thinking of nothing 
 but dreadful things. A great many of them I've at different 
 times named to you, but there were others I couldn't name." 
 
 " They were too, too dreadful ? " 
 
 " Too, too dreadful some of them." 
 
 She looked at him a minute, and there came to him as he 
 met it an inconsequent sense that her eyes, when one got their 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 163 
 
 full clearness, were still as beautiful as they had been in youth, 
 only beautiful with a strange, cold light a light that somehow 
 was a part of the effect, if it wasn't rather a part of the cause, of 
 the pale, hard sweetness of the season and the hour. "And 
 yet," she said at last, " there are horrors we have mentioned." 
 
 It deepened the strangeness to see her, as such a figure in such 
 a picture, talk of " horrors," but she was to do, in a few minutes, 
 something stranger yet though even of this he was to take the 
 full measure but afterwards and the note of it was already in 
 the air. It was, for the matter of that, one of the signs that her 
 eyes were having again such a high flicker of their prime. He 
 had to admit, however, what she said. "Oh yes, there were 
 times when we did go far." He caught himself in the act of speak- 
 ing as if it all were over. Well, he wished it were; and the 
 consummation depended, for him, clearly, more and more on his 
 companion. 
 
 But she had now a soft smile. " Oh, far ! " 
 
 It was oddly ironic. " Do you mean you're prepared to go 
 further?" 
 
 She was frail and ancient and charming as she continued to 
 look at him, yet it was rather as if she had lost the thread. " Do 
 you consider that we went so far ? " 
 
 " Why, I thought it the point you were just making that we 
 had looked most things in the face." 
 
 " Including each other ? " She still smiled. " But you're quite 
 right. We've had together great imaginations, often great fears ; 
 but some of them have been unspoken." 
 
 "Then the worst we haven't faced that. I could face it, I 
 believe, if I knew what you think it. I feel," he explained, " as 
 if I had lost my power to conceive such things." And he 
 wondered if he looked as blank as he sounded. " It's spent." 
 
 " Then why do you assume," she asked, " that mine isn't ? " 
 
 "Because you've given me signs to the contrary. It isn't 
 a question for you of conceiving, imagining, comparing. It 
 isn't a question now of choosing." At last he came out with it. 
 "You know something that I don't You've shown me that 
 before." 
 
 These last words affected her, he could see in a moment, 
 remarkably, and she spoke with firmness. " I've shown you, my 
 dear, nothing." 
 
 He shook his head. " You can't hide it." 
 
 "Oh, oh!" May Bartram murmured over what she couldn't 
 hide. It was almost a smothered groan. 
 
 "You admitted it months ago, when I spoke of it to you as 
 
1 64 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 of something you were afraid I would find out. Your answer 
 was that I couldn't, that I wouldn't, and I don't pretend I have. 
 But you had something therefore in mind, and I see now that 
 it must have been, that it still is, the possibility that, of all 
 possibilities, has settled itself for you as the worst. This," he 
 went on, "is why I appeal to you. I'm only afraid of ignorance 
 now I'm not afraid of knowledge." And then as for a while 
 she said nothing : " What makes me sure is that I see in your 
 face and feel here, in this air and amid these appearances, that 
 you're out of it. You've done. You've had your experience. 
 You leave me to my fate." 
 
 Well, she listened, motionless and white in her chair, as if she 
 had in fact a decision to make, so that her whole manner was a 
 virtual confession, though still with a small, fine, inner stiffness, 
 an imperfect surrender. " It would be the worst," she finally 
 let herself say. " I mean the thing that I've never said." 
 
 It hushed him a moment. " More monstrous than all the 
 monstrosities we've named ? " 
 
 " More monstrous. Isn't that what you sufficiently express," 
 she asked, " in calling it the worst ? " 
 
 Marcher thought. " Assuredly if you mean, as I do, some- 
 thing that includes all the loss and all the shame that are 
 thinkable." 
 
 " It would if it should happen," said May Bartram. " What 
 we're speaking of, remember, is only my idea." 
 
 " It's your belief," Marcher returned. " That's enough for me. 
 I feel your beliefs are right. Therefore if, having this one, you 
 give me no more light on it, you abandon me." 
 
 "No, no !" she repeated. " I'm with you don't you see? 
 still." And as if to make it more vivid to him she rose from her 
 chair a movement she seldom made in these days and showed 
 herself, all draped and all soft, in her fairness and slimness. " I 
 haven't forsaken you." 
 
 It was really, in its effort against weakness, a generous assur- 
 ance, and had the success of the impulse not, happily, been great, 
 it would have touched him to pain more than to pleasure. But 
 the cold charm in her eyes had spread, as she hovered before 
 him, to all the rest of her person, so that it was, for the minute, 
 almost like a recovery of youth. He couldn't pity her for that ; 
 he could only take her as she showed as capable still of helping 
 him. It was as if, at the same time, her light might at any 
 instant go out ; wherefore he must make the most of it. There 
 passed before him with intensity the three or four things he 
 wanted most to know ; but the question that came of itself to his 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 165 
 
 lips really covered the others. " Then tell me if I shall con- 
 sciously suffer." 
 
 She promptly shook her head. " Never ! " 
 
 It confirmed the authority he imputed to her, and it produced 
 on him an extraordinary effect. "Well, what's better than that? 
 Do you call that the worst ? " 
 
 " You think nothing is better ? " she asked. 
 
 She seemed to mean something so special that he again sharply 
 wondered, though still with the dawn of a prospect of relief. 
 " Why not, if one doesn't know ? " After which, as their eyes, 
 over his question, met in a silence, the dawn deepened and 
 something to his purpose came, prodigiously, out of her very 
 face. His own, as he took it in, suddenly flushed to the forehead, 
 and he gasped with the force of a perception to which, on the 
 instant, everything fitted. The sound of his gasp filled the air ; 
 then he became articulate. " I see if I don't suffer ! " 
 
 In her own look, however, was doubt. " You see what ? " 
 
 " Why, what you mean what you've always meant." 
 
 She again shook her head. "What I mean isn't what I've 
 always meant. It's different." 
 
 " It's something new?" 
 
 She hesitated. " Something new. It's not what you think. 
 I see what you think." 
 
 His divination drew breath then ; only her correction might be 
 wrong. " It isn't that I am a donkey ? " he asked between faint- 
 ness and grimness. " It isn't that it's all a mistake? " 
 
 " A mistake ? " she pityingly echoed. That possibility, for her, 
 he saw, would be monstrous ; and if she guaranteed him the im- 
 munity from pain it would accordingly not be what she had in 
 mind. "Oh, no," she declared; "it's nothing of that sort. 
 You've been right." 
 
 Yet he couldn't help asking himself if she weren't, thus 
 pressed, speaking but to save him. It seemed to him he should 
 be most lost if his history should prove all a platitude. " Are 
 you telling me the truth, so that I sha'n't have been a bigger 
 idiot than I can bear to know? I haven't lived with a vain 
 imagination, in the most besotted illusion ? I haven't waited but 
 to see the door shut in my face ? " 
 
 She shook her head again. "However the case stands that 
 isn't the truth. Whatever the reality, it is a reality. The door 
 isn't shut. The door's open," said May Bartram. 
 
 " Then something's to come ? " 
 
 She waited once again, always with her cold, sweet eyes on 
 him. " It's never too late." She had, with her gliding step, 
 
i66 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 diminished the distance between them, and she stood nearer to 
 him, close to him, a minute, as if still full of the unspoken. 
 Her movement might have been for some finer emphasis of what 
 she was at once hesitating and deciding to say. He had been 
 standing by the chimney-piece, fireless and sparely adorned, a 
 small, perfect old French clock and two morsels of rosy 
 Dresden constituting all its furniture ; and her hand grasped the 
 shelf while she kept him waiting, grasped it a little as for support 
 and encouragement. She only kept him waiting, however ; that 
 is he only waited. It had become suddenly, from her move- 
 ment and attitude, beautiful and vivid to him that she had some- 
 thing more to give him ; her wasted face delicately shone with it, 
 and it glittered, almost as with the white lustre of silver, in her 
 expression. She was right, incontestably, for what he saw in her 
 face was the truth, and strangely, without consequence, while 
 their talk of it as dreadful was still in the air, she appeared to 
 present it as inordinately soft. This, prompting bewilderment, 
 made him but gape the more gratefully for her revelation, so that 
 they continued for some minutes silent, her face shining at him, 
 her contact imponderably pressing, and his stare all kind, but all 
 expectant. The end, none the less, was that what he had ex- 
 pected failed to sound. Something else took place instead, 
 which seemed to consist at first in the mere closing of her eyes. 
 She gave way at the same instant to a slow, fine shudder, and 
 though he remained staring though he stared, in fact, but the 
 harder she turned off and regained her chair. It was the end 
 of what she had been intending, but it left him thinking only of 
 that. 
 
 "Well, you don't say ?" 
 
 She had touched in her passage a bell near the chimney and 
 had sunk back, strangely pale. " I'm afraid I'm too ill." 
 
 " Too ill to tell me ? " It sprang up sharp to him, and almost 
 to his lips, the fear that she would die without giving him light. 
 He checked himself in time from so expressing his question, but 
 she answered as if she had heard the words. 
 
 "Don't you know now?" 
 
 "'Now' ?" She had spoken as if something that had 
 
 made a difference had come up within the moment. But her 
 maid, quickly obedient to her bell, was already with them. " I 
 know nothing." And he was afterwards to say to himself that 
 he must have spoken with odious impatience, such an impatience 
 as to show that, supremely disconcerted, he washed his hands of 
 the whole question. 
 
 " Oh! "said May Bartram. 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 167 
 
 " Are you in pain ? " he asked, as the woman went to her. 
 
 " No," said May Bartram. 
 
 Her maid, who had put an arm round her as if to take her to 
 her room, fixed on him eyes that appealingly contradicted her ; 
 in spite of which, however, he showed once more his mystifica- 
 tion. " What then has happened ? " 
 
 She was once more, with her companion's help, on her feet, 
 and, feeling withdrawal imposed on him, he had found, blankly, 
 his hat and gloves and had reached the door. Yet he waited 
 for her answer. " What was to," she said. 
 
 HE came back the next day, but she was then unable to see him, 
 and as it was literally the first time this had occurred in the long 
 stretch of their acquaintance he turned away, defeated and sore, 
 almost angry or feeling at least that such a break in their custom 
 was really the beginning of the end and wandered alone with 
 his thoughts, especially with one of them that he was unable to 
 keep down. She was dying, and he would lose her; she was 
 dying, and his life would end. He stopped in the park, into 
 which he had passed, and stared before him at his recurrent 
 doubt. Away from her the doubt pressed again ; in her presence 
 he had believed her, but as he felt his forlornness he threw himself 
 into the explanation that, nearest at hand, had most of a miserable 
 warmth for him and least of a cold torment. She had deceived 
 him to save him to put him off with something in which he 
 should be able to rest. What could the thing that was to happen 
 to him be, after all, but just this thing that had begun to happen? 
 Her dying, her death, his consequent solitude that was what 
 he had figured as the beast in the jungle, that was what had been 
 in the lap of the gods. He had had her word for it as he left 
 her ; for what else, on earth, could she have meant ? It wasn't 
 a thing of a monstrous order ; not a fate rare and distinguished ; 
 not a stroke of fortune that overwhelmed and immortalised ; it 
 had only the stamp of the common doom. But poor Marcher, at 
 this hour, judged the common doom sufficient. It would serve his 
 turn, and even as the consummation of infinite waiting he would 
 bend his pride to accept it. He sat down on a bench in the 
 twilight. He hadn't been a fool. Something had been, as she 
 had said, to come. Before he rose indeed it had quite struck 
 him that the final fact really matched with the long avenue 
 through which he had had to reach it. As sharing his suspense, 
 and as giving herself all, giving her life, to bring it to an end, she 
 
168 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 had come with him every step of the way. He had lived by her 
 aid, and to leave her behind would be cruelly, damnably to miss 
 her. What could be more overwhelming than that ? 
 
 Well, he was to know within the week, for though she kept him 
 a while at bay, left him restless and wretched during a series of 
 days on each of which he asked about her only again to have to 
 turn away, she ended his trial by receiving him where she had 
 always received him. Yet she had been brought out at some 
 hazard into the presence of so many of the things that were, 
 consciously, vainly, half their past, and there was scant service 
 left in the gentleness of her mere desire, all too visible, to check 
 his obsession and wind up his long trouble. That was clearly 
 what she wanted ; the one thing more, for her own peace, while 
 she could still put out her hand. He was so affected by her state 
 that, once seated by her chair, he was moved to let everything 
 go ; it was she herself therefore who brought him back, took up 
 again, before she dismissed him, her last word of the other time. 
 She showed how she wished to leave their affair in order. " I'm 
 not sure you understood. You've nothing to wait for more. It 
 has come." 
 
 Oh, how he looked at her ! " Really ? " 
 
 "Really." 
 
 "The thing that, as you said, was to ?" 
 
 " The thing that we began in our youth to watch for." 
 
 Face to face with her once more he believed her; it was a 
 claim to which he had so abjectly little to oppose. "You mean 
 that it has come as a positive, definite occurrence, with a name 
 and a date ? " 
 
 "Positive. Definite. I don't know about the 'name,' but, 
 oh, with a date ! " 
 
 He found himself again too helplessly at sea. " But come in 
 the night come and passed me by ? " 
 
 May Bartram had her strange, faint smile. " Oh no, it hasn't 
 passed you by ! " 
 
 "But if I haven't been aware of it, and it hasn't touched 
 me ?" 
 
 " Ah, your not being aware of it," and she seemed to hesitate 
 an instant to deal with this " your not being aware of it is the 
 strangeness in the strangeness. It's the wonder of the wonder." 
 She spoke as with the softness almost of a sick child, yet now at 
 last, at the end of all, with the perfect straightness of a sibyl. 
 She visibly knew that she knew, and the effect on him was of 
 something co-ordinate, in its high character, with the law that had 
 ruled him. It was the true voice of the law ; so on her lips would 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 169 
 
 the law itself have sounded. " It has touched you," she went on. 
 " It has done its office. It has made you all its own." 
 
 "So utterly without my knowing it? " 
 
 " So utterly without your knowing it." His hand, as he leaned 
 to her, was on the arm of her chair, and, dimly smiling always 
 now, she placed her own on it. "It's enough if /know it." 
 
 " Oh ! " he confusedly sounded, as she herself of late so often 
 had done. 
 
 " What I long ago said is true. You'll never know now, and 
 I think you ought to be content. You've had it," said May 
 Bartram. 
 
 "But had what?" 
 
 " Why, what was to have marked you out. The proof of your 
 law. It has acted. I'm too glad," she then bravely added, "to 
 have been able to see what it's not" 
 
 He continued to attach his eyes to her, and with the sense that 
 it was all beyond him, and that she was too, he would still have 
 sharply challenged her, had he not felt it an abuse of her weak- 
 ness to do more than take devoutly what she gave him, take it as 
 hushed as to a revelation. If he did speak, it was out of the 
 foreknowledge of his loneliness to come. " If you're glad of what 
 it's ' not/ it might then have been worse ? " 
 
 She turned her eyes away, she looked straight before her with 
 which, after a moment : "Well, you know our fears." 
 
 He wondered. " It's something then we never feared ? ' 
 
 On this, slowly, she turned to him. "Did we ever dream, with 
 all our dreams, that we should sit and talk of it thus ? " 
 
 He tried for a little to make out if they had ; but it was as if 
 their dreams, numberless enough, were in solution in some thick, 
 cold mist, in which thought lost itself. " It might have been that 
 we couldn't talk ? " 
 
 "Well" she did her best for him "not from this side. This, 
 you see," she said, "is the other side." 
 
 " I think," poor Marcher returned, " that all sides are the same 
 to me." Then, however, as she softly shook her head in correc- 
 tion : " We mightn't, as it were, have got across ? " 
 
 "To where we are no. We're here" she made her weak 
 emphasis. 
 
 " And much good does it do us ! " was her friend's frank 
 comment. 
 
 " It does us the good it can. It does us the good that it isn't 
 
 here. It's past. It's behind," said May Bartram. " Before " 
 
 but her voice dropped. 
 
 He had got up, not to tire her, but it was hard to combat his 
 
i;o THE BETTER SORT 
 
 yearning. She after all told him nothing but that his light had 
 
 failed which he knew well enough without her. " Before ? " 
 
 he blankly echoed. 
 
 " Before, you see, it was always to come. That kept it present." 
 
 " Oh, I don't care what comes now ! Besides," Marcher added, 
 "it seems to me I liked it better present, as you say, than I 
 can like it absent with your absence." 
 
 " Oh, mine ! " and her pale hands made light of it. 
 
 " With the absence of everything." He had a dreadful sense 
 of standing there before her for so far as anything but this 
 proved, this bottomless drop was concerned the last time of their 
 life. It rested on him with a weight he felt he could scarce bear, 
 and this weight it apparently was that still pressed out what 
 remained in him of speakable protest. " I believe you ; but I 
 can't begin to pretend I understand. Nothing, for me, is past ; 
 nothing will pass until I pass myself, which I pray my stars may 
 be as soon as possible. Say, however," he added, "that I've 
 eaten my cake, as you contend, to the last crumb how can the 
 thing I've never felt at all be the thing I was marked out 
 to feel?" 
 
 She met him, perhaps, less directly, but she met him un- 
 perturbed. " You take your * feelings ' for granted. You were to 
 suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it." 
 
 " How in the world when what is such knowledge but 
 suffering ? " 
 
 She looked up at him a while, in silence. "No you don't 
 understand." 
 
 " I suffer," said John Marcher. 
 
 " Don't, don't ! " 
 
 "How can I help at least tkatV* 
 
 "Don't/" May Bartram repeated. 
 
 She spoke it in a tone so special, in spite of her weakness, that 
 he stared an instant stared as if some light, hitherto hidden, 
 had shimmered across his vision. Darkness again closed over it, 
 but the gleam had already become for him an idea. " Because 
 I haven't the right ? " 
 
 " Don't know when you needn't," she mercifully urged. " You 
 needn't for we shouldn't." 
 
 " Shouldn't ? " If he could but know what she meant ! 
 
 " No it's too much." 
 
 "Too much?" he still asked but with a mystification that 
 was the next moment, of a sudden, to give way. Her words, if 
 they meant something, affected him in this light the light also 
 of her wasted faceas meaning all, and the sense of what know- 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 171 
 
 ledge had been for herself came over him with a rush which 
 broke through into a question. "Is it of that, then, you're 
 dying?" 
 
 She but watched him, gravely at first, as if to see, with this, 
 where he was, and she might have seen something, or feared 
 something, that moved her sympathy. " I would live for you still 
 if I could." Her eyes closed for a little, as if, withdrawn into 
 herself, she were, for a last time, trying. " But I can't ! " she said 
 as she raised them again to take leave of him. 
 
 She couldn't indeed, as but too promptly and sharply appeared, 
 and he had no vision of her after this that was anything but 
 darkness and doom. They had parted forever in that strange 
 talk ; access to her chamber of pain, rigidly guarded, was almost 
 wholly forbidden him ; he was feeling now moreover, in the face 
 of doctors, nurses, the two or three relatives attracted doubtless 
 by the presumption of what she had to " leave," how few were 
 the rights, as they were called in such cases, that he had to put 
 forward, and how odd it might even seem that their intimacy 
 shouldn't have given him more of them. The stupidest fourth 
 cousin had more, even though she had been nothing in such a 
 person's life. She had been a feature of features in his, for what 
 else was it to have been so indispensable? Strange beyond 
 saying were the ways of existence, baffling for him the anomaly 
 of his lack, as he felt it to be, of producible claim. A woman 
 might have been, as it were, everything to him, and it might yet 
 present him in no connection that anyone appeared obliged to 
 recognise. If this was the case in these closing weeks it was the 
 case more sharply on the occasion of the last offices rendered, in 
 the great grey London cemetery, to what had been mortal, to 
 what had been precious, in his friend. The concourse at her 
 grave was not numerous, but he saw himself treated as scarce 
 more nearly concerned with it than if there had been a thousand 
 others. He was in short from this moment face to face with the 
 fact that he was to profit extraordinarily little by the interest May 
 Bartram had taken in him. He couldn't quite have said what he 
 expected, but he had somehow not expected this approach to a 
 double privation. Not only had her interest failed him, but he 
 seemed to feel himself unattended and for a reason he couldn't 
 sound by the distinction, the dignity, the propriety, if nothing 
 else, of the man markedly bereaved. It was as if, in the view of 
 society, he had not been markedly bereaved, as if there still failed 
 some sign or proof of it, and as if, none the less, his character 
 could never be affirmed, nor the deficiency ever made up. There 
 were moments, as the weeks went by, when he would have liked, 
 
i;2 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 by some almost aggressive act, to take his stand on the intimacy 
 of his loss, in order that it might be questioned and his retort, to 
 the relief of his spirit, so recorded ; but the moments of an irri- 
 tation more helpless followed fast on these, the moments during 
 which, turning things over with a good conscience but with a 
 bare horizon, he found himself wondering if he oughtn't to have 
 begun, so to speak, further back. 
 
 He found himself wondering indeed at many things, and this 
 last speculation had others to keep it company. What could he 
 have done, after all, in her lifetime, without giving them both, as 
 it were, away ? He couldn't have made it known she was watch- 
 ing him, for that would have published the superstition of the 
 Beast. This was what closed his mouth now now that the 
 Jungle had been threshed to vacancy and that the Beast had 
 stolen away. It sounded too foolish and too flat ; the difference 
 for him in this particular, the extinction in his life of the element 
 of suspense, was such in fact as to surprise him. He could 
 scarce have said what the effect resembled ; the abrupt cessation, 
 the positive prohibition, of music perhaps, more than anything 
 else, in some place all adjusted and all accustomed to sonority 
 and to attention. If he could at any rate have conceived lifting 
 the veil from his image at some moment of the past (what had 
 he done, after all, if not lift it to her?), so to do this to-day, to talk 
 to people at large of the jungle cleared and confide to them that 
 he now felt it as safe, would have been not only to see them 
 listen as to a goodwife's tale, but really to hear himself tell one. 
 What it presently came to in truth was that poor Marcher waded 
 through his beaten grass, where no life stirred, where no breath 
 sounded, where no evil eye seemed to gleam from a possible lair, 
 very much as if vaguely looking for the Beast, and still more as 
 if missing it. He walked about in an existence that had grown 
 strangely more spacious, and, stopping fitfully in places where the 
 undergrowth of life struck him as closer, asked himself yearn- 
 ingly, wondered secretly and sorely, if it would have lurked 
 here or there. It would have at all events sprung ; what was at 
 least complete was his belief in the truth itself of the assurance 
 given him. The change from his old sense to his new was abso- 
 lute and final : what was to happen had so absolutely and finally 
 happened that he was as little able to know a fear for his future 
 as to know a hope ; so absent in short was any question of any- 
 thing still to come. He was to live entirely with the other 
 question, that of his unidentified past, that of his having to see 
 his fortune impenetrably muffled and masked. 
 
 The torment of this vision became then his occupation; he 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 173 
 
 couldn't perhaps have consented to live but for the possibility 
 of guessing. She had told him, his friend, not to guess ; she 
 had forbidden him, so far as he might, to know, and she had 
 even in a sort denied the power in him to learn : which were so 
 many things, precisely, to deprive him of rest. It wasn't that he 
 wanted, he argued for fairness, that anything that had happened 
 to him should happen over again ; it was only that he shouldn't, 
 as an anticlimax, have been taken sleeping so sound as not to be 
 able to win back by an effort of thought the lost stuff of con- 
 sciousness. He declared to himself at moments that he would 
 either win it back or have done with consciousness for ever ; he 
 made this idea his one motive, in fine, made it so much his 
 passion that none other, to compare with it, seemed ever to have 
 touched him. The lost stuff of consciousness became thus for 
 him as a strayed or stolen child to an unappeasable father ; he 
 hunted it up and down very much as if he were knocking at 
 doors and inquiring of the police. This was the spirit in which, 
 inevitably, he set himself to travel ; he started on a journey that 
 was to be as long as he could make it; it danced before him 
 that, as the other side of the globe couldn't possibly have less to 
 say to him, it might, by a possibility of suggestion, have more. 
 Before he quitted London, however, he made a pilgrimage to 
 May Bartram's grave, took his way to it through the endless 
 avenues of the grim suburban necropolis, sought it out in the 
 wilderness of tombs, and, though he had come but for the 
 renewal of the act of farewell, found himself, when he had at last 
 stood by it, beguiled into long intensities. He stood for an 
 hour, powerless to turn away and yet powerless to penetrate the 
 darkness of death ; fixing with his eyes her inscribed name and 
 date, beating his forehead against the fact of the secret they kept, 
 drawing his breath, while he waited as if, in pity of him, some 
 sense would rise from the stones. He kneeled on the stones, 
 however, in vain ; they kept what they concealed ; and if the 
 face of the tomb did become a face for him it was because her 
 two names were like a pair of eyes that didn't know him. He 
 gave them a last long look, but no palest light broke. 
 
174 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 VI 
 
 HE stayed away, after this, for a year ; he visited the depths of 
 Asia, spending himself on scenes of romantic interest, of super- 
 lative sanctity \ but what was present to him everywhere was that 
 for a man who had known what he had known the world was 
 vulgar and vain. The state of mind in which he had lived for so 
 many years shone out to him, in reflection, as a light that 
 coloured and refined, a light beside which the glow of the East 
 was garish, cheap and thin. The terrible truth was that he had 
 lost with everything else a distinction as well ; the things he 
 saw couldn't help being common when he had become common 
 to look at them. He was simply now one of them himself he 
 was in the dust, without a peg for the sense of difference ; and 
 there were hours when, before the temples of gods and the 
 sepulchres of kings, his spirit turned, for nobleness of associa- 
 tion, to the barely discriminated slab in the London suburb. 
 That had become for him, and more intensely with time and 
 distance, his one witness of a past glory. It was all that was left 
 to him for proof or pride, yet the past glories of Pharaohs were 
 nothing to him as he thought of it. Small wonder then that he 
 came back to it on the morrow of his return. He was drawn 
 there this time as irresistibly as the other, yet with a confidence, 
 almost, that was doubtless the effect of the many months that 
 had elapsed. He had lived, in spite of himself, into his change 
 of feeling, and in wandering over the earth had wandered, as 
 might be said, from the circumference to the centre of his desert. 
 He had settled to his safety and accepted perforce his extinction ; 
 figuring to himself, with some colour, in the likeness of certain 
 little old men he remembered to have seen, of whom, all meagre 
 and wizened as they might look, it was related that they had in 
 their time fought twenty duels or been loved by ten princesses. 
 They indeed had been wondrous for others, while he was but 
 wondrous for himself; which, however, was exactly the cause of 
 his haste to renew the wonder by getting back, as he might put 
 it, into his own presence. That had quickened his steps and 
 checked his delay. If his visit was prompt it was because he had 
 been separated so long from the part of himself that alone he 
 now valued. 
 
 It is accordingly not false to say that he reached his goal with 
 a certain elation and stood there again with a certain assurance. 
 The creature beneath the sod knew of his rare experience, so 
 that, strangely now, the place had lost for him its mere blankness 
 of expression. It met him in mildness not, as before, in 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 175 
 
 mockery ; it wore for him the air of conscious greeting that we 
 find, after absence, in things that have closely belonged to us 
 and which seem to confess of themselves to the connection. The 
 plot of ground, the graven tablet, the tended flowers affected him 
 so as belonging to him that he quite felt for the hour like a 
 contented landlord reviewing a piece of property. Whatever had 
 happened well, had happened. He had not come back this 
 time with the vanity of that question, his former worrying, " What, 
 what ? " now practically so spent. Yet he would, none the less, 
 never again so cut himself off from the spot ; he would come 
 back to it every month, for if he did nothing else by its aid he 
 at least held up his head. It thus grew for him, in the oddest 
 way, a positive resource ; he carried out his idea of periodical 
 returns, which took their place at last among the most inveterate 
 of his habits. What it all amounted to, oddly enough, was that, 
 in his now so simplified world, this garden of death gave him the 
 few square feet of earth on which he could still most live. It 
 was as if, being nothing anywhere else for anyone, nothing even 
 for himself, he were just everything here, and if not for a crowd 
 of witnesses, or indeed for any witness but John Marcher, then 
 by clear right of the register that he could scan like an open page. 
 The open page was the tomb of his friend, and there were the 
 facts of the past, there the truth of his life, there the backward 
 reaches in which he could lose himself. He did this, from time 
 to time, with such effect that he seemed to wander through the 
 old years with his hand in the arm of a companion who was, in 
 the most extraordinary manner, his other, his younger self ; and 
 to wander, which was more extraordinary yet, round and round 
 a third presence not wandering she, but stationary, still, whose 
 eyes, turning with his revolution, never ceased to follow him, and 
 whose seat was his point, so to speak, of orientation. Thus in 
 short he settled to live feeding only on the sense that he once 
 had lived, and dependent on it not only for a support but for an 
 identity. 
 
 It sufficed him, in its way, for months, and the year elapsed ; it 
 would doubtless even have carried him further but for an accident, 
 superficially slight, which moved him, in a quite other direction, 
 with a force beyond any of his impressions of Egypt or of India. 
 It was a thing of the merest chance the turn, as he afterwards 
 felt, of a hair, though he was indeed to live to believe that if light 
 hadn't come to him in this particular fashion it would still have 
 come in another. He was to live to believe this, I say, though 
 he was not to live, I may not less definitely mention, to do much 
 else. We allow him at any rate the benefit of the conviction, 
 
i;6 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 struggling up for him at the end, that, whatever might have 
 happened or not happened, he would have come round of him- 
 self to the light. The incident of an autumn day had put the 
 match to the train laid from of old by his misery. With the light 
 before him he knew that even of late his ache had only been 
 smothered. It was strangely drugged, but it throbbed ; at the 
 touch it began to bleed. And the touch, in the event, was the 
 face of a fellow-mortal. This face, one grey afternoon when the 
 leaves were thick in the alleys, looked into Marcher's own, at the 
 cemetery, with an expression like the cut of a blade. He felt it, 
 that is, so deep down that he winced at the steady thrust. The 
 person who so mutely assaulted him was a figure he had noticed, 
 on reaching his own goal, absorbed by a grave a short distance 
 away, a grave apparently fresh, so that the emotion of the visitor 
 would probably match it for frankness. This fact alone forbade 
 further attention, though during the time he stayed he remained 
 vaguely conscious of his neighbour, a middle-aged man apparently, 
 in mourning, whose bowed back, among the clustered monuments 
 and mortuary yews, was constantly presented. Marcher's theory 
 that these were elements in contact with which he himself revived, 
 had suffered, on this occasion, it may be granted, a sensible 
 though inscrutable check. The autumn day was dire for him as 
 none had recently been, and he rested with a heaviness he had 
 not yet known on the low stone table that bore May Bartram's 
 name. He rested without power to move, as if some spring in 
 him, some spell vouchsafed, had suddenly been broken forever. 
 If he could have done that moment as he wanted he would 
 simply have stretched himself on the slab that was ready to take 
 him, treating it as a place prepared to receive his last sleep. 
 What in all the wide world had he now to keep awake for ? He 
 stared before him with the question, and it was then that, as 
 one of the cemetery walks passed near him, he caught the shock 
 of the face. 
 
 His neighbour at the other grave had withdrawn, as he himself, 
 with force in him to move, would have done by now, and was 
 advancing along the path on his way to one of the gates. This 
 brought him near, and his pace was slow, so that and all the 
 more as there was a kind of hunger in his look the two men were 
 for a minute directly confronted. Marcher felt him on the spot 
 as one of the deeply stricken a perception so sharp that nothing 
 else in the picture lived for it, neither his dress, his age, nor his 
 presumable character and class; nothing lived but the deep 
 ravage of the features that he showed. He showed them that 
 was the point ; he was moved, as he passed, by some impulse that 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 177 
 
 was either a signal for sympathy or, more possibly, a challenge to 
 another sorrow. He might already have been aware of our friend, 
 might, at some previous hour, have noticed in him the smooth 
 habit of the scene, with which the state of his own senses so 
 scantly consorted, and might thereby have been stirred as by a 
 kind of overt discord. What Marcher was at all events conscious 
 of was, in the first place, that the imaged of scarred passion pre- 
 sented to him was concious too of something that profaned the 
 air; and, in the second, that, roused, startled, shocked, he was 
 yet the next moment looking after it, as it went, with envy. The 
 most extraordinary thing that had happened to him though he 
 had given that name to other matters as well took place, after his 
 immediate vague stare, as a consequence of this impression. The 
 stranger passed, but the raw glare of his grief remained, making 
 our friend wonder in pity what wrong, what wound it expressed, 
 what injury not to be healed. What had the man had to make 
 him, by the loss of it, so bleed and yet live? 
 
 Something and this reached him with a pang that he, John 
 Marcher, hadn't ; the proof of which was precisely John Marcher's 
 arid end. No passion had ever touched him, for this was what 
 passion meant ; he had survived and maundered and pined, but 
 where had been his deep ravage? The extraordinary thing we 
 speak of was the sudden rush of the result of this question. The 
 sight that had just met his eyes named to him, as in letters of 
 quick flame, something he had utterly, insanely missed, and what 
 he had missed made these things a train of fire, made them mark 
 themselves in an anguish of inward throbs. He had seen outside 
 of his life, not learned it within, the way a woman was mourned 
 when she had been loved for herself; such was the force of his 
 conviction of the meaning of the stranger's face, which still flared 
 for him like a smoky torch. It had not come to him, the know- 
 ledge, on the wings of experience ; it had brushed him, jostled 
 him, upset him, with the disrespect of chance, the insolence of 
 an accident. Now that the illumination had begun, however, it 
 blazed to the zenith, and what he presently stood there gazing at 
 was the sounded void of his life. He gazed, he drew breath, in 
 pain ; he turned in his dismay, and, turning, he had before him in 
 sharper incision than ever the open page of his story. The name 
 on the table smote him as the passage of his neighbour had done, 
 and what it said to him, full in the face, was that she was what he 
 had missed. This was the awful thought, the answer to all the 
 past, the vision at the dread clearness of which he turned as cold 
 as the stone beneath him. Everything fell together, confessed, 
 explained, overwhelmed ; leaving him most of all stupefied at the 
 N 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 blindness he had cherished. The fate he had been marked for he 
 had met with a vengeance he had emptied the cup to the lees ; 
 he had been the man of his time, the man, to whom nothing on 
 earth was to have happened. That was the rare stroke that was 
 his visitation. So he saw it, as we say, in pale horror, while the 
 pieces fitted and fitted. So she had seen it, while he didn't, and so 
 she served at this hour to drive the truth home. It was the truth, 
 vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had waited the wait was 
 itself his portion. This the companion of his vigil had at a 
 given moment perceived, and she had then offered him the 
 chance to baffle his doom. One's doom, however, was never 
 baffled, and on the day she had told him that his own had come 
 down she had seen him but stupidly stare at the escape she 
 offered him. 
 
 The escape would have been to love her ; then, then he would 
 have lived. She had lived who could say now with what 
 passion ? since she had loved him for himself; whereas he had 
 never thought of her (ah, how it hugely glared at him !) but in the 
 chill of his egotism and the light of her use. Her spoken words 
 came back to him, and the chain stretched and stretched. The 
 beast had lurked indeed, and the beast, at its hour, had sprung ; 
 it had sprung in that twilight of the cold April when, pale, ill, 
 wasted, but all beautiful, and perhaps even then recoverable, she 
 had risen from her chair to stand before him and let him imagin- 
 ably guess. It had sprung as he didn't guess ; it had sprung as 
 she hopelessly turned from him, and the mark, by the time he left 
 her, had fallen where it was to fall. He had justified his fear and 
 achieved his fate ; he had failed, with the last exactitude, of all he 
 was to fail of; and a moan now rose to his lips as he remembered 
 she had prayed he mightn't know. This horror of waking this 
 was knowledge, knowledge under the breath of which the very 
 tears in his eyes seemed to freeze. Through them, none the less, 
 he tried to fix it and hold it ; he kept it there before him so that 
 he might feel the pain. That at least, belated and bitter, had 
 something of the taste of life. But the bitterness suddenly 
 sickened him, and it was as if, horribly, he saw, in the truth, in 
 the cruelty of his image, what had been appointed and done. 
 He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast ; then, 
 while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and 
 hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened 
 it was close ; and, instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to 
 avoid it, he flung himself, on his face, on the tomb. 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 IT seemed to them at first, the offer, too good to be true, and 
 their friend's letter, addressed to them to feel, as he said, the 
 ground, to sound them as to inclinations and possibilities, had 
 almost the effect of a brave joke at their expense. Their friend, 
 Mr. Grant- Jackson, a highly preponderant, pushing person, great 
 in discussion and arrangement, abrupt in overture, unexpected, if 
 not perverse, in attitude, and almost equally acclaimed and 
 objected to in the wide midland region to which he had taught, 
 as the phrase was, the size of his foot their friend had launched 
 his bolt quite out of the blue and had thereby so shaken them as 
 to make them fear almost more than hope. The place had fallen 
 vacant by the death of one of the two ladies, mother and 
 daughter, who had discharged its duties for fifteen years; the 
 daughter was staying on alone, to accommodate, but had found, 
 though extremely mature, an opportunity of marriage that involved 
 retirement, and the question of the new incumbents was not a 
 little pressing. The want thus determined was of a united couple 
 of some sort, of the right sort, a pair of educated and competent 
 sisters possibly preferred, but a married pair having its advantages 
 if other qualifications were marked. Applicants, candidates, 
 besiegers of the door of everyone supposed to have a voice in the 
 matter, were already beyond counting, and Mr. Grant-Jackson, 
 who was in his way diplomatic and whose voice, though not 
 perhaps of the loudest, possessed notes of insistence, had found 
 his preference fixing itself on some person or brace of persons 
 who had been decent and dumb. The Gedges appeared to have 
 struck him as waiting in silence though absolutely, as happened, 
 no busybody had brought them, far away in the north, a hint 
 either of bliss or of danger ; and the happy spell, for the rest, had 
 obviously been wrought in him by a remembrance which, though 
 now scarcely fresh, had never before borne any such fruit. 
 
 Morris Gedge had for a few years, as a young man, carried on 
 a small private school of the order known as preparatory, and 
 had happened then to receive under his roof the small son of the 
 
 179 
 
1 80 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 great man, who was not at that time so great. The little boy, 
 during an absence of his parents from England, had been 
 dangerously ill, so dangerously that they had been recalled in 
 haste, though with inevitable delays, from a far country they had 
 gone to America, with the whole continent and the great sea to 
 cross again and had got back to find the child saved, but saved, 
 as couldn't help coming to light, by the extreme devotion and 
 perfect judgment of Mrs. Gedge. Without children of her own, 
 she had particularly attached herself to this tiniest and tenderest 
 of her husband's pupils, and they had both dreaded as a dire 
 disaster the injury to their little enterprise that would be caused by 
 their losing him. Nervous, anxious, sensitive persons, with a pride 
 as they were for that matter well aware above their position, 
 never, at the best, to be anything but dingy, they had nursed him 
 in terror and had brought him through in exhaustion. Exhaustion, 
 as befell, had thus overtaken them early and had for one reason 
 and another managed to assert itself as their permanent portion. 
 The little boy's death would, as they said, have done for them, 
 yet his recovery hadn't saved them ; with which it was doubtless 
 also part of a shy but stiff candour in them that they didn't 
 regard themselves as having in a more indirect manner laid up 
 treasure. Treasure was not to be, in any form whatever, of 
 their dreams or of their waking sense; and the years that 
 followed had limped under their weight, had now and then 
 rather grievously stumbled, had even barely escaped laying 
 them in the dust. The school had not prospered, had but 
 dwindled to a close. Gedge's health had failed, and, still more, 
 every sign in him of a capacity to publish himself as practical. 
 He had tried several things, he had tried many, but the final 
 appearance was of their having tried him not less. They mostly, 
 at the time I speak of, were trying his successors, while he found 
 himself, with an effect of dull felicity that had come in this case 
 from the mere postponement of change, in charge of the grey 
 town-library of Blackport-on-Dwindle, all granite, fog and female 
 fiction. This was a situation in which his general intelligence 
 acknowledged as his strong point was doubtless conceived, 
 around him, as feeling less of a strain than that mastery of 
 particulars in which he was recognised as weak. 
 
 It was at Blackport-on-Dwindle that the silver shaft reached and 
 pierced him ; it was as an alternative to dispensing dog's-eared 
 volumes the very titles of which, on the lips of innumerable glib 
 girls, were a challenge to his temper, that the wardenship of so 
 different a temple presented itself. The stipend named differed 
 little from the slim wage at present paid him, but even had it 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 181 
 
 been less the interest and the honour would have struck him as 
 determinant. The shrine at which he was to preside though 
 he had always lacked occasion to approach it figured to him 
 as the most sacred known to the steps of men, the early home 
 of the supreme poet, the Mecca of the English-speaking race. 
 The tears came into his eyes sooner still than into his wife's while 
 he looked about with her at their actual narrow prison, so grim 
 with enlightenment, so ugly with industry, so turned away from 
 any dream, so intolerable to any taste. He felt as if a window 
 had opened into a great green woodland, a woodland that had 
 a name, glorious, immortal, that was peopled with vivid figures, 
 each of them renowned, and that gave out a murmur, deep as 
 the sound of the sea, which was the rustle in forest shade of all 
 the poetry, the beauty, the colour of life. It would be prodigious 
 that of this transfigured world he should keep the key. No he 
 couldn't believe it, not even when Isabel, at sight of his face, 
 came and helpfully kissed him. He shook his head with a strange 
 smile. " We shan't get it. Why should we? It's perfect." 
 
 " If we don't he'll simply have been cruel ; which is impossible 
 when he has waited all this time to be kind." Mrs. Gedge did 
 believe she would; since the wide doors of the world of poetry 
 had suddenly pushed back for them it was in the form of poetic 
 justice that they were first to know it. She had her faith in their 
 patron; it was sudden, but it was now complete. "He re- 
 members that's all ; and that's our strength." 
 
 "And what's his?" Gedge asked. " He may want to put us 
 through, but that's a different thing from being able. What are 
 our special advantages ? " 
 
 " Well, that we're just the thing." Her knowledge of the needs 
 of the case was, as yet, thanks to scant information, of the 
 vaguest, and she had never, more than her husband, stood on 
 the sacred spot ; but she saw herself waving a nicely-gloved hand 
 over a collection of remarkable objects and saying to a compact 
 crowd of gaping, awe-struck persons : " And now, please, this 
 way." She even heard herself meeting with promptness and 
 decision an occasional inquiry from a visitor in whom audacity 
 had prevailed over awe. She had been once, with a cousin, 
 years before, to a great northern castle, and that was the way the 
 housekeeper had taken them round. And it was not moreover, 
 either, that she thought of herself as a housekeeper ; she was 
 well above that, and the wave of her hand, wouldn't fail to be 
 such as to show it. This, and much-. lse,' she summed up as 
 she answered her mate. " Out special advantages are that you're 
 a gentleman.," .^4 ,w .,/ * ' 
 
 
 
182 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " Oh ! " said Gedge, as if he had never thought of it, and yet 
 as if too it were scarce worth thinking of. 
 
 " I see it all," she went on ; " they've had\hz vulgar they find 
 they don't do. We're poor and we're modest, but anyone can 
 see what we are." 
 
 Gedge wondered. " Do you mean ? " More modest than 
 
 she, he didn't know quite what she meant. 
 
 " We're refined. We know how to speak." 
 
 " Do we ? " he still, suddenly, wondered. 
 
 But she was, from the first, surer of everything than he ; so that 
 when a few weeks more had elapsed and the shade of uncertainty 
 though it was only a shade had grown almost to sicken him, 
 her triumph was to come with the news that they were fairly 
 named. " We're on poor pay, though we manage " she had on 
 the present occasion insisted on her point. " But we're highly 
 cultivated, and for them to get that, don't you see? without 
 getting too much with it in the way of pretensions and demands, 
 must be precisely their dream. We've no social position, but we 
 don't mind that we haven't, do we ? a bit ; which is because we 
 know the difference between realities and shams. We hold to 
 reality, and that gives us common sense, which the vulgar have 
 less than anything, and which yet must be wanted there, after all, 
 as well as anywhere else." 
 
 Her companion followed her, but musingly, as if his horizon 
 had within a few moments grown so great that he was almost lost 
 in it and required a new orientation. The shining spaces sur- 
 rounded him ; the association alone gave a nobler arch to the sky. 
 "Allow that we hold also a little to the romance, It seems to 
 me that that's the beauty. We've missed it all our life, and now 
 it's come. We shall be at head-quarters for it. We shall have 
 our fill of it." 
 
 She looked at his face, at the effect in it of these prospects, 
 and her own lighted as if he had suddenly grown handsome. 
 " Certainly we shall live as in a fairy-tale. But what I mean is 
 that we shall give, in a way and so gladly quite as much as we 
 get. With all the rest of it we're, for instance, neat." Their letter 
 had come to them at breakfast, and she picked a fly out of the 
 butter-dish. "It's the way we'll keep the place" with which she 
 removed from the sofa to the top of the cottage-piano a tin of 
 biscuits that had refused to squeeze into the cupboard. At 
 Blackport they were in lodgings of the lowest description, she 
 had been known, with a freedom felt by Blackport to be slightly 
 invidious, to declare. The Birthplace and that itself, after such 
 a life, was exaltation wouldn't be lodgings, since a house close 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 183 
 
 beside it was set apart for the warden, a house joining on to it as 
 a sweet old parsonage is often annexed to a quaint old church. 
 It would all together be their home, and such a home as would 
 make a little world that they would never want to leave. She 
 dwelt on the gain, for that matter, to their income ; as, obviously, 
 though the salary was not a change for the better, the house, 
 given them, would make all the difference. He assented to this, 
 but absently, and she was almost impatient at the range of his 
 thoughts. It was as if something, for him the very swarm 
 of them veiled the view ; and he presently, of ihimself, showed 
 what it was. 
 
 "What I can't get over is its being such a man !" He 
 
 almost, from inward emotion, broke down. 
 
 "Such a man ?" 
 
 " Him, him, HIM ! " It was too much. 
 
 " Grant- Jackson ? Yes, it's a surprise, but one sees how he 
 has been meaning, all the while, the right thing by us." 
 
 " I mean Him" Gedge returned more coldly ; " our becoming 
 familiar and intimate for that's what it will come to. We shall 
 just live with Him." 
 
 " Of course it is the beauty." And she added quite gaily : 
 " The more we do the more we shall love Him." 
 
 " No doubt but it's rather awful. The more we know Him," 
 Gedge reflected, " the more we shall love Him. We don't as yet, 
 you see, know Him so very tremendously." 
 
 "We do so quite as well, I imagine, as the sort of people 
 they've had. And that probably isn't unless you care, as we 
 do so awfully necessary. For there are the facts." 
 
 "Yes there are the facts." 
 
 " I mean the principal ones. They're all that the people the 
 people who come want." 
 
 " Yes they must be all they want." 
 
 "So that they're all that those who've been in charge have 
 needed to know." 
 
 " Ah," he said as if it were a question of honour, " we must 
 know everything." 
 
 She cheerfully acceded : she had the merit, he felt, of keeping 
 the case within bounds. "Everything. But about him personally," 
 she added, "there isn't, is there? so very, very much." 
 
 " More, I believe, than there used to be. They've made 
 discoveries." 
 
 It was a grand thought. " Perhaps we shall make some ! " 
 
 " Oh, I shall be content to be a little better up in what has 
 been done." And his eyes rested on a shelf of books, half of 
 
1 84 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 which, little worn but much faded, were of the florid " gift " order 
 and belonged to the house. Of those among them that were his own 
 most were common specimens of the reference sort, not excluding 
 an old Bradshaw and a catalogue of the town -library. "We've 
 not even a Set of our own. Of the Works," he explained in quick 
 repudiation of the sense, perhaps more obvious, in which she 
 might have taken it. 
 
 As a proof of their scant range of possessions this sounded 
 almost abject, till the painful flush with which they met on the 
 admission melted presently into a different glow. It was just for 
 that kind of poorness that their new situation was, by its intrinsic 
 charm, to console them. And Mrs. Gedge had a happy thought. 
 " Wouldn't the Library more or less have them ? " 
 
 " Oh no, we've nothing of that sort : for what do you take 
 us ? " This, however, was but the play of Gedge's high spirits : 
 the form both depression and exhilaration most frequently took 
 with him being a bitterness on the subject of the literary taste of 
 Blackport. No one was so deeply acquainted with it. It acted 
 with him in fact as so lurid a sign of the future that the charm of 
 the thought of removal was sharply enhanced by the prospect of 
 escape from it. The institution he served didn't of course 
 deserve the particular reproach into which his irony had flowered; 
 and indeed if the several Sets in which the Works were present 
 were a trifle dusty, the dust was a little his own fault. To make 
 up for that now he had the vision of immediately giving his time 
 to the study of them; he saw himself indeed, inflamed with a 
 new passion, earnestly commenting and collating. Mrs. Gedge, 
 who had suggested that they ought, till their move should come, 
 to read Him regularly of an evening certain as they were to do 
 it still more when in closer quarters with Him Mrs. Gedge felt 
 also, in her degree, the spell ; so that the very happiest time of 
 their anxious life was perhaps to have been the series of lamplight 
 hours, after supper, in which, alternately taking the book, they 
 declaimed, they almost performed, their beneficent author. He 
 became speedily more than their author their personal friend, 
 their universal light, their final authority and divinity. Where in 
 the world, they were already asking themselves, would they have 
 been without him? By the time their appointment arrived in 
 form their relation to him had immensely developed. It was 
 amusing to Morris Gedge that he had so lately blushed for his 
 ignorance, and he made this remark to his wife during the last 
 hour they were able to give to their study, before proceeding, 
 across half the country, to the scene of their romantic future. It 
 was as if, in deep, close throbs, in cool after-waves that broke of 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 185 
 
 a sudden and bathed his mind, all possession and comprehension 
 and sympathy, all the truth and the life and the story, had come 
 to him, and come, as the newspapers said, to stay. " It's 
 absurd," he didn't hesitate to say, "to talk of our not 'knowing.' 
 So far as we don't it's because we're donkeys. He's in the thing, 
 over His ears, and the more we get into it the more we're with 
 Him. I seem to myself at any rate," he declared, " to see Him 
 in it as if He were painted on the wall." 
 
 "Oh, doesrit one rather, the dear thing? And don't you feel 
 where it is?" Mrs. Gedge finely asked. "We see Him because 
 we love Him that's what we do. How can we not, the old 
 darling with what He's doing for us ? There's no light " she 
 had a sententious turn "like true affection." 
 
 "Yes, I suppose that's it. And yet," her husband mused, "I 
 see, confound me, the faults." 
 
 "That's because you're so critical. You see them, but you 
 don't mind them. You see them, but you forgive them. You 
 mustn't mention them there. We shan't, you know, be there for 
 that." 
 
 " Dear no ! " he laughed : " we'll chuck out anyone who hints 
 at them." 
 
 II 
 
 IF the sweetness of the preliminary months had been great, 
 great too, though almost excessive as agitation, was the wonder 
 of fairly being housed with Him, of treading day and night in 
 the footsteps He had worn, of touching the objects, or at all 
 events the surfaces, the substances, over which His hands had 
 played, which his arms, his shoulders had rubbed, of breathing 
 the air or something not too unlike it in which His voice 
 had sounded. They had had a little at first their bewilderments, 
 their disconcertedness ; the place was both humbler and grander 
 than they had exactly prefigured, more at once of a cottage and 
 of a museum, a little more archaically bare and yet a little more 
 richly official. But the sense was strong with them that the 
 point of view, for the inevitable ease of the connection, patiently, 
 indulgently awaited them; in addition to which, from the first 
 evening, after closing -hour, when the last blank pilgrim had 
 gone, the mere spell, the mystic presence as if they had had it 
 quite to themselves were all they could have desired. They 
 had received, by Grant- Jackson's care and in addition to a table 
 of instructions and admonitions by the number, and in some 
 particulars by the nature, of which they found themselves 
 slightly depressed, various little guides, handbooks, travellers' 
 
1 86 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 tributes, literary memorials and other catch-penny publications, 
 which, however, were to be for the moment swallowed up in the 
 interesting episode of the induction or initiation appointed for 
 them in advance at the hands of several persons whose con- 
 nection with the establishment was, as superior to their own, 
 still more official, and at those in especial of one of the ladies 
 who had for so many years borne the brunt. About the instruc- 
 tions from above, about the shilling books and the well-known 
 facts and the full-blown legend, the supervision, the subjection, 
 the submission, the view as of a cage in which he should circu- 
 late and a groove in which he should slide, Gedge had preserved 
 a certain play of mind; but all power of reaction appeared 
 suddenly to desert him in the presence of his so visibly compe- 
 tent predecessor and as an effect of her good offices. He had 
 not the resource, enjoyed by his wife, of seeing himself, with 
 impatience, attired in black silk of a make characterised by just 
 the right shade of austerity ; so that this firm, smooth, expert and 
 consummately respectable middle-aged person had him somehow, 
 on the whole ground, completely at her mercy. 
 
 It was evidently something of a rueful moment when, as a 
 lesson she being for the day or two still in the field he accepted 
 Miss Putchin's suggestion of " going round " with her and with 
 the successive squads of visitors she was there to deal with. He 
 appreciated her method he saw there had to be one ; he admired 
 her as succinct and definite ; for there were the facts, as his wife 
 had said at Blackport, and they were to be disposed of in the 
 time ; yet he felt like a very little boy as he dangled, more than 
 once, with Mrs. Gedge, at the tail of the human comet. The idea 
 had been that they should, by this attendance, more fully embrace 
 the possible accidents and incidents, as it were, of the relation to 
 the great public in which they were to find themselves ; and the 
 poor man's excited perception of the great public rapidly became 
 such as to resist any diversion meaner than that of the admirable 
 manner of their guide. It wandered from his gaping companions 
 to that of the priestess in black silk, whom he kept asking him- 
 self if either he or Isabel could hope by any possibility ever 
 remotely to resemble ; then it bounded restlessly back to the 
 numerous persons who revealed to him, as it had never yet been 
 revealed, the happy power of the simple to hang upon the lips of 
 the wise. The great thing seemed to be and quite surprisingly 
 that the business was easy and the strain, which as a strain 
 they had feared, moderate ; so that he might have been puzzled, 
 had he fairly caught himself in the act, by his recognising as the 
 last effect of the impression an odd absence of the ability to rest 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 187 
 
 in it, an agitation deep within him that vaguely threatened to 
 grow. " It isn't, you see, so very complicated," the black silk 
 lady seemed to throw off, with everything else, in her neat, crisp, 
 cheerful way ; in spite of which he already, the very first time 
 that is after several parties had been in and out and up and 
 down went so far as to wonder if there weren't more in it than 
 she imagined. She was, so to speak, kindness itself was all 
 encouragement and reassurance ; but it was just her slightly 
 coarse redolence of these very things that, on repetition, before 
 they parted, dimmed a little, as he felt, the light of his acknow- 
 ledging smile. That, again, she took for a symptom of some 
 pleading weakness in him he could never be as brave as she ; 
 so that she wound up with a few pleasant words from the very 
 depth of her experience. " You'll get into it, never fear it will 
 come ; and then you'll feel as if you had never done anything 
 else." He was afterwards to know that, on the spot, at this 
 moment, he must have begun to wince a little at such a menace ; 
 that he might come to feel as if he had never done anything but 
 what Miss Putchin did loomed for him, in germ, as a penalty to 
 pay. The support she offered, none the less, continued to strike 
 him ; she put the whole thing on so sound a basis when she said : 
 " You see they're so nice about it they take such an interest. 
 And they never do a thing they shouldn't. That was always 
 everything to mother and me." "They," Gedge had already 
 noticed, referred constantly and hugely, in the good woman's 
 talk, to the millions who shuffled through the house ; the pronoun 
 in question was forever on her lips, the hordes it represented 
 filled her consciousness, the addition of their numbers ministered 
 to her glory. Mrs. Gedge promptly met her. " It must be 
 indeed delightful to see the effect on so many, and to feel that 
 one may perhaps do something to make it well, permanent." 
 But he was kept silent by his becoming more sharply aware 
 that this was a new view, for him, of the reference made, that 
 he had never thought of the quality of the place as derived 
 from Them, but from Somebody Else, and that They, in short, 
 seemed to have got into the way of crowding out Him. He 
 found himself even a little resenting this for Him, which per- 
 haps had something to do with the slightly invidious cast of 
 his next inquiry. 
 
 " And are They always, as one might say a stupid ? " 
 " Stupid ! " She stared, looking as if no one could be such a 
 thing in such a connection. No one had ever been anything but 
 neat and cheerful and fluent, except to be attentive and unobjec- 
 tionable and, so far as was possible, American. 
 
1 88 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " What I mean is," he explained, " is there any perceptible 
 proportion that take an interest in Him ? " 
 
 His wife stepped on his toe j she deprecated irony. But his 
 mistake fortunately was lost on their friend. " That's just why 
 they come, that they take such an interest. I sometimes think 
 they take more than about anything else in the world." With 
 which Miss Putchin looked about at the place. " It is pretty, 
 don't you think, the way they've got it now ? " This, Gedge saw, 
 was a different " They " ; it applied to the powers that were the 
 people who had appointed him, the governing, visiting Body, in 
 respect to which he was afterwards to remark to Mrs. Gedge that 
 a fellow it was the difficulty didn't know "where to have her." 
 His wife, at a loss, questioned at that moment the necessity of 
 having her anywhere, and he said, good-humouredly, " Of course ; 
 it's all right." He was in fact content enough with the last 
 touches their friend had given the picture. "There are many 
 who know all about it when they come, and the Americans often 
 are tremendously up. Mother and me really enjoyed " it was 
 her only slip " the interest of the Americans. We've sometimes 
 had ninety a day, and all wanting to see and hear everything. 
 But you'll work them off; you'll see the way it's all experi- 
 ence." She came back, for his comfort, to that. She came back 
 also to other things : she did justice to the considerable class 
 who arrived positive and primed. " There are those who know 
 more about it than you do. But that only comes from their 
 interest." 
 
 " Who know more about what ? " Gedge inquired. 
 
 " Why, about the place. I mean they have their ideas of 
 what everything is, and where it is, and what it isn't, and where 
 it should be. They do ask questions," she said, yet not so much 
 in warning as in the complacency of being seasoned and sound ; 
 " and they're down on you when they think you go wrong. As if 
 you ever could ! You know too much," she sagaciously smiled ; 
 " or you will" 
 
 " Oh, you mustn't know too much, must you ? " And Gedge 
 now smiled as well. He knew, he thought, what he meant. 
 
 " Well, you must know as much as anybody else. I claim, at 
 any rate, that I do," Miss Putchin declared. "They never really 
 caught me." 
 
 " I'm very sure of that? Mrs. Gedge said with an elation almost 
 personal. 
 
 "Certainly," he added, "I don't want to be caught." She 
 rejoined that, in such a case, he would have Them down on him, 
 and he saw that this time she meant the powers above. It 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 189 
 
 quickened his sense of all the elements that were to reckon with, 
 yet he felt at the same time that the powers above were not what 
 he should most fear. " I'm glad," he observed, " that they ever 
 ask questions ; but I happened to notice, you know, that no one 
 did to-day." 
 
 " Then you missed several and no loss. There were three or 
 four put to me too silly to remember. But of course they mostly 
 are silly.' 
 
 " You mean the questions ? " 
 
 She laughed with all her cheer. " Yes, sir ; I don't mean the 
 answers." 
 
 Whereupon, for a moment snubbed and silent, he felt like one 
 of the crowd. Then it made him slightly vicious. " I didn't 
 know but you meant the people in general till I remembered 
 that I'm to understand from you that they're wise, only occasionally 
 breaking down." 
 
 It was not really till then, he thought, that she lost patience ; 
 and he had had, much more than he meant no doubt, a cross- 
 questioning air. " You'll see for yourself." Of which he was 
 sure enough. He was in fact so ready to take this that she 
 came round to full accommodation, put it frankly that every now 
 and then they broke out not the silly, oh no, the intensely 
 inquiring. " We've had quite lively discussions, don't you know, 
 about well-known points. They want it all their way, and I 
 know the sort that are going to as soon as I see them. That's 
 one of the things you do you get to know the sorts. And if 
 it's what you're afraid of their taking you up," she was further 
 gracious enough to say, "you needn't mind a bit. What do 
 they know, after all, when for us it's our life ? I've never moved 
 an inch, because, you see, I shouldn't have been here if I didn't 
 know where I was. No more will you be a year hence you 
 know what I mean, putting it impossibly if you don't. I 
 expect you do, in spite of your fancies." And she dropped 
 once more to bed-rock. " There are the facts. Otherwise where 
 would any of us be? That's all you've got to go upon. A 
 person, however cheeky, can't have them his way just because 
 he takes it into his head. There can only be one way, and," 
 she gaily added as she took leave of them, " I'm sure it's quite 
 enough ! " 
 
190 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 III 
 
 GEDGE not only assented eagerly one way was quite enough if 
 it were the right one but repeated it, after this conversation, at 
 odd moments, several times over to his wife. " There can only 
 be one way, one way," he continued to remark though indeed 
 much as if it were a joke ; till she asked him how many more he 
 supposed she wanted. He failed to answer this question, but 
 resorted to another repetition, "There are the facts, the facts," 
 which, perhaps, however, he kept a little more to himself, sound- 
 ing it at intervals in different parts of the house. Mrs. Gedge 
 was full of comment on their clever introductress, though not 
 restrictively save in the matter of her speech, " Me and mother," 
 and a general tone which certainly was not their sort of thing. 
 " I don't know," he said, " perhaps it comes with the place, since 
 speaking in immortal verse doesn't seem to come. It must be, 
 one seems to see, one thing or the other. I dare say that in a 
 few months I shall also be at it ' me and the wife.' " 
 
 " Why not me and the missus at once ? " Mrs. Gedge resent- 
 fully inquired. " I don't think," she observed at another time, 
 " that I quite know what's the matter with you." 
 
 " It's only that I'm excited, awfully excited as I don't see 
 how one can not be. You wouldn't have a fellow drop into this 
 berth as into an appointment at the Post Office. Here on the 
 spot it goes to my head ; how can that be helped ? But we shall 
 live into it, and perhaps," he said with an implication of the 
 other possibility that was doubtless but part of his fine ecstasy, 
 "we shall live through it." The place acted on his imagination 
 how, surely, shouldn't it? And his imagination acted on his 
 nerves, and these things together, with the general vividness and 
 the new and complete immersion, made rest for him almost im- 
 possible, so that he could scarce go to bed at night and even 
 during the first week more than once rose in the small hours to 
 move about, up and down, with his lamp, standing, sitting, listen- 
 ing, wondering, in the stillness, as if positively to recover some 
 echo, to surprise some secret, of the genius loci. He couldn't 
 have explained it and didn't in fact need to explain it, at least 
 to himself, since the impulse simply held him and shook him ; 
 but the time after closing, the time above all after the people 
 Them, as he felt himself on the way to think of them, pre- 
 dominant, insistent, all in the foreground brought him, or ought 
 to have brought him, he seemed to see, nearer to the enshrined 
 Presence, enlarged the opportunity for communion and intensified 
 the sense of it. These nightly prowls, as he called them, were 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 191 
 
 disquieting to his wife, who had no disposition to share in them, 
 speaking with decision of the whole place as just the place to be 
 forbidding after dark. She rejoiced in the distinctness, con- 
 tiguous though it was, of their own little residence, where she 
 trimmed the lamp and stirred the fire and heard the kettle sing, 
 repairing the while the omissions of the small domestic who 
 slept out; she foresaw herself with some promptness, drawing 
 rather sharply the line between her own precinct and that in 
 which the great spirit might walk. It would be with them, the 
 great spirit, all day even if indeed on her making that remark, 
 and in just that form, to her husband, he replied with a queer 
 " But will he though ? " And she vaguely imaged the develop- 
 ment of a domestic antidote after a while, precisely, in the shape 
 of curtains more markedly drawn and everything most modern 
 and lively, tea, "patterns," the newspapers, the female fiction 
 itself that they had reacted against at Blackport, quite defiantly 
 cultivated. 
 
 These possibilities, however, were all right, as her companion 
 said it was, all the first autumn they had arrived at summer's 
 end ; as if he were more than content with a special set of his own 
 that he had access to from behind, passing out of their low door 
 for the few steps between it and the Birthplace. With his lamp 
 ever so carefully guarded, and his nursed keys that made him 
 free of treasures, he crossed the dusky interval so often that she 
 began to qualify it as a habit that "grew." She spoke of it 
 almost as if he had taken to drink, and he humoured that 
 view of it by confessing that the cup was strong. This had been 
 in truth, altogether, his immediate sense of it ; strange and deep 
 for him the spell of silent sessions before familiarity and, to 
 some small extent, disappointment had set in. The exhibitional 
 side of the establishment had struck him, even on arrival, as 
 qualifying too much its character ; he scarce knew what he might 
 best have looked for, but the three or four rooms bristled over- 
 much, in the garish light of day, with busts and relics, not even 
 ostensibly always His, old prints and old editions, old objects 
 fashioned in His likeness, furniture "of the time" and auto- 
 graphs of celebrated worshippers. In the quiet hours and the 
 deep dusk, none the less, under the play of the shifted lamp and 
 that of his own emotion, these things too recovered their advan- 
 tage, ministered to the mystery, or at all events to the impression, 
 seemed consciously to offer themselves as personal to the poet. 
 Not one of them was really or unchallengeably so, but they had 
 somehow, through long association, got, as Gedge always phrased 
 it, into the secret, and it was about the secret he asked them 
 
192 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 while he restlessly wandered. It was not till months had elapsed 
 that he found how little they had to tell him, and he was quite 
 at his ease with them when he knew they were by no means 
 where his sensibility had first placed them. They were as out 
 of it as he ; only, to do them justice, they had made him im- 
 mensely feel. And still, too, it was not they who had done 
 that most, since his sentiment had gradually cleared itself to 
 deep, to deeper refinements. 
 
 The Holy of Holies of the Birthplace was the low, the sub- 
 lime Chamber of Birth, sublime because, as the Americans 
 usually said unlike the natives they mostly found words it was 
 so pathetic; and pathetic because it was well, really nothing 
 else in the world that one could name, number or measure. It 
 was as empty as a shell of which the kernel has withered, and 
 contained neither busts nor prints nor early copies ; it contained 
 only the Fact the Fact itself which, as he stood sentient there 
 at midnight, our friend, holding his breath, allowed to sink into 
 him. He had to take it as the place where the spirit would most 
 walk and where he would therefore be most to be met, with 
 possibilities of recognition and reciprocity. He hadn't, most 
 probably He hadn't much inhabited the room, as men weren't 
 apt, as a rule, to convert to their later use and involve in their 
 wider fortune the scene itself of their nativity. But as there 
 were moments when, in the conflict of theories, the sole 
 certainty surviving for the critic threatened to be that He had 
 not unlike other successful men not been born, so Gedge, 
 though little of a critic, clung to the square feet of space that 
 connected themselves, however feebly, with the positive appear- 
 ance. He was little of a critic he was nothing of one; he 
 hadn't pretended to the character before coming, nor come to 
 pretend to it; also, luckily for him, he was seeing day by day 
 how little use he could possibly have for it. It would be to him, 
 the attitude of a high expert, distinctly a stumbling-block, and 
 that he rejoiced, as the winter waned, in his ignorance, was one 
 of the propositions he betook himself, in his odd manner, to 
 enunciating to his wife. She denied it, for hadn't she, in the first 
 place, been present, wasn't she still present, at his pious, his tire- 
 less study of everything connected with the subject ? so present 
 that she had herself learned more about it than had ever seemed 
 likely. Then, in the second place, he was not to proclaim on 
 the housetops any point at which he might be weak, for who 
 knew, if it should get abroad that they were ignorant, what effect 
 might be produced ? 
 
 " On the attraction "he took her up" of the Show ? " 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 193 
 
 He had fallen into the harmless habit of speaking of the 
 place as the " Show " ; but she didn't mind this so much as to be 
 diverted by it. " No ; on the attitude of the Body. You know 
 they're pleased with us, and I don't see why you should want to 
 spoil it. We got in by a tight squeeze you know we've had 
 evidence of that, and that it was about as much as our backers 
 could manage. But we're proving a comfort to them, and it's 
 absurd of you to question your suitability to people who were 
 content with the Putchins." 
 
 "I don't, my dear," he returned, "question anything; but 
 if I should do so it would be precisely because of the greater 
 advantage constituted for the Putchins by the simplicity of their 
 spirit. They were kept straight by the quality of their ignorance 
 which was denser even than mine. It was a mistake in us, 
 from the first, to have attempted to correct or to disguise ours. 
 We should have waited simply to become good parrots, to learn 
 our lesson all on the spot here, so little of it is wanted and 
 squawk it off." 
 
 "Ah, 'squawk,' love what a word to use about Him !" 
 
 " It isn't about Him nothing's about Him. None of Them 
 care tuppence about Him. The only thing They care about 
 is this empty shell or rather, for it isn't empty, the extraneous, 
 preposterous stuffing of it." 
 
 " Preposterous ? " he made her stare with this as he had not 
 yet done. 
 
 At sight of her look, however the gleam, as it might have 
 been, of a queer suspicion he bent to her kindly and tapped 
 her cheek. "Oh, it's all right. We must fall back on the 
 Putchins. Do you remember what she said? 'They've made 
 it so pretty now.' They have made it pretty, and it's a first-rate 
 show. It's a first-rate show and a first-rate billet, and He was 
 a first-rate poet, and you're a first-rate woman to put up so 
 sweetly, I mean, with my nonsense." 
 
 She appreciated his domestic charm and she justified that 
 part of his tribute which concerned herself. " I don't care how 
 much of your nonsense you talk to me, so long as you keep 
 it all for me and don't treat Them to it." 
 
 "The pilgrims? No," he conceded "it isn't fair to Them. 
 They mean well." 
 
 " What complaint have we, after all, to make of Them so long 
 as They don't break off bits as They used, Miss Putchin told us, 
 so awfully to conceal about Their Persons ? She broke them at 
 least of that." 
 
 " Yes," Gedge mused again ; " I wish awfully she hadn't ! " 
 
194 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 "You would like the relics destroyed, removed? That's all 
 that's wanted ! " 
 
 " There are no relics." 
 
 " There won't be any soon, unless you take care." But he 
 was already laughing, and the talk was not dropped without his 
 having patted her once more. An impression or two, however, 
 remained with her from it, as he saw from a question she asked 
 him on the morrow. "What did you mean yesterday about 
 Miss Putchin's simplicity its keeping her 'straight'? Do you 
 mean mentally?" 
 
 Her " mentally " was rather portentous, but he practically con- 
 fessed. " Well, it kept her up. I mean," he amended, laughing, 
 "it kept her down." 
 
 It was really as if she had been a little uneasy. " You consider 
 there's a danger of your being affected? You know what I 
 mean. Of its going to your head. You do know," she insisted 
 as he said nothing. " Through your caring for him so. You'd 
 certainly be right in that case about its having been a mistake for 
 you to plunge so deep." And then as his listening without reply, 
 though with his look a little sad for her, might have denoted that, 
 allowing for extravagance of statement, he saw there was some- 
 thing in it : " Give up your prowls. Keep it for daylight. Keep 
 it for Them." 
 
 " Ah," he smiled, " if one could ! My prowls," he added, " are 
 what I most enjoy. They're the only time, as I've told you 
 before, that I'm really with Him. Then I don't see the place. 
 He isn't the place." 
 
 "I don't care for what you 'don't' see," she replied with 
 vivacity ; " the question is of what you do see." 
 
 Well, if it was, he waited before meeting it. " Do you know 
 what I sometimes do?" And then as she waited too: "In the 
 Birthroom there, when I look in late, I often put out my light. 
 That makes it better." 
 
 " Makes what ? " 
 
 " Everything." 
 
 " What is it then you see in the dark ? " 
 
 "Nothing !" said Morris Gedge. 
 
 "And what's the pleasure of that?" 
 
 " Well, what the American ladies say. It's so fascinating." 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 195 
 
 IV 
 
 THE autumn was brisk, as Miss Putchin had told them it would 
 be, but business naturally fell off with the winter months and the 
 short days. There was rarely an hour indeed without a call of 
 some sort, and they were never allowed to forget that they kept 
 the shop in all the world, as they might say, where custom was 
 least fluctuating. The seasons told on it, as they tell upon travel, 
 but no other influence, consideration or convulsion to which the 
 population of the globe is exposed. This population, never 
 exactly in simultaneous hordes, but in a full, swift and steady 
 stream, passed through the smoothly-working mill and went, in its 
 variety of degrees duly impressed and edified, on its artless way. 
 Gedge gave himself up, with much ingenuity of spirit, to trying to 
 keep in relation with it ; having even at moments, in the early 
 time, glimpses of the chance that the impressions gathered from 
 so rare an opportunity for contact with the general mind might 
 prove as interesting as anything else in the connection. Types, 
 classes, nationalities, manners, diversities of behaviour, modes of 
 seeing, feeling, of expression, would pass before him and become 
 for him, after a fashion, the experience of an untravelled man. 
 His journeys had been short and saving, but poetic justice again 
 seemed inclined to work for him in placing him just at the point 
 in all Europe perhaps where the confluence of races was thickest. 
 The theory, at any rate, carried him on, operating helpfully for 
 the term of his anxious beginnings and gilding in a manner it 
 was the way he characterised the case to his wife the somewhat 
 stodgy gingerbread of their daily routine. They had not known 
 many people, and their visiting-list was small which made it 
 again poetic justice that they should be visited on such a scale. 
 They dressed and were at home, they were under arms and 
 received, and except for the offer of refreshment and Gedge had 
 his view that there would eventually be a buffet farmed out to a 
 great firm their hospitality would have made them princely if mere 
 hospitality ever did. Thus they were launched, and it was 
 interesting, and from having been ready to drop, originally, with 
 fatigue, they emerged even-winded and strong in the legs, as if 
 they had had an Alpine holiday. This experience, Gedge opined, 
 also represented, as a gain, a like seasoning of the spirit by which 
 he meant a certain command of impenetrable patience. 
 
 The patience was needed for the particular feature of the ordeal 
 that, by the time the lively season was with them again, had dis- 
 engaged itself as the sharpest the immense assumption of 
 veracities and sanctities, of the general soundness of the legend 
 
196 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 with which everyone arrived. He was well provided, certainly, 
 for meeting it, and he gave all he had, yet he had sometimes the 
 sense of a vague resentment on the part of his pilgrims at his not 
 ladling out their fare with a bigger spoon. An irritation had 
 begun to grumble in him during the comparatively idle months of 
 winter when a pilgrim would turn up singly. The pious in- 
 dividual, entertained for the half-hour, had occasionally seemed to 
 offer him the promise of beguilement or the semblance of a 
 personal relation ; it came back again to the few pleasant calls he 
 had received in the course of a life almost void of social amenity. 
 Sometimes he liked the person, the face, the speech : an educated 
 man, a gentleman, not one of the herd ; a graceful woman, vague, 
 accidental, unconscious of him, but making him wonder, while he 
 hovered, who she was. These chances represented for him light 
 yearnings and faint flutters ; they acted indeed, within him, in a 
 special, an extraordinary way. He would have liked to talk with 
 such stray companions, to talk with them really ', to talk with them 
 as he might have talked if he had met them where he couldn't meet 
 them at dinner, in the "world," on a visit at a country-house. 
 Then he could have said and about the shrine and the idol 
 always things he couldn't say now. The form in which his 
 irritation first came to him was that of his feeling obliged to say 
 to them to the single visitor, even when sympathetic, quite as to 
 the gaping group the particular things, a dreadful dozen or so, 
 that they expected. If he had thus arrived at characterising these 
 things as dreadful the reason touches the very point that, for 
 a while turning everything over, he kept dodging, not facing, 
 trying to ignore. The point was that he was on his way to 
 become two quite different persons, the public and the private, 
 and yet that it would somehow have to be managed that these 
 persons should live together. He was splitting into halves, unmis- 
 takeably he who, whatever else he had been, had at least always 
 been so entire and, in his way, so solid. One of the halves, or 
 perhaps even, since the split promised to be rather unequal, one 
 of the quarters, was the keeper, the showman, the priest of the 
 idol ; the other piece was the poor unsuccessful honest man he 
 had always been. 
 
 There are moments when he recognised this primary character 
 as he had never done before ; when he in fact quite shook in his 
 shoes at the idea that it perhaps had in reserve some supreme 
 assertion of its identity. It was honest, verily, just by reason of 
 the possibility. It was poor and unsuccessful because here it was 
 just on the verge of quarrelling with its bread and butter. Salva- 
 tion would be of course the salvation of the showman rigidly 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 197 
 
 to keep it on the verge ; not to let it, in other words, overpass by 
 an inch. He might count on this, he said to himself, if there 
 weren't any public if there weren't thousands of people demand- 
 ing of him what he was paid for. He saw the approach of the 
 stage at which they would affect him, the thousands of people 
 and perhaps even more the earnest individual as coming really to 
 see if he were earning his wage. Wouldn't he soon begin to fancy 
 them in league with the Body, practically deputed by it given, no 
 doubt, a kindled suspicion to look in and report observations ? 
 It was the way he broke down with the lonely pilgrim that led to 
 his first heart-searchings broke down as to the courage required 
 for damping an uncritical faith. What they all most wanted was 
 to feel that everything was "just as it was"; only the shock of 
 having to part with that vision was greater than any individual 
 could bear unsupported. The bad moments were upstairs in the 
 Birthroom, for here the forces pressing on the very edge assumed 
 a dire intensity. The mere expression of eye, all-credulous, 
 omnivorous and fairly moistening in the act, with which many 
 persons gazed about, might eventually make it difficult for him to 
 remain fairly civil. Often they came in pairs sometimes one 
 had come before and then they explained to each other. He 
 never in that case corrected ; he listened, for the lesson of listen- 
 ing : after which he would remark to his wife that there was no end 
 to what he was learning. He saw that if he should really ever 
 break down it would be with her he would begin. He had given 
 her hints and digs enough, but she was so inflamed with apprecia- 
 tion that she either didn't feel them or pretended not to under- 
 stand. 
 
 This was the greater complication that, with the return of the 
 spring and the increase of the public, her services were more 
 required. She took the field with him, from an early hour ; she 
 was present with the party above while he kept an eye, and still 
 more an ear, on the party below ; and how could he know, he asked 
 himself, what she might say to them and what she might suffer 
 Them to say or in other words, poor wretches, to believe while 
 removed from his control? Some day or other, and before too 
 long, he couldn't but think, he must have the matter out with her 
 the matter, namely, of the morality of their position. The 
 morality of women was special he was getting lights on that. 
 Isabel's conception of her office was to cherish and enrich the 
 legend. It was already, the legend, very taking, but what was she 
 there for but to make it more so ? She certainly wasn't there to 
 chill any natural piety. If it was all in the air all in their " eye," 
 as the vulgar might say that He had been born in the Birth- 
 
i 9 8 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 room, where was the value of the sixpences they took ? where the 
 equivalent they had engaged to supply? "Oh dear, yes just 
 about here "; and she must tap the place with her foot. " Altered? 
 Oh dear, no save in a few trifling particulars ; you see the place 
 and isn't that just the charm of it ? quite as He saw it. Very 
 poor and homely, no doubt; but that's just what's so wonderful." 
 He didn't want to hear her, and yet he didn't want to give her 
 her head ; he didn't want to make difficulties or to snatch the 
 bread from her mouth. But he must none the less give her a 
 warning before they had gone too far. That was the way, one 
 evening in June, he put it to her ; the affluence, with the finest 
 weather, having lately been of the largest, and the crowd, all day, 
 fairly gorged with the story. " We mustn't, you know, go too far." 
 
 The odd thing was that she had now ceased to be even 
 conscious of what troubled him she was so launched in her own 
 career. " Too far for what ? " 
 
 "To save our immortal souls. We mustn't, love, tell too 
 many lies." 
 
 She looked at him with dire reproach. " Ah now, are you 
 going to begin again ? " 
 
 " I never have begun ; I haven't wanted to worry you. But, 
 you know, we don't know anything about it." And then as she 
 stared, flushing: "About His having been born up there. About 
 anything, really. Not the least little scrap that would weigh, in 
 any other connection, as evidence. So don't rub it in so." 
 
 "Rub it in how?" 
 
 " That He was born " But at sight of her face he only 
 
 sighed. " Oh dear, oh dear ! " 
 
 " Don't you think," she replied cuttingly, " that He was born 
 anywhere ? " 
 
 He hesitated it was such an edifice to shake. "Well, we 
 don't know. There's very little to know. He covered His tracks 
 as no other human being has ever done." 
 
 She was still in her public costume and had not taken off the 
 gloves that she made a point of wearing as a part of that uniform ; 
 she remembered how the rustling housekeeper in the Border 
 castle, on whom she had begun by modelling herself, had worn 
 them. She seemed official and slightly distant. " To cover His 
 tracks. He must have had to exist. Have we got to give that up?" 
 
 " No, I don't ask you to give it up yet. But there's very little 
 to go upon." 
 
 " And is that what I'm to tell Them in return for everything ? " 
 
 Gedge waited he walked about. The place was doubly still 
 after the bustle of the day, and the summer evening rested on 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 199 
 
 it as a blessing, making it, in its small state and ancientry, 
 mellow and sweet. It was good to be there, and it would be 
 good to stay. At the same time there was something incalculable 
 in the effect on one's nerves of the great gregarious density. 
 That was an attitude that had nothing to do with degrees and 
 shades, the attitude of wanting all or nothing. And you couldn't 
 talk things over with it. You could only do this with friends, and 
 then but in cases where you were sure the friends wouldn't betray 
 you. " Couldn't you adopt," he replied at last, " a slightly more 
 discreet method? What we can say is that things have been 
 said; that's all we have to do with. ' And is this really ' when 
 they jam their umbrellas into the floor ' the very spot where He 
 was born ? ' c So it has, from a long time back, been described 
 as being.' Couldn't one meet Them, to be decent a little, in 
 some such way as that ? " 
 
 She looked at him very hard. " Is that the way you meet 
 them?" 
 
 " No ; I've kept on lying without scruple, without shame." 
 
 " Then why do you haul me up ? " 
 
 " Because it has seemed to me that we might, like true com- 
 panions, work it out a little together." 
 
 This was not strong, he felt, as, pausing with his hands in his 
 pockets, he stood before her ; and he knew it as weaker still 
 after she had looked at him a minute. " Morris Gedge, I propose 
 to be your true companion, and I've come here to stay. That's 
 all I've got to say." It was not, however, for " You had better 
 try yourself and see," she presently added. " Give the place, 
 give the story away, by so much as a look, and well, I'd allow 
 you about nine days. Then you'd see." 
 
 He feigned, to gain time, an innocence. "They'd take it 
 so ill ? " And then, as she said nothing : " They'd turn and rend 
 me ? They'd tear me to pieces ? " 
 
 But she wouldn't make a joke of it. "They wouldn't have it, 
 simply." 
 
 " No they wouldn't. That's what I say. They won't." 
 
 "You had better," she went on, "begin with Grant- Jackson. 
 But even that isn't necessary. It would get to him, it would get 
 to the Body, like wildfire." 
 
 "I see," said poor Gedge. And indeed for the moment he 
 did see, while his companion followed up what she believed her 
 advantage. 
 
 " Do you consider it's all a fraud ? " 
 
 " Well, I grant you there was somebody. But the details are 
 naught. The links are missing. The evidence in particular 
 
200 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 about that room upstairs, in itself our Casa Santa is nil. It 
 was so awfully long ago." Which he knew again sounded weak. 
 
 "Of course it was awfully long ago that's just the beauty 
 and the interest. Tell Them, ^//Thern," she continued, " that the 
 evidence is nil, and I'll tell them something else." She spoke it 
 with such meaning that his face seemed to show a question, to 
 which she was on the spot of replying " I'll tell them that you're 
 
 a " She stopped, however, changing it. " I'll them exactly 
 
 the opposite. And I'll find out what you say it won't take 
 long to do it. If we tell different stories, that possibly may 
 save us." 
 
 " I see what you mean. It would perhaps, as an oddity, have 
 a success of curiosity. It might become a draw. Still, they but 
 want broad masses." And he looked at her sadly. "You're 
 no more than one of Them." 
 
 "If it's being no more than one of them to love it," she 
 answered, " then I certainly am. And I am not ashamed of my 
 company." 
 
 "To love what?" said Morris Gedge. 
 
 " To love to think He was born there." 
 
 " You think too much. It's bad for you." He turned away 
 with his chronic moan. But it was without losing what she called 
 after him. 
 
 " I decline to let the place down." And what was there indeed 
 to say ? They were there to keep it up. 
 
 HE kept it up through the summer, but with the queerest con- 
 sciousness, at times, of the want of proportion between his secret 
 rage and the spirit of those from whom the friction came. He 
 said to himself so sore as his sensibility had grown that They 
 were gregariously ferocious at the very time he was seeing Them 
 as individually mild. He said to himself that They were mild 
 only because he was he flattered himself that he was divinely 
 so, considering what he might be; and that he should, as his 
 wife had warned him, soon enough have news of it were he to 
 deflect by a hair's breadth from the line traced for him. That 
 was the collective fatuity that it was capable of turning, on the 
 instant, both to a general and to a particular resentment. Since 
 the least breath of discrimination would get him the sack with- 
 out mercy, it was absurd, he reflected, to speak of his dis- 
 comfort as light. He was gagged, he was goaded, as in om- 
 nivorous companies he doubtless sometimes showed by a strange 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 201 
 
 silent glare. They would get him the sack for that as well, if he 
 didn't look out ; therefore wasn't it in effect ferocity when you 
 mightn't even hold your tongue? They wouldn't let you off 
 with silence They insisted on your committing yourself. It was 
 the pound of flesh They would have it ; so under his coat he 
 bled. But a wondrous peace, by exception, dropped on him one 
 afternoon at the end of August. The pressure had, as usual, 
 been high, but it had diminished with the fall of day, and the 
 place was empty before the hour for closing. Then it was that, 
 within a few minutes of this hour, there presented themselves 
 a pair of pilgrims to whom in the ordinary course he would have 
 remarked that they were, to his regret, too late. He was to 
 wonder afterwards why the course had, at sight of the visitors 
 a gentleman and a lady, appealing and fairly young shown for 
 him as other than ordinary; the consequence sprang doubtless 
 from something rather fine and unnameable, something, for 
 instance, in the tone of the young man, or in the light of his eye, 
 after hearing the statement on the subject of the hour. " Yes, 
 we know it's late ; but it's just, I'm afraid, because of that We've 
 had rather a notion of escaping the crowd as, I suppose, you 
 mostly have one now ; and it was really on the chance of finding 
 
 you alone ! " 
 
 These things the young man said before being quite admitted, 
 and they were words that any one might have spoken who had 
 not taken the trouble to be punctual or who desired, a little 
 ingratiatingly, to force the door. Gedge even guessed at the 
 sense that might lurk in them, the hint of a special tip if the 
 point were stretched. There were no tips, he had often thanked 
 his stars, at the Birthplace ; there was the charged fee and 
 nothing more ; everything else was out of order, to the relief of 
 a palm not formed by nature for a scoop. Yet in spite of every- 
 thing, in spite especially of the almost audible chink of the 
 gentleman's sovereigns, which might in another case exactly have 
 put him out, he presently found himself, in the Birthroom, access 
 to which he had gracefully enough granted, almost treating the 
 visit as personal and private. The reason well, the reason 
 would have been, if anywhere, in something naturally persuasive 
 on the part of the couple, unless it had been, rather, again, in the 
 way the young man, once he was in the place, met the caretaker's 
 expression of face, held it a moment and seemed to wish to 
 sound it. That they were Americans was promptly clear, and 
 Gedge could very nearly have told what kind ; he had arrived at 
 the point of distinguishing kinds, though the difficulty might 
 have been with him now that the case before him was rare. He 
 
202 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 saw it, in fact, suddenly, in the light of the golden midland 
 evening, which reached them through low old windows, saw 
 it with a rush of feeling, unexpected and smothered, that made 
 him wish for a moment to keep it before him as a case of in- 
 ordinate happiness. It made him feel old, shabby, poor, but he 
 watched it no less intensely for its doing so. They were children 
 of fortune, of the greatest, as it might seem to Morris Gedge, 
 and they were of course lately married ; the husband, smooth- 
 faced and soft, but resolute and fine, several years older than the 
 wife, and the wife vaguely, delicately, irregularly, but mercilessly 
 pretty. Somehow, the world was theirs; they gave the person 
 who took the sixpences at the Birthplace such a sense of the 
 high luxury of freedom as he had never had. The thing was 
 that the world was theirs not simply because they had money 
 he had seen rich people enough but because they could in 
 a supreme degree think and feel and say what they liked. They 
 had a nature and a culture, a tradition, a facility of some sort 
 and all producing in them an effect of positive beauty that 
 gave a light to their liberty and an ease to their tone. These 
 things moreover suffered nothing from the fact that they 
 happened to be in mourning ; this was probably worn for some 
 lately-deceased opulent father, or some delicate mother who 
 would be sure to have been a part of the source of the beauty, 
 and it affected Gedge, in the gathered twilight and at his odd 
 crisis, as the very uniform of their distinction. 
 
 He couldn't quite have said afterwards by what steps the point 
 had been reached, but it had become at the end of five minutes 
 a part of their presence in the Birthroom, a part of the young 
 man's look, a part of the charm of the moment, and a part, 
 above all, of a strange sense within him of " Now or never ! " 
 that Gedge had suddenly, thrillingly, let himself go. He had 
 not been definitely conscious of drifting to it ; he had been, for 
 that, too conscious merely of thinking how different, in all their 
 range, were such a united couple from another united couple that 
 he knew. They were everything he and his wife were not ; this 
 was more than anything else the lesson at first of their talk. 
 Thousands of couples of whom the same was true certainly had 
 passed before him, but none of whom it was true with just that 
 engaging intensity. This was because of their transcendent free- 
 dom ; that was what, at the end of five minutes, he saw it all 
 come back to. The husband had been there at some earlier 
 time, and he had his impression, which he wished now to make 
 his wife share. But he already, Gedge could see, had not 
 concealed it from her. A pleasant irony, in fine, our friend 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 203 
 
 seemed to taste in the air he who had not yet felt free to taste 
 his own. 
 
 " I think you weren't here four years ago " that was what the 
 young man had almost begun by remarking. Gedge liked his 
 remembering it, liked his frankly speaking to him ; all the more 
 that he had given him, as it were, no opening. He had let them 
 look about below, and then had taken them up, but without 
 words, without the usual showman's song, of which he would 
 have been afraid. The visitors didn't ask for it ; the young man 
 had taken the matter out of his hands by himself dropping for 
 the benefit of the young woman a few detached remarks. What 
 Gedge felt, oddly, was that these remarks were not inconsiderate 
 of him ; he had heard others, both of the priggish order and the 
 crude, that might have been called so. And as the young man 
 had not been aided to this cognition of him as new, it already 
 began to make for them a certain common ground. The ground 
 became immense when the visitor presently added with a smile : 
 "There was a good lady, I recollect, who had a great deal to 
 say." 
 
 It was the gentleman's smile that had done it ; the irony was 
 there. "Ah, there has been a great deal said." And Gedge's 
 look at his interlocutor doubtless showed his sense of being 
 sounded. It was extraordinary of course that a perfect stranger 
 should have guessed the travail of his spirit, should have caught 
 the gleam of his inner commentary. That probably, in spite of 
 him, leaked out of his poor old eyes. "Much of it, in such 
 places as this," he heard himself adding, " is of course said very 
 irresponsibly." Such places as this ! he winced at the words as 
 soon as he had uttered them. 
 
 There was no wincing, however, on the part of his pleasant 
 companions. "Exactly so; the whole thing becomes a sort of 
 stiff, smug convention, like a dressed-up sacred doll in a Spanish 
 church which you're a monster if you touch." [ 
 
 " A monster," said Gedge, meeting his eyes. 
 
 The young man smiled, but he thought he looked at him a 
 little harder. " A blasphemer." 
 
 "A blasphemer." 
 
 It seemed to do his visitor good he certainly was looking at 
 him harder. Detached as he was he was interested he was at 
 least amused. " Then you don't claim, or at any rate you don't 
 insist ? I mean you personally." 
 
 He had an identity for him, Gedge felt, that he couldn't have 
 had for a Briton, and the impulse was quick in our friend to 
 testify to this perception. " I don't insist to you" 
 
204 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 The young man laughed. " It really I assure you if I may 
 wouldn't do any good. I'm too awfully interested." 
 
 "Do you mean," his wife lightly inquired, "in a pulling it 
 down ? That is in what you've said to me." 
 
 "Has he said to you," Gedge intervened, though quaking a 
 little, " that he would like to pull it down ? " 
 
 She met, in her free sweetness, this directness with such a 
 charm ! " Oh, perhaps not quite the house / " 
 
 " Good. You see we live on it I mean we people." 
 
 The husband had laughed, but had now so completely ceased 
 to look about him that there seemed nothing left for him but 
 to talk avowedly with the caretaker. "I'm interested," he ex- 
 plained, "in what, I think, is the interesting thing or at all 
 events the eternally tormenting one. The fact of the abyssmally 
 little that, in proportion, we know." 
 
 " In proportion to what ? " his companion asked. 
 
 " Well, to what there must have been to what in fact there 
 is to wonder about. That's the interest; its immense. He 
 escapes us like a thief -at night, carrying off well, carrying off 
 everything. And people pretend to catch Him like a flown 
 canary, over whom you can close your hand and put Him back. 
 He won't go back ; he won't come back. He's not " the young 
 man laughed " such a fool ! It makes Him the happiest of all 
 great men." 
 
 He had begun by speaking to his wife, but had ended, with 
 his friendly, his easy, his indescribable competence, for Gedge 
 poor Gedge who quite held his breath and who felt, in the most 
 unexpected way, that he had somehow never been in such good 
 society. The young wife, who for herself meanwhile had con- 
 tinued to look about, sighed out, smiled out Gedge couldn't 
 have told which her little answer to these remarks. " It's rather 
 a pity, you know, that He isn't here. I mean as Goethe's at 
 Weimar. For Goethe is at Weimar." 
 
 "Yes, my dear; that's Goethe's bad luck. There he sticks. 
 This man isn't anywhere. I defy you to catch Him." 
 
 " Why not say, beautifully," the young woman laughed, "that, 
 like the wind, He's everywhere ? " 
 
 It wasn't of course the tone of discussion, it was the tone of 
 joking, though of better joking, Gedge seemed to feel, and more 
 within his own appreciation, than he had ever listened to ; and 
 this was precisely why the young man could go on without the 
 effect of irritation, answering his wife but still with eyes for their 
 companion. " I'll be hanged if He's here I " 
 
 It was almost as if he were taken that is, struck and rather 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 205 
 
 held by their companion's unruffled state, which they hadn't 
 meant to ruffle, but which suddenly presented its interest, perhaps 
 even projected its light. The gentleman didn't know, Gedge 
 was afterwards to say to himself, how that hypocrite was inwardly 
 all of a tremble, how it seemed to him that his fate was being 
 literally pulled down on his head. He was trembling for the 
 moment certainly too much to speak ; abject he might be, but 
 he didn't want his voice to have the absurdity of a quaver. And 
 the young woman charming creature ! still had another word. 
 It was for the guardian of the spot, and she made it, in her way, 
 delightful. They had remained in the Holy of Holies, and she 
 had been looking for a minute, with a ruefulness just marked 
 enough to be pretty, at the queer old floor. "Then if you say 
 it wasn't in this room He was born well, what's the use ? " 
 
 "What's the use of what?" her husband asked. "The use, 
 you mean, of our coming here ? Why, the place is charming in 
 itself. And it's also interesting," he added to Gedge, " to know 
 how you get on." 
 
 Gedge looked at him a moment in silence, but he answered the 
 young woman first. If poor Isabel, he was thinking, could only 
 have been like that! not as to youth, beauty, arrangement of 
 hair or picturesque grace of hat these things he didn't mind; 
 but as to sympathy, facility, light perceptive, and yet not cheap, 
 detachment ! "I don't say it wasn't but I don't say it was" 
 
 "Ah, but doesn't that," she returned, "come very much to the 
 same thing ? And don't They want also to see where He had His 
 dinner and where He had His tea ? " 
 
 " They want everything," said Morris Gedge. " They want to 
 see where He hung up His hat and where He kept His boots and 
 where His mother boiled her pot." 
 
 " But if you don't show them ? " 
 
 " They show me. It's in all their little books." 
 
 "You mean," the husband asked, "that you've only to hold 
 your tongue ? " 
 
 " I try to," said Gedge. 
 
 " Well," his visitor smiled, " I see you can. 19 
 
 Gedge hesitated. " I can't." 
 
 " Oh, well," said his friend, " what does it matter ? " 
 
 " I do speak," he continued. " I can't sometimes not." 
 
 " Then how do you get on ? " 
 
 Gedge looked at him more abjectly, to his own sense, than he 
 had ever looked at anyone even at Isabel when she frightened 
 him. " I don't get on. I speak," he said, " since I've spoken to 
 you." 
 
206 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " Oh, we shan't hurt you ! " the young man reassuringly 
 laughed. 
 
 The twilight meanwhile had sensibly thickened ; the end of the 
 visit was indicated. They turned together out of the upper room, 
 and came down the narrow stair. The words just exchanged 
 might have been felt as producing an awkwardness which the 
 young woman gracefully felt the impulse to dissipate. "You 
 must rather wonder why we've come." And it was the first 
 note, for Gedge, of a further awkwardness as if he had definitely 
 heard it make the husband's hand, in a full pocket, begin to 
 fumble. 
 
 It was even a little awkwardly that the husband still held off. 
 " Oh, we like it as it is. There's always something? With which 
 they had approached the door of egress. 
 
 " What is there, please ? " asked Morris Gedge, not yet open- 
 ing the door, as he would fain have kept the pair on, and con- 
 scious only for a moment after he had spoken that his question 
 was just having, for the young man, too dreadfully wrong a sound. 
 This personage wondered, yet feared, had evidently for some 
 minutes been asking himself; so that, with his preoccupation, the 
 caretaker's words had represented to him, inevitably, "What is 
 there, please, for me 1 " Gedge already knew, with it, moreover, 
 that he wasn't stopping him in time. He had put his question, 
 to show he himself wasn't afraid, and he must have had in 
 consequence, he was subsequently to reflect, a lamentable air of 
 waiting. 
 
 The visitor's hand came out. " I hope I may take the 
 
 liberty ?" What afterwards happened our friend scarcely 
 
 knew, for it fell into a slight confusion, the confusion of a queer 
 gleam of gold a sovereign fairly thrust at him ; of a quick, almost 
 violent motion on his own part, which, to make the matter worse, 
 might well have sent the money rolling on the floor ; and then of 
 marked blushes all round, and a sensible embarrassment; pro- 
 ducing indeed, in turn, rather oddly, and ever so quickly, an 
 increase of communion. It was as if the young man had offered 
 him money to make up to him for having, as it were, led him on, 
 and then, perceiving the mistake, but liking him the better for his 
 refusal, had wanted to obliterate this aggravation of his original 
 wrong. He had done so, presently, while Gedge got the door 
 open, by saying the best thing he could, and by saying it frankly 
 and gaily. " Luckily it doesn't at all affect the work /" 
 
 The small town-street, quiet and empty in the summer even- 
 tide, stretched to right and left, with a gabled and timbered house 
 or two, and fairly seemed to have cleared itself to congruity with 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 207 
 
 the historic void over which our friends, lingering an instant to 
 converse, looked at each other. The young wife, rather, looked 
 about a moment at all there wasn't to be seen, and then, before 
 Gedge had found a reply to her husband's remark, uttered, 
 evidently in the interest of conciliation, a little question of her 
 own that she tried to make earnest. "It's our unfortunate 
 ignorance, you mean, that doesn't ? " 
 
 "Unfortunate or fortunate. I like it so," said the husband. 
 " ' The play's the thing.' Let the author alone." 
 
 Gedge, with his key on his forefinger, leaned against the door- 
 post, took in the stupid little street, and was sorry to see them go 
 they seemed so to abandon him. " That's just what They won't 
 do not let me do. It's all I want to let the author alone. 
 Practically" he felt himself getting the last of his chance 
 " there is no author ; that is for us to deal with. There are all 
 the immortal people in the work ; but there's nobody else." 
 
 "Yes," said the young man "that's what it comes to. There 
 should really, to clear the matter up, be no such Person." 
 
 " As you say," Gedge returned, " it's what it comes to. There 
 is no such Person." 
 
 The evening air listened, in the warm, thick midland stillness, 
 while the wife's little cry rang out. " But wasrit there ? " 
 
 "There was somebody," said Gedge, against the doorpost. 
 " But They've killed Him. And, dead as He is, They keep it 
 up, They do it over again, They kill Him every day." 
 
 He was aware of saying this so grimly more grimly than he 
 wished that his companions exchanged a glance and even 
 perhaps looked as if they felt him extravagant. That was the way, 
 really, Isabel had warned him all the others would be looking if 
 he should talk to Them as he talked to her. He liked, however, 
 for that matter, to hear how he should sound when pronounced 
 incapable through deterioration of the brain. "Then if there's 
 no author, if there's nothing to be said but that there isn't any- 
 body," the young woman smilingly asked, "why in the world 
 should there be a house?" 
 
 " There shouldn't," said Morris Gedge. 
 
 Decidedly, yes, he affected the young man. " Oh, I don't say, 
 mind you, that you should pull it down ! " 
 
 "Then where would you go?" their companion sweetly in- 
 quired. 
 
 "That's what my wife asks," Gedge replied. 
 
 " Then keep it up, keep it up ! " And the husband held out 
 his hand. 
 
 " That's what my wife says," Gedge went on as he shook it. 
 
208 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 The young woman, charming creature, emulated the other 
 visitor ; she offered their remarkable friend her handshake. 
 "Then mind your wife." 
 
 The poor man faced her gravely. " I would if she were such 
 a wife as you ! " 
 
 VI 
 
 IT had made for him, all the same, an immense difference ; it 
 had given him an extraordinary lift, so that a certain sweet after- 
 taste of his freedom might, a couple of months later, have been 
 suspected of aiding to produce for him another, and really a 
 more considerable, adventure. It was an odd way to think of it, 
 but he had been, to his imagination, for twenty minutes in good 
 society that being the term that best described for him the 
 company of people to whom he hadn't to talk, as he further 
 phrased it, rot. It was his title to society that he had, in his 
 doubtless awkward way, affirmed ; and the difficulty was just that, 
 having affirmed it, he couldn't take back the affirmation. Few 
 things had happened to him in life, that is few that were agree- 
 able, but at least this had, and he wasn't so constructed that he 
 could go on as if it hadn't. It was going on as if it had, however, 
 that landed him, alas ! in the situation unmistakeably marked by 
 a visit from Grant-Jackson, late one afternoon toward the end of 
 October. This had been the hour of the call of the young 
 Americans. Every day that hour had come round something of 
 the deep throb of it, the successful secret, woke up ; but the two 
 occasions were, of a truth, related only by being so intensely 
 opposed. The secret had been successful in that he had said 
 nothing of it to Isabel, who, occupied in their own quarter while 
 the incident lasted, had neither heard the visitors arrive nor 
 seen them depart. It was on the other hand scarcely success- 
 ful in guarding itself from indirect betrayals. There were two 
 persons in the world, at least, who felt as he did; they were 
 persons, also, who had treated him, benignly, as feeling as they 
 did, who had been ready in fact to overflow in gifts as a sign of 
 it, and though they were now off in space they were still with 
 him sufficiently in spirit to make him play, as it were, with the 
 sense of their sympathy. This in turn made him, as he was 
 perfectly aware, more than a shade or two reckless, so that, in his 
 reaction from that gluttony of the public for false facts which 
 had from the first tormented him, he fell into the habit of sailing, 
 as he would have said, too near the wind, or in other words all 
 in presence of the people of washing his hands of the legend. 
 He had crossed the line he knew it ; he had struck wild They 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 209 
 
 drove him to it ; he had substituted, by a succession of uncon- 
 trollable profanities, an attitude that couldn't be understood for 
 an attitude that but too evidently had been. 
 
 This was of course the franker line, only he hadn't taken it, 
 alas ! for frankness hadn't in the least, really, taken it, but had 
 been simply himself caught up and disposed of by it, hurled by his 
 fate against the bedizened walls of the temple, quite in the way of 
 a priest possessed to excess of the god, or, more vulgarly, that of a 
 blind bull in a china-shop an animal to which he often compared 
 himself. He had let himself fatally go, in fine, just for irritation, 
 for rage, having, in his predicament, nothing at all to do with 
 frankness a luxury reserved for quite other situations. It had 
 always been his sentiment that one lived to learn ; he had learned 
 something every hour of his life, though people mostly never 
 knew what, in spite of its having generally been hadn't it ? at 
 somebody's expense. What he was at present continually learning 
 was the sense of a form of words heretofore so vain the famous 
 4 'false position" that had so often helped out a phrase. One 
 used names in that way without knowing what they were worth ; 
 then of a sudden, one fine day, their meaning was bitter in the 
 mouth. This was a truth with the relish of which his fireside 
 hours were occupied, and he was quite conscious that a man was 
 exposed who looked so perpetually as if something had disagreed 
 with him. The look to be worn at the Birthplace was properly 
 the beatific, and when once it had fairly been missed by those 
 who took it for granted, who, indeed, paid sixpence for it like 
 the table-wine in provincial France, it was compris one would be 
 sure to have news of the remark. 
 
 News accordingly was what Gedge had been expecting and 
 what he knew, above all, had been expected by his wife, who 
 had a way of sitting at present as with an ear for a certain knock. 
 She didn't watch him, didn't follow him about the house, at the 
 public hours, to spy upon his treachery ; and that could touch 
 him even though her averted eyes went through him more than 
 her fixed. Her mistrust was so perfectly expressed by her manner 
 of showing she trusted that he never felt so nervous, never so 
 tried to keep straight, as when she most let him alone. When 
 the crowd thickened and they had of necessity to receive together 
 he tried himself to get off by allowing her as much as possible 
 the word. When people appealed to him he turned to her and 
 with more of ceremony than their relation warranted : he couldn't 
 help this either, if it seemed ironic as to the person most 
 concerned or most competent. He flattered himself at these 
 moments that no one would have guessed her being his wife; 
 
210 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 especially as, to do her justice, she met his manner with a 
 wonderful grim bravado grim, so to say, for himself, grim by its 
 outrageous cheerfulness for the simple-minded. The lore she 
 did produce for them, the associations of the sacred spot that she 
 developed, multiplied, embroidered ; the things in short she said 
 and the stupendous way she said them ! She wasn't a bit 
 ashamed ; for why need virtue be ever ashamed ? It was virtue, 
 for it put bread into his mouth he meanwhile, on his side, 
 taking it out of hers. He had seen Grant-Jackson, on the 
 October day, in the Birthplace itself the right setting of course 
 for such an interview; and what occurred was that, precisely, when 
 the scene had ended and he had come back to their own sitting- 
 room, the question she put to him for information was : " Have 
 you settled it that I'm to starve ? " 
 
 She had for a long time said nothing to him so straight which 
 was but a proof of her real anxiety ; the straightness of Grant- 
 Jackson's visit, following on the very slight sinuosity of a note 
 shortly before received from him, made tension show for what it 
 was. By this time, really, however, his decision had been taken ; 
 the minutes elapsing between his reappearance at the domestic 
 fireside and his having, from the other threshold, seen Grant- 
 Jackson's broad, well-fitted back, the back of a banker and a 
 patriot, move away, had, though few, presented themselves to him 
 as supremely critical. They formed, as it were, the hinge of his 
 door, that door actually ajar so as to show him a possible fate 
 beyond it, but which, with his hand, in a spasm, thus tightening 
 on the knob, he might either open wide or close partly and 
 altogether. He stood, in the autumn dusk, in the little museum 
 that constituted the vestibule of the temple, and there, as with a 
 concentrated push at the crank of a windlass, he brought himself 
 round. The portraits on the walls seemed vaguely to watch for it ; 
 it was in their august presence kept dimly august, for the 
 moment, by Grant-Jackson's impressive check of his application 
 of a match to the vulgar gas that the great man had uttered, as 
 
 if it said all, his " You know, my dear fellow, really ! " He 
 
 had managed it with the special tact of a fat man, always, when 
 there was any, very fine ; he had got the most out of the time, 
 the place, the setting, all the little massed admonitions and 
 symbols ; confronted there with his victim on the spot that he 
 took occasion to name to him afresh as, to his piety and patriotism, 
 the most sacred on earth, he had given it to be understood that 
 in the first place he was lost in amazement and that in the second 
 he expected a single warning now to suffice. Not to insist too 
 much moreover on the question of gratitude, he would let his 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 211 
 
 remonstrance rest, if need be, solely on the question of taste. 
 
 As a. matter of taste alone ! But he was surely not to be 
 
 obliged to follow that up. Poor Gedge indeed would have been 
 sorry to oblige him, for he saw it was precisely to the atrocious 
 taste of unthankfulness that the allusion was made. When he 
 said he wouldn't dwell on what the fortunate occupant of the 
 post owed him for the stout battle originally fought on his behalf, 
 he simply meant he would. That was his tact which, with 
 everything else that had been mentioned, in the scene, to help, 
 really had the ground to itself. The day had been when Gedge 
 couldn't have thanked him enough though he had thanked him, 
 he considered, almost fulsomely and nothing, nothing that he 
 could coherently or reputably name, had happened since then. 
 From the moment he was pulled up, in short, he had no case, 
 and if he exhibited, instead of one, only hot tears in his eyes, the 
 mystic gloom of the temple either prevented his friend from 
 seeing them or rendered it possible that they stood for remorse. 
 He had dried them, with the pads formed by the base of his 
 bony thumbs, before he went in to Isabel. This was the more 
 fortunate as, in spite of her inquiry, prompt and pointed, he but 
 moved about the room looking at her hard. Then he stood 
 before the fire a little with his hands behind him and his coat-tails 
 divided, quite as the person in permanent possession. It was an 
 indication his wife appeared to take in ; but she put nevertheless 
 presently another question. "You object to telling me what he 
 said?" 
 
 " He said ' You know, my dear fellow, really ! ' " 
 
 "And is that all?" 
 
 " Practically. Except that I'm a thankless beast." 
 
 " Well ! " she responded, not with dissent. 
 
 " You mean that I am ? " 
 
 "Are those the words he used?" she asked with a scruple. 
 
 Gedge continued to think. "The words he used were that I 
 give away the Show and that, from several sources, it has come 
 round to Them." 
 
 "As of course a baby would have known ! " And then as her 
 husband said nothing : " Were those the words he used ? " 
 
 "Absolutely. He couldn't have used better ones." 
 
 "Did he call it," Mrs. Gedge inquired, "the 'Show'?" 
 
 " Of course he did. The Biggest on Earth." 
 
 She winced, looking at him hard she wondered, but only for 
 a moment. "Well, it t's." 
 
 "Then it's something," Gedge went on, "to have given that 
 away. But," he added, " I've taken it back." 
 
212 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " You mean you've been convinced ? " 
 
 "I mean I've been scared." 
 
 " At last, at last ! " she gratefully breathed. 
 
 " Oh, it was easily done. It was only two words. But here 
 I am." 
 
 Her face was now less hard for him. "And what two 
 words?" 
 
 " ' You know, Mr. Gedge, that it simply won't do.' That was 
 all. But it was the way such a man says them." 
 
 "I'm glad, then," Mrs. Gedge frankly averred, "that he is such 
 a man. How did you ever think it could do ? " 
 
 " Well, it was my critical sense. I didn't ever know I had one 
 till They came and (by putting me here) waked it up in me. 
 Then I had, somehow, don't you see? to live with it; and I 
 seemed to feel that, somehow or other, giving it time and in the 
 long run, it might, it ought to, come out on top of the heap. Now 
 that's where, he says, it simply won't do. So I must put it I have 
 put it at the bottom." 
 
 "A very good place, then, for a critical sense !" And Isabel, 
 more placidly now, folded her work. " J/, that is, you can only 
 keep it there. If it doesn't struggle up again." 
 
 " It can't struggle." He was still before the fire, looking round 
 at the warm, low room, peaceful in the lamplight, with the hum 
 of the kettle for the ear, with the curtain drawn over the leaded 
 casement, a short moreen curtain artfully chosen by Isabel for the 
 effect of the olden time, its virtue of letting the light within show 
 ruddy to the street. "It's dead," he went on; "I killed it 
 just now." 
 
 He spoke, really, so that she wondered. " Just now ? " 
 
 "There in the other place I strangled it, poor thing, in the 
 dark. If you'll go out and see, there must be blood. Which, 
 indeed," he added, " on an altar of sacrifice, is all right. But the 
 place is forever spattered." 
 
 " I don't want to go out and see." She rested her locked hands 
 on the needlework folded on her knee, and he knew, with her 
 eyes on him, that a look he had seen before was in her face. 
 "You're off your head you know, my dear, in a way." Then, 
 however, more cheeringly : " It's a good job it hasn't been 
 too late." 
 
 " Too late to get it under ? " 
 
 "Too late for Them to give you the second chance that I 
 thank God you accept." 
 
 " Yes, if it had been ! " And he looked away as through 
 
 the ruddy curtain and into the chill street. Then he faced her 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 213 
 
 again. " I've scarcely got over my fright yet. I mean," he went 
 on, " for you." 
 
 "And I mean for you. Suppose what you had come to 
 announce to me now were that we had got the sack. How 
 should I enjoy, do you think, seeing you turn out? Yes, out 
 there ! " she added as his eyes again moved from their little warm 
 circle to the night of early winter on the other side of the pane, 
 to the rare, quick footsteps, to the closed doors, to the curtains 
 drawn like their own, behind which the small flat town, intrinsi- 
 cally dull, was sitting down to supper. 
 
 He stiffened himself as he warmed his back ; he held up his 
 head, shaking himself a little as if to shake the stoop out of his 
 shoulders, but he had to allow she was right. " What would 
 have become of us ? " 
 
 "What indeed? We should have begged our bread or I 
 should be taking in washing." 
 
 He was silent a little. " I'm too old. I should have begun 
 sooner." 
 
 " Oh, God forbid ! " she cried. 
 
 " The pinch," he pursued, " is that I can do nothing else." 
 
 " Nothing whatever ! " she agreed with elation. 
 
 " Whereas here if I cultivate it I perhaps can still lie. But 
 I must cultivate it." 
 
 " Oh, you old dear ! " And she got up to kiss him. 
 
 " 111 do my best," he said. 
 
 VII 
 
 "Do you remember us?" the gentleman asked and smiled 
 with the lady beside him smiling too ; speaking so much less 
 as an earnest pilgrim or as a tiresome tourist than as an old 
 acquaintance. It was history repeating itself as Gedge had some- 
 how never expected, with almost everything the same except that 
 the evening was now a mild April-end, except that the visitors 
 had put off mourning and showed all their bravery besides 
 showing, as he doubtless did himself, though so differently, for a 
 little older ; except, above all, that oh, seeing them again 
 suddenly affected him as not a bit the thing he would have 
 thought it. " We're in England again, and we were near ; I've 
 a brother at Oxford with whom we've been spending a day, and 
 we thought we'd come over." So the young man pleasantly said 
 while our friend took in the queer fact that he must himself seem 
 to them rather coldly to gape. They had come in the same way, 
 at the quiet close ; another August had passed, and this was the 
 
214 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 second spring ; the Birthplace, given the hour, was about to 
 suspend operations till the morrow ; the last lingerer had gone, 
 and the fancy of the visitors was, once more, for a look round by 
 themselves. This represented surely no greater presumption 
 than the terms on which they had last parted with him seemed 
 to warrant ; so that if he did inconsequently stare it was just in 
 fact because he was so supremely far from having forgotten them. 
 But the sight of the pair luckily had a double effect, and the first 
 precipitated the second the second being really his sudden 
 vision that everything perhaps depended for him on his recognis- 
 ing no complication. He must go straight on, since it was what 
 had for more than a year now so handsomely answered; he 
 must brazen it out consistently, since that only was what his 
 dignity was at last reduced to. He mustn't be afraid in one way 
 any more than he had been in another; besides which it came 
 over him with a force that made him flush that their visit, in its 
 essence, must have been for himself. It was good society again, 
 and they were the same. It wasn't for him therefore to behave as 
 if he couldn't meet them. 
 
 These deep vibrations, on Gedge's part, were as quick as they 
 were deep ; they came in fact all at once, so that his response, 
 his declaration that it was all right "Oh, rather; the hour doesn't 
 matter for you/" had hung fire but an instant ; and when they 
 were within and the door closed behind them, within the twilight 
 of the temple, where, as before, the votive offerings glimmered 
 on the walls, he drew the long breath of one who might, by a 
 self-betrayal, have done something too dreadful. For what had 
 brought them back was not, indubitably, the sentiment of the 
 shrine itself since he knew their sentiment ; but their intelligent 
 interest in the queer case of the priest. Their call was the 
 tribute of curiosity, of sympathy, of a compassion really, as such 
 things went, exquisite a tribute to that queerness which en- 
 titled them to the frankest welcome. They had wanted, for the 
 generous wonder of it, to see how he was getting on, how such a 
 man in such a place could ; and they had doubtless more than 
 half expected to see the door opened by somebody who had 
 succeeded him. Well, somebody had only with a strange 
 equivocation ; as they would have, poor things, to make out for 
 themselves, an embarrassment as to which he pitied them. 
 Nothing could have been more odd, but verily it was this 
 troubled vision of their possible bewilderment, and this com- 
 punctious view of such a return for their amenity, that practically 
 determined for him his tone. The lapse of the months had 
 but made their name familiar to him ; they had on the other 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 215 
 
 occasion inscribed it, among the thousand names, in the current 
 public register, and he had since then, for reasons of his own, 
 reasons of feeling, again and again turned back to it. It was 
 nothing in itself; it told him nothing "Mr. and Mrs. B. D. 
 Hayes, New York" one of those American labels that were 
 just like every other American label and that were, precisely, the 
 most remarkable thing about people reduced to achieving an 
 identity in such other ways. They could be Mr. and Mrs. B. D. 
 Hayes and yet they could be, with all presumptions missing 
 well, what these callers were. It had quickly enough indeed 
 cleared the situation a little further that his friends had absolutely, 
 the other time, as it came back to him, warned him of his original 
 danger, their anxiety about which had been the last note 
 sounded between them. What he was afraid of, with this 
 reminiscence, was that, finding him still safe, they would, the 
 next thing, definitely congratulate him and perhaps even, no less 
 candidly, ask him how he had managed. It was with the sense 
 of nipping some such inquiry in the bud that, losing no time and 
 holding himself with a firm grip, he began, on the spot, downstairs, 
 to make plain to them how he had managed. He averted the 
 question in short by the assurance of his answer. "Yes, yes, I'm 
 still here ; I suppose it is in a manner to one's profit that one 
 does, such as it is, one's best." He did his best on the present 
 occasion, did it with the gravest face he had ever worn and a 
 soft serenity that was like a large damp sponge passed over their 
 previous meeting over everything in it, that is, but the fact of 
 its pleasantness. 
 
 " We stand here, you see, in the old living-room, happily still to 
 be reconstructed in the mind's eye, in spite of the havoc of time, 
 which we have fortunately, of late years, been able to arrest. It 
 was of course rude and humble, but it must have been snug and 
 quaint, and we have at least the pleasure of knowing that the 
 tradition in respect to the features that do remain is delightfully 
 uninterrupted. Across that threshold He habitually passed; 
 through those low windows, in childhood, He peered out into the 
 world that He was to make so much happier by the gift to it of 
 His genius ; over the boards of this floor that is over some of 
 them, for we mustn't be carried away! his little feet often 
 pattered ; and the beams of this ceiling (we must really in some 
 places take care of our heads !) he endeavoured, in boyish strife, to 
 jump up and touch. It's not often that in the early home of genius 
 and renown the whole tenor of existence is laid so bare, not often that 
 we are able to retrace, from point to point and from step to step, 
 its connection with objects, with influences to build it round 
 
216 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 again with the little solid facts out of which it sprang. This, 
 therefore, I need scarcely remind you, is what makes the small 
 space between these walls so modest to measurement, so in- 
 significant of aspect unique on all the earth. There is nothing 
 like it? Morris Gedge went on, insisting as solemnly and softly, 
 for his bewildered hearers, as over a pulpit-edge; "there is 
 nothing at all like it anywhere in the world. There is nothing, 
 only reflect, for the combination of greatness, and, as we 
 venture to say, of intimacy. You may find elsewhere perhaps 
 absolutely fewer changes, but where shall you find ^presence equally 
 diffused, uncontested and undisturbed? Where in particular 
 shall you find, on the part of the abiding spirit, an equally tower- 
 ing eminence ? You may find elsewhere eminence of a consider- 
 able order, but where shall you find with it, don't you see, 
 changes, after all, so few, and the contemporary element caught 
 so, as it were, in the very fact ? " His visitors, at first confounded, 
 but gradually spellbound, were still gaping with the universal 
 gape wondering, he judged, into what strange pleasantry he had 
 been suddenly moved to break out, and yet beginning to see in 
 him an intention beyond a joke, so that they started, at this 
 point, almost jumped, when, by as rapid a transition, he made, 
 toward the old fireplace, a dash that seemed to illustrate, 
 precisely, the act of eager catching. " It is in this old chimney 
 corner, the quaint inglenook of our ancestors just there in the 
 far angle, where His little stool was placed, and where, I dare 
 say, if we could look close enough, we should find the hearth- 
 stone scraped with His little feet that we see the inconceiv- 
 able child gazing into the blaze of the old oaken logs and 
 making out there pictures and stories, see Him conning, with 
 curly bent head, His well-worn hornbook, or poring over 
 some scrap of an ancient ballad, some page of some such rudely 
 bound volume of chronicles as lay, we may be sure, in His 
 father's window-seat." 
 
 It was, he even himself felt at this moment, wonderfully done ; 
 no auditors, for all his thousands, had ever yet so inspired him. 
 The odd, slightly alarmed shyness in the two faces, as if in a 
 drawing-room, in their "good society," exactly, some act incon- 
 gruous, something grazing the indecent, had abruptly been per- 
 petrated, the painful reality of which faltered before coming home 
 the visible effect on his friends, in fine, wound him up as to the 
 sense that they were worth the trick. It came of itself now he 
 had got it so by heart ; but perhaps really it had never come so 
 well, with the staleness so disguised, the interest so renewed and 
 the clerical unction, demanded by the priestly character, so 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 217 
 
 successfully distilled. Mr. Hayes of New York had more than 
 once looked at his wife, and Mrs. Hayes of New York had more 
 than once looked at her husband only, up to now, with a stolen 
 glance, with eyes it had not been easy to detach from the remark- 
 able countenance by the aid of which their entertainer held them. 
 At present, however, after an exchange less furtive, they ventured 
 on a sign that they had not been appealed to in vain. "Charm- 
 ing, charming, Mr. Gedge ! " Mr. Hayes broke out ; " we feel 
 that we've caught you in the mood." 
 
 His wife hastened to assent it eased the tension. " It would 
 be quite the way; except," she smiled, "that you'd be too 
 dangerous. You've really a genius ! " 
 
 Gedge looked at her hard, but yielding no inch, even though 
 she touched him there at a point of consciousness that quivered. 
 This was the prodigy for him, and had been, the year through 
 that he did it all, he found, easily, did it better than he had done 
 anything else in his life ; with so high and broad an effect, in 
 truth, an inspiration so rich and free, that his poor wife now, 
 literally, had been moved more than once to fresh fear. She 
 had had her bad moments, he knew, after taking the measure of 
 his new direction moments of readjusted suspicion in which 
 she wondered if he had not simply embraced another, a different 
 perversity. There would be more than one fashion of giving 
 away the show, and wasn't this perhaps a question of giving it 
 away by excess ? He could dish them by too much romance as 
 well as by too little; she had not hitherto fairly apprehended 
 that there might be too much. It was a way like another, at any 
 rate, of reducing the place to the absurd ; which reduction, if he 
 didn't look out, would reduce them again to the prospect of 
 the streets, and this time surely without an appeal. It all de- 
 pended, indeed he knew she knew that on how much Grant- 
 Jackson and the others, how much the Body, in a word, would 
 take. He knew she knew what he himself held it would take 
 that he considered no limit could be drawn to the quantity. 
 They simply wanted it piled up, and so did everybody else; 
 wherefore, if no one reported him, as before, why were They to 
 be uneasy ? It was in consequence of idiots brought to reason 
 that he had been dealt with before; but as there was now no 
 form of idiocy that he didn't systematically flatter, goading it on 
 really to its own private doom, who was ever to pull the string of 
 the guillotine? The axe was in the air yes; but in a world 
 gorged to satiety there were no revolutions. And it had been 
 vain for Isabel to ask if the other thunder-growl also hadn't come 
 out of the blue. There was actually proof positive that the 
 
218 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 winds were now at rest. How could they be more so? he 
 appealed to the receipts. These were golden days the show 
 had never so flourished. So he had argued, so he was arguing 
 still and, it had to be owned, with every appearance in his 
 favour. Yet if he inwardly winced at the tribute to his plausi- 
 bility rendered by his flushed friends, this was because he felt in 
 it the real ground of his optimism. The charming woman before 
 him acknowledged his "genius" as he himself had had to do. 
 He had been surprised at his facility until he had grown used to 
 it. Whether or no he had, as a fresh menace to his future, 
 found a new perversity, he had found a vocation much older, 
 evidently, than he had at first been prepared to recognise. He 
 had done himself injustice. He liked to be brave because it 
 came so easy; he could measure it off by the yard. It was in 
 the Birthroom, above all, that he continued to do this, having 
 ushered up his companions without, as he was still more elated 
 to feel, the turn of a hair. She might take it as she liked, but he 
 had had the lucidity all, that is, for his own safety to meet 
 without the grace of an answer the homage of her beautiful 
 smile. She took it apparently, and her husband took it, but as a 
 part of his odd humour, and they followed him aloft with faces 
 now a little more responsive to the manner in which, on that 
 spot, he would naturally come out. He came out, according to 
 the word of his assured private receipt, " strong." He missed a 
 little, in truth, the usual round-eyed question from them the 
 inveterate artless cue with which, from moment to moment, 
 clustered troops had, for a year, obliged him. Mr. and Mrs. 
 Hayes were from New York, but it was a little like singing, as he 
 had heard one of his Americans once say about something, to a 
 Boston audience. He did none the less what he could, and it 
 was ever his practice to stop still at a certain spot in the room 
 and, after having secured attention by look and gesture, suddenly 
 shoot off: "Here!" 
 
 They always understood, the good people he could fairly love 
 them now for it ; they always said, breathlessly and unanimously, 
 "There?" and stared down at the designated point quite as if 
 some trace of the grand event were still to be made out. This 
 movement produced, he again looked round. " Consider it well : 
 
 the spot of earth !" "Oh, but it isn't earth!" the boldest 
 
 spirit there was always a boldest would generally pipe out. 
 Then the guardian of the Birthplace would be truly superior as 
 if the unfortunate had figured the Immortal coming up, like a 
 potato, through the soil. "I'm not suggesting that He was 
 born on the bare ground. He was born here/" with an un- 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 219 
 
 compromising dig of his heel. "There ought to be a brass, 
 with an inscription, let in." "Into the floor?" it always came. 
 " Birth and burial : seedtime, summer, autumn ! " that always, 
 with its special, right cadence, thanks to his unfailing spring, 
 came too. " Why not as well as into the pavement of the 
 church? you've seen our grand old church?" The former of 
 which questions nobody ever answered abounding, on the other 
 hand, to make up, in relation to the latter. Mr. and Mrs. Hayes 
 even were at first left dumb by it not indeed, to do them justice, 
 having uttered the word that produced it. They had uttered no 
 word while he kept the game up, and (though that made it a 
 little more difficult) he could yet stand triumphant before them 
 after he had finished with his flourish. Then it was only that 
 Mr. Hayes of New York broke silence. 
 
 " Well, if we wanted to see, I think I may say we're quite 
 satisfied. As my wife says, it would seem to be your line." He 
 spoke now, visibly, with more ease, as if a light had come: 
 though he made no joke of it, for a reason that presently ap- 
 peared. They were coming down the little stair, and it was on 
 the descent that his companion added her word. 
 
 "Do you know what we half did think ?" And then to 
 
 her husband : " Is it dreadful to tell him ? " They were in the 
 room below, and the young woman, also relieved, expressed the 
 feeling with gaiety. She smiled, as before, at Morris Gedge, 
 treating him as a person with whom relations were possible, 
 yet remaining just uncertain enough to invoke Mr. Hayes's 
 opinion. " We have awfully wanted from what we had heard." 
 But she met her husband's graver face; he was not quite out 
 of the wood. At this she was slightly flurried but she cut it 
 short. "You must know don't you? that, with the crowds 
 who listen to you, we'd have heard." 
 
 He looked from one to the other, and once more again, with 
 force, something came over him. They had kept him in mind, 
 they were neither ashamed nor afraid to show it, and it was 
 positively an interest, on the part of this charming creature and 
 this keen, cautious gentleman, an interest resisting oblivion and 
 surviving separation, that had governed their return. Their 
 other visit had been the brightest thing that had ever happened 
 to him, but this was the gravest ; so that at the end of a minute 
 something broke in him and his mask, of itself, fell off. He 
 chucked, as he would have said, consistency; which, in its 
 extinction, left the tears in his eyes. His smile was therefore 
 queer. " Heard how I'm going it ? " 
 
 The young man, though still looking at him hard, felt sure, 
 
220 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 with this, of his own ground. " Of course, you're tremendously 
 talked about. You've gone round the world." 
 
 "You've heard of me in America?" 
 
 " Why, almost of nothing else ! " 
 
 " That was what made us feel ! " Mrs. Hayes contributed. 
 
 "That you must see for yourselves?" Again he compared, 
 poor Gedge, their faces. " Do you mean I excite a scandal ? " 
 
 " Dear no ! Admiration. You renew so," the young man 
 observed, " the interest." 
 
 " Ah, there it is ! " said Gedge with eyes of adventure that 
 seemed to rest beyond the Atlantic. 
 
 " They listen, month after month, when they're out here, as 
 you must have seen ; and they go home and talk. But they sing 
 your praise." 
 
 Our friend could scarce take it in. " Over there ? " 
 
 " Over there. I think you must be even in the papers." 
 
 "Without abuse?" 
 
 " Oh, we don't abuse everyone." 
 
 Mrs. Hayes, in her beauty, it was clear, stretched the point. 
 " They rave about you." 
 
 "Then they don't know?" 
 
 "Nobody knows," the young man declared; "it wasn't any- 
 one's knowledge, at any rate, that made us uneasy." 
 
 " It was your own ? I mean your own sense ? " 
 
 " Well, call it that. We remembered, and we wondered what 
 had happened. "So," Mr. Hayes now frankly laughed, "we 
 came to see." 
 
 Gedge stared through his film of tears. "Came from America 
 to see me ? " 
 
 " Oh, a part of the way. But we wouldn't, in England, not 
 have seen you." 
 
 " And now we have !" the young woman soothingly added. 
 
 Gedge still could only gape at the candour of the tribute. 
 But he tried to meet them it was what was least poor for him 
 in their own key. " Well, how do you like it ? " 
 
 Mrs. Hayes, he thought if their answer were important 
 laughed a little nervously. " Oh, you see." 
 
 Once more he looked from one to the other. " It's too beastly 
 easy, you know." 
 
 Her husband raised his eyebrows. "You conceal your art. 
 The emotion yes ; that must be easy ; the general tone must 
 flow. But about your facts you've so many : how do you get 
 them through ? " 
 
 Gedge wondered. " You think I get too many ? " 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 221 
 
 At this they were amused together. "That's just what we 
 came to see ! " 
 
 "Well, you know, I've felt my way; I've gone step by step; 
 you wouldn't believe how I've tried it on. This where you see 
 me is where I've come out." After which, as they said nothing: 
 "You hadn't thought I could come out?" 
 
 Again they just waited, but the husband spoke : " Are you 
 so awfully sure you are out ? " 
 
 Gedge drew himself up in the manner of his moments of 
 emotion, almost conscious even that, with his sloping shoulders, 
 his long lean neck and his nose so prominent in proportion 
 to other matters, he looked the more like a giraffe. It was now 
 at last that he really caught on. " I may be in danger again 
 and the danger is what has moved you ? Oh ! " the poor man 
 fairly moaned. His appreciation of it quite weakened him, yet 
 he pulled himself together. " You've your view of my danger ? " 
 
 It was wondrous how, with that note definitely sounded, the 
 air was cleared. Lucid Mr. Hayes, at the end of a minute, 
 had put the thing in a nutshell. " I don't know what you'll think 
 of us for being so beastly curious." 
 
 "I think," poor Gedge grimaced, "you're only too beastly 
 kind." 
 
 " It's all your own fault," his friend returned, " for presenting 
 us (who are not idiots, say) with so striking a picture of a crisis. 
 At our other visit, you remember," he smiled, " you created an 
 anxiety for the opposite reason. Therefore if this should again 
 be a crisis for you, you'd really give us the case with an ideal 
 completeness." 
 
 "You make me wish," said Morris Gedge, "that it might 
 be one." 
 
 " Well, don't try for our amusement to bring one on. I don't 
 see, you know, how you can have much margin. Take care 
 take care." 
 
 Gedge took it pensively in. "Yes, that was what you said 
 a year ago. You did me the honour to be uneasy as my 
 wife was." 
 
 Which determined on the young woman's part an immediate 
 question. " May I ask, then, if Mrs. Gedge is now at rest ? " 
 
 " No ; since you do ask. She fears, at least, that I go too far ; 
 she doesn't believe in my margin. You see, we had our scare 
 after your visit. They came down." 
 
 His friends were all interest. " Ah ! They came down ? " 
 
 " Heavy. They brought me down. That's why- " 
 
 " Why you are down ? " Mrs. Hayes sweetly demanded. 
 
222 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " Ah, but my dear man," her husband interposed, " you're not 
 down; you're up! You're only up a different tree, but you're 
 up at the tip-top." 
 
 " You mean I take it too high ? " 
 
 " That's exactly the question," the young man answered ; " and 
 the possibility, as matching your first danger, is just what we 
 felt we couldn't, if you didn't mind, miss the measure of." 
 
 Gedge looked at him. " I feel that I know what you at 
 bottom hoped" 
 
 " We at bottom ' hope,' surely, that you're all right." 
 
 " In spite of the fool it makes of everyone ? " 
 
 Mr. Hayes of New York smiled. " Say because of that. We 
 only ask to believe that everyone is a fool ! " 
 
 " Only you haven't been, without reassurance, able to imagine 
 fools of the size that my case demands ? " And Gedge had a 
 pause, while, as if on the chance of some proof, his companion 
 waited. " Well, I won't pretend to you that your anxiety hasn't 
 made me, doesn't threaten to make me, a bit nervous ; though 
 I don't quite understand it if, as you say, people but rave 
 about me." 
 
 " Oh, that report was from the other side ; people in our 
 country so very easily rave. You've seen small children laugh 
 to shrieks when tickled in a new place. So there are amiable 
 millions with us who are but small children. They perpetually 
 present new places for the tickler. What we've seen in further 
 lights," Mr. Hayes good-humouredly pursued, "is your people 
 here the Committee, the Board, or whatever the powers to whom 
 you're responsible." 
 
 " Call them my friend Grant- Jack son then my original 
 backer, though I admit, for that reason, perhaps my most 
 formidable critic. It's with him, practically, I deal; or rather 
 it's by him I'm dealt with was dealt with before. I stand or 
 fall by him. But he has given me my head." 
 
 "Mayn't he then want you," Mrs, Hayes inquired, "just to 
 show as flagrantly running away." 
 
 " Of course I see what you mean. I'm riding, blindly, for a 
 fall, and They're watching (to be tender of me!) for the smash 
 that may come of itself. It's Machiavellic but everything's 
 possible. And what did you just now mean," Gedge asked 
 "especially if you've only heard of my prosperity by your 
 'further lights'?" 
 
 His friends for an instant looked embarrassed, but Mr. Hayes 
 came to the point. " We've heard of your prosperity, but we've 
 also, remember, within a few minutes, heard you" 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 223 
 
 " I was determined you should," said Gedge. " I'm good then 
 but I overdo ? " His strained grin was still sceptical. 
 
 Thus challenged, at any rate, his visitor pronounced. " Well, 
 if you don't ; if at the end of six months more it's clear that you 
 haven't overdone ; then, then " 
 
 "Then what?" 
 
 " Then it's great." 
 
 " But it is great greater than anything of the sort ever was. I 
 overdo, thank goodness, yes ; or I would if it were a thing you 
 could." 
 
 " Oh, well, if there's prooj "that you can't ! " With which, and 
 
 an expressive gesture, Mr. Hayes threw up his fears. 
 
 His wife, however, for a moment, seemed unable to let them 
 go. " Don't They want then any truth ? none even for the mere 
 look of it?" 
 
 " The look of it," said Morris Gedge, " is what I give ! " 
 
 It made them, the others, exchange a look of their own. Then 
 she smiled. " Oh, well, if they think so ! " 
 
 "You at least don't? You're like my wife which indeed, I 
 remember," Gedge added, "is a similarity I expressed a year ago 
 the wish for ! At any rate I frighten her" 
 
 The young husband, with an " Ah, wives are terrible ! " 
 smoothed it over, and their visit would have failed of further 
 excuse had not, at this instant, a movement at the other end of 
 the room suddenly engaged them. The evening had so nearly 
 closed in, though Gedge, in the course of their talk, had lighted 
 the lamp nearest them, that they had not distinguished, in con- 
 nection with the opening of the door of communication to the 
 warden's lodge, the appearance of another person, an eager 
 woman, who, in her impatience, had barely paused before 
 advancing. Mrs. Gedge her identity took but a few seconds to 
 become vivid was upon them, and she had not been too late for 
 Mr. Hayes's last remark. Gedge saw at once that she had come 
 with news ; no need even, for that certitude, of her quick retort 
 to the words in the air " You may say as well, sir, that they're 
 often, poor wives, terrified ! " She knew nothing of the friends 
 whom, at so unnatural an hour, he was showing about; but 
 there was no livelier sign for him that this didn't matter than 
 the possibility with which she intensely charged her " Grant- 
 Jackson, to see you at once ! " letting it, so to speak, fly in his 
 face. 
 
 " He has been with you ?" 
 
 " Only a minute he's there. But it's you he wants to see." 
 
 He looked at the others. " And what does he want, dear ? " 
 
224 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " God knows ! There it is. It's his horrid hour it w as that 
 other time." 
 
 She had nervously turned to the others, overflowing to them, in 
 her dismay, for all their strangeness quite, as he said to himself, 
 like a woman of the people. She was the bare-headed goodwife 
 talking in the street about the row in the house, and it was in this 
 character that he instantly introduced her : " My dear doubting 
 wife, who will do her best to entertain you while I wait upon our 
 friend." And he explained to her as he could his now protesting 
 companions " Mr. and Mrs. Hayes of New York, who have been 
 here before." He knew, without knowing why, that her an- 
 nouncement chilled him ; he failed at least to see why it should 
 chill him so much. His good friends had themselves been 
 visibly affected by it, and heaven knew that the depths of brood- 
 ing fancy in him were easily stirred by contact. If they had 
 wanted a crisis they accordingly had found one, albeit they had 
 already asked leave to retire before it. This he wouldn't have. 
 " Ah no, you must really see ! " 
 
 " But we shan't be able to bear it, you know," said the young 
 woman, " if it is to turn you out." 
 
 Her crudity attested her sincerity, and it was the latter, doubt- 
 less, that instantly held Mrs. Gedge. " It is to turn us out." 
 
 " Has he told you that, madam ? " Mr. Hayes inquired of her 
 it being wondrous how the breath of doom had drawn them 
 together. 
 
 " No, not told me ; but there's something in him there I 
 mean in his awful manner that matches too well with other 
 things. We've seen," said the poor pale lady, " other things 
 enough." 
 
 The young woman almost clutched her. " Is his manner very 
 awful?" 
 
 " It's simply the manner," Gedge interposed, " of a very great 
 man." 
 
 "Well, very great men," said his wife, "are very awful things." 
 
 " It's exactly," he laughed, " what we're finding out ! But I 
 mustn't keep him waiting. Our friends here," he went on, "are 
 directly interested. You mustn't, mind you, let them go until we 
 know." 
 
 Mr. Hayes, however, held him; he found himself stayed. 
 " We're so directly interested that I want you to understand this. 
 If anything happens " 
 
 "Yes?" said Gedge, all gentle as he faltered. 
 
 " Well, we must set you up." 
 
 Mrs. Hayes quickly abounded. " Oh, do come to us ! " 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 225 
 
 Again he could but look at them. They were really wonderful 
 folk. And but Mr. and Mrs. Hayes ! It affected even Isabel, 
 through her alarm ; though the balm, in a manner, seemed to 
 foretell the wound. He had reached the threshold of his own 
 quarters ; he stood there as at the door of the chamber of judg- 
 ment. But he laughed ; at least he could be gallant in going up 
 for sentence. " Very good then I'll come to you ! " 
 
 This was very well, but it didn't prevent his heart, a minute 
 later, at the end of the passage, from thumping with beats he 
 could count. He had paused again before going in ; on the other 
 side of this second door his poor future was to be let loose at 
 him. It was broken, at best, and spiritless, but wasn't Grant- 
 Jackson there, like a beast-tamer in a cage, all tights and spangles 
 and circus attitudes, to give it a cut with the smart official whip 
 and make it spring at him ? It was during this moment that he 
 fully measured the effect for his nerves of the impression made 
 on his so oddly earnest friends whose earnestness he in fact, 
 in the spasm of this last effort, came within an ace of resenting. 
 They had upset him by contact ; he was afraid, literally, of meet- 
 ing his doom on his knees ; it wouldn't have taken much more, 
 he absolutely felt, to make him approach with his forehead in the 
 dust the great man whose wrath was to be averted. Mr. and 
 Mrs. Hayes of New York had brought tears to his eyes ; but was 
 it to be reserved for Grant-Jackson to make him cry like a baby ? 
 He wished, yes, while he palpitated, that Mr. and Mrs. Hayes of 
 New York hadn't had such an eccentricity of interest, for it 
 seemed somehow to come from them that he was going so fast 
 to pieces. Before he turned the knob of the door, however, he 
 had another queer instant ; making out that it had been, strictly, 
 his case that was interesting, his funny power, however accidental, 
 to show as in a picture the attitude of others not his poor, dingy 
 personality. It was this latter quantity, none the less, that was 
 marching to execution. It is to our friend's credit that he 
 believed^ as he prepared to turn the knob, that he was going to be 
 hanged ; and it is certainly not less to his credit that his wife, on 
 the chance, had his supreme thought. Here it was that possibly 
 with his last articulate breath he thanked his stars, such as they 
 were, for Mr. and Mrs. Hayes of New York. At least they would 
 take care of her. 
 
 They were doing that certainly with some success when, ten 
 minutes later, he returned to them. She sat between them in the 
 beautified Birthplace, and he couldn't have been sure afterwards 
 that each wasn't holding her hand. The three together, at any 
 rate, had the effect of recalling to him it was too whimsical 
 
226 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 some picture, a sentimental print, seen and admired in his youth, 
 a "Waiting for the Verdict," a "Counting the Hours," or some- 
 thing of that sort; humble respectability in suspense about humble 
 innocence. He didn't know how he himself looked, and he 
 didn't care ; the great thing was that he wasn't crying though he 
 might have been ; the glitter in his eyes was assuredly dry, 
 though that there was a glitter, or something slightly to bewilder, 
 the faces of the others, as they rose to meet him, sufficiently 
 proved. His wife's eyes pierced his own, but it was Mrs. Hayes 
 of New York who spoke. " Was it then for that ? " 
 
 He only looked at them at first he felt he might now enjoy it. 
 "Yes, it was for 'that.' I mean it was about the way I've been 
 going on. He came to speak of it." 
 
 " And he's gone ? " Mr. Hayes permitted himself to inquire. 
 
 " He's gone." 
 
 " It's over ? " Isabel hoarsely asked. 
 
 " It's over." 
 
 "Then we go?" 
 
 This it was that he enjoyed. " No, my dear ; we stay." 
 
 There was fairly a triple gasp; relief took time to operate. 
 " Then why did he come ? " 
 
 " In the fulness of his kind heart and of Their discussed and 
 decreed satisfaction. To express Their sense ! " 
 
 Mr. Hayes broke into a laugh, but his wife wanted to know. 
 " Of the grand work you're doing ? " 
 
 "Of the way I polish it off. They're most handsome about 
 it. The receipts, it appears, speak " 
 
 He was nursing his effect ; Isabel intently watched him, and 
 the others hung on his lips. "Yes, speak ?" 
 
 " Well, volumes. They tell the truth." 
 
 At this Mr. Hayes laughed again. " Oh, they at least do ? " 
 
 Near him thus, once more, Gedge knew their intelligence as 
 one which was so good a consciousness to get back that his 
 tension now relaxed as by the snap of a spring and he felt his 
 old face at ease. " So you can't say," he continued, " that we 
 don't want it." 
 
 " I bow to it," the young man smiled. " It's what I said then. 
 It's great." 
 
 " It's great," said Morris Gedge. " It couldn't be greater." 
 
 His wife still watched him ; her irony hung behind. " Then 
 we're just as we were?" 
 
 "No, not as we were." 
 
 She jumped at it. " Better ? " 
 
 " Better. They give us a rise." 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 227 
 
 "Of income?" 
 
 "Of our sweet little stipend by a vote of the Committee. 
 That's what, as Chairman, he came to announce." 
 
 The very echoes of the Birthplace were themselves, for the 
 instant, hushed; the warden's three companions showed, in the 
 conscious air, a struggle for their own breath. But Isabel, with 
 almost a shriek, was the first to recover hers. "They double 
 us?" 
 
 "Well call it that. ' In recognition.' There you are." Isabel 
 uttered another sound but this time inarticulate ; partly because 
 Mrs. Hayes of New York had already jumped at her to kiss her. 
 Mr. Hayes meanwhile, as with too much to say, but put out his 
 hand, which our friend took in silence. So Gedge had the last 
 word. " And there you are ! " 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 i 
 
 THERE was a longish period the dense duration of a London 
 winter, cheered, if cheered it could be called, with lurid 
 electric, with fierce " incandescent " flares and glares when they 
 repeatedly met, at feeding-time, in a small and not quite savoury 
 pothouse a stone's-throw from the Strand. They talked always 
 of pothouses, of feeding-time by which they meant any hour 
 between one and four of the afternoon ; they talked of most 
 things, even of some of the greatest, in a manner that gave, or 
 that they desired to show as giving, in respect to the conditions 
 of their life, the measure of their detachment, their contempt, 
 their general irony. Their general irony, which they tried at the 
 same time to keep gay and to make amusing at least to each 
 other, was their refuge from the want of savour, the want of 
 napkins, the want, too often, of shillings, and of many things 
 besides that they would have liked to have. Almost all they had 
 with any security was their youth, complete, admirable, very nearly 
 invulnerable, or as yet inattackable ; for they didn't count their 
 talent, which they had originally taken for granted and had since 
 then lacked freedom of mind, as well indeed as any offensive 
 reason, to reappraise. They were taken up with other questions and 
 other estimates the remarkable limits, for instance, of their luck, 
 the remarkable smallness of the talent of their friends. They were 
 above all in that phase of youth and in that state of aspiration in 
 which " luck " is the subject of most frequent reference, as definite 
 as the colour red, and in which it is the elegant name for money 
 when people are as refined as they are poor. She was only a 
 suburban young woman in a sailor hat, and he a young man 
 destitute, in strictness, of occasion for a " topper " ; but they felt 
 that they had in a peculiar way the freedom of the town, and the 
 town, if it did nothing else, gave a range to the spirit. They 
 sometimes went, on excursions that they groaned at as pro- 
 fessional, far afield from the Strand, but the curiosity with which 
 they came back was mostly greater than any other, the Strand 
 
 228 
 
THE PAPERS 229 
 
 being for them, with its ampler alternative Fleet Street, over- 
 whelmingly the Papers, and the Papers being, at a rough guess, 
 all the furniture of their consciousness. 
 
 The Daily Press played for them the part played by the em- 
 bowered nest on the swaying bough for the parent birds that 
 scour the air. It was, as they mainly saw it, a receptacle, owing 
 its form to the instinct more remarkable, as they held the journal- 
 istic, than that even of the most highly organised animal, into 
 which, regularly, breathlessly, contributions had to be dropped 
 odds and ends, all grist to the mill, all somehow digestible and 
 convertible, all conveyed with the promptest possible beak and 
 the flutter, often, of dreadfully fatigued little wings. If there had 
 been no Papers there would have been no young friends for us 
 of the figure we hint at, no chance mates, innocent and weary, 
 yet acute even to penetration, who were apt to push off their 
 plates and rest their elbows on the table in the interval between 
 the turn-over of the pint-pot and the call for the awful glibness of 
 their score. Maud Blandy drank beer and welcome, as one 
 may say ; and she smoked cigarettes when privacy permitted, 
 though she drew the line at this in the right place, just as she 
 flattered herself she knew how to draw it, journalistically, where 
 other delicacies were concerned. She was fairly a product of the 
 day so fairly that she might have been born afresh each morn- 
 ing, to serve, after the fashion of certain agitated ephemeral 
 insects, only till the morrow. It was as if a past had been wasted 
 on her and a future were not to be fitted ; she was really herself, 
 so far at least as her great preoccupation went, an edition, an 
 " extra special," coming out at the loud hours and living its life, 
 amid the roar of vehicles, the hustle of pavements, the shriek of 
 newsboys, according to the quantity of shock to be proclaimed 
 and distributed, the quantity to be administered, thanks to the 
 varying temper of Fleet Street, to the nerves of the nation. Maud 
 was a shocker, in short, in petticoats, and alike for the thorough- 
 fare, the club, the suburban train and the humble home ; though 
 it must honestly be added that petticoats were not of her essence. 
 This was one of the reasons, in an age of " emancipations," of 
 her intense actuality, as well as, positively, of a good fortune to 
 which, however impersonal she might have appeared, she was not 
 herself in a position to do full justice ; the felicity of her having 
 about her naturally so much of the young bachelor that she was 
 saved the disfigurement of any marked straddling or elbowing. 
 It was literally true of her that she would have pleased less, or 
 at least have offended more, had she been obliged, or been 
 prompted, to assert all too vainly, as it would have been sure to 
 
230 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 be her superiority to sex. Nature, constitution, accident, what- 
 ever we happen to call it, had relieved her of this care; the 
 struggle for life, the competition with men, the taste of the day, 
 the fashion of the hour had made her superior, or had at any 
 rate made her indifferent, and she had no difficulty in remaining 
 so. The thing was therefore, with the aid of an extreme general 
 flatness of person, directness of step and simplicity of motive, 
 quietly enough done, without a grace, a weak inconsequence, a 
 stray reminder to interfere with the success ; and it is not too 
 much to say that the success by which I mean the plainness of 
 the type would probably never have struck you as so great as 
 at the moments of our young lady's chance comradeship with 
 Howard Bight. For the young man, though his personal signs 
 had not, like his friend's, especially the effect of one of the stages 
 of an evolution, might have been noted as not so fiercely or so 
 freshly a male as to distance Maud in the show. 
 
 She presented him in truth, while they sat together, as com- 
 paratively girlish. She fell naturally into gestures, tones, expres- 
 sions, resemblances, that he either suppressed, from sensibility to 
 her personal predominance, or that were merely latent in him 
 through much taking for granted. Mild, sensitive, none too 
 solidly nourished, and condemned, perhaps by a deep delusion 
 as to the final issue of it, to perpetual coming and going, he was 
 so resigned to many things, and so disgusted even with many 
 others, that the least of his cares was the cultivation of a bold 
 front. What mainly concerned him was its being bold enough 
 to get him his dinner, and it was never more void of aggression 
 than when he solicited in person those scraps of information, 
 snatched at those floating particles of news, on which his dinner 
 depended. Had he had time a little more to try his case, he 
 would have made out that if he liked Maud Blandy it was partly 
 by the impression of what she could do for him : what she could 
 do for herself had never entered into his head. The positive 
 quantity, moreover, was vague to his mind ; it existed, that is, for 
 the present, but as the proof of how, in spite of the want of 
 encouragement, a fellow could keep going. She struck him in 
 fact as the only encouragement he had, and this altogether by 
 example, since precept, frankly, was deterrent on her lips, as 
 speech was free, judgment prompt, and accent not absolutely 
 pure. The point was that, as the easiest thing to be with her, he 
 was so passive that it almost made him graceful and so attentive 
 that it almost made him distinguished. She was herself neither 
 of these things, and they were not of course what a man had 
 most to be ; whereby she contributed to their common view the 
 
THE PAPERS 231 
 
 impatiences required by a proper reaction, forming thus for him 
 a kind of protective hedge behind which he could wait. Much 
 waiting, for either, was, I hasten to add, always in order, inasmuch 
 as their novitiate seemed to them interminable and the steps of 
 their ladder fearfully far apart. It rested the ladder against 
 the great stony wall of the public attention a sustaining mass 
 which apparently wore somewhere, in the upper air, a big, thank- 
 less, expressionless face, a countenance equipped with eyes, ears, 
 an uplifted nose and a gaping mouth all convenient if they could 
 only be reached. The ladder groaned meanwhile, swayed and 
 shook with the weight of the close-pressed climbers, tier upon 
 tier, occupying the upper, the middle, the nethermost rounds and 
 quite preventing, for young persons placed as our young friends 
 were placed, any view of the summit. It was meanwhile more- 
 over only Howard Bight's perverse view he was confessedly 
 perverse that Miss Blandy had arrived at a perch superior to 
 his own. 
 
 She had hitherto recognised in herself indeed but a tighter 
 clutch and a grimmer purpose; she had recognised, she believed, 
 in keen moments, a vocation ; she had recognised that there had 
 been eleven of them at home, with herself as youngest, and dis- 
 tinctions by that time so blurred in her that she might as easily 
 have been christened John. She had recognised truly, most of 
 all, that if they came to talk they both were nowhere ; yet this 
 was compatible with her insisting that Howard had as yet com- 
 paratively had the luck. When he wrote to people they con- 
 sented, or at least they answered ; almost always, for that matter, 
 they answered with greed, so that he was not without something 
 of some sort to hawk about to buyers. Specimens indeed of 
 human greed the greed, the great one, the eagerness to figure, 
 the snap at the bait of publicity, he had collected in such store 
 as to stock, as to launch, a museum. In this museum the prize 
 object, the high rare specimen, had been for some time estab- 
 lished ; a celebrity of the day enjoying, uncontested, a glass 
 case all to himself, more conspicuous than any other, before 
 which the arrested visitor might rebound from surprised recogni- 
 tion. Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., stood forth 
 there as large as life, owing indeed his particular place to the 
 shade of direct acquaintance with him that Howard Bight 
 could boast, yet with his eminent presence in such a collection 
 but too generally and notoriously justified. He was universal 
 and ubiquitous, commemorated, under some rank rubric, on 
 every page of every public print every day in every year, and as 
 inveterate a feature of each issue of any self-respecting sheet as 
 
2 3 2 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 the name, the date, the tariffed advertisements. He had always 
 done something, or was about to do something, round which the 
 honours of announcement clustered, and indeed, as he had 
 inevitably thus become a subject of fallacious report, one half of 
 his chronicle appeared to consist of official contradiction of the 
 other half. His activity if it had not better been called his 
 passivity was beyond any other that figured in the public eye, 
 for no other assuredly knew so few or such brief intermittences. 
 Yet, as there was the inside as well as the outside view of his 
 current history, the quantity of it was easy to analyse for the 
 possessor of the proper crucible. Howard Bight, with his arms 
 on the table, took it apart and put it together again most days in 
 the year, so that an amused comparison of notes on the subject 
 often added a mild spice to his colloquies with Maud Blandy. 
 They knew, the young pair, as they considered, many secrets, 
 but they liked to think that they knew none quite so scandalous 
 as the way that, to put it roughly, this distinguished person 
 maintained his distinction. 
 
 It was known certainly to all who had to do with the Papers, 
 a brotherhood, a sisterhood of course interested for what was 
 it, in the last resort, but the interest of their bread and butter ? 
 in shrouding the approaches to the oracle, in not telling tales out 
 of school. They all lived alike on the solemnity, the sanctity of 
 the oracle, and the comings and goings, the doings and undoings, 
 the intentions and retractations of Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet 
 K.C.B., M.P., were in their degree a part of that solemnity. The 
 Papers, taken together the glory of the age, were, though super- 
 ficially multifold, fundamentally one, so that any revelation of 
 their being procured or procurable to float an object not 
 intrinsically buoyant would very logically convey discredit from 
 the circumference where the revelation would be likely to be 
 made to the centre. Of so much as this our grim neophytes, 
 in common with a thousand others, were perfectly aware; but 
 something in the nature of their wit, such as it was, or in the 
 condition of their nerves, such as it easily might become, 
 sharpened almost to acerbity their relish of so artful an imitation 
 of the voice of fame. The fame was all voice, as they could 
 guarantee who had an ear always glued to the speaking-tube; 
 the items that made the sum were individually of the last 
 vulgarity, but the accumulation was a triumph one of the 
 greatest the age could show of industry and vigilance. It was 
 after all not true that a man had done nothing who for ten years 
 had so fed, so dyked and directed and distributed the fitful 
 sources of publicity. He had laboured, in his way, like a navvy 
 
THE PAPERS 233 
 
 with a spade ; he might be said to have earned by each night's 
 work the reward, each morning, of his small spurt of glory. 
 Even for such a matter as its not being true that Sir A. B. C. 
 Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., was to start on his visit to the 
 Sultan of Samarcand on the 23rd, but being true that he was to 
 start on the 29th, the personal attention required was no small 
 affair, taking the legend with the fact, the myth with the mean- 
 ing, the original artless error with the subsequent earnest truth 
 allowing in fine for the statement still to come that the visit 
 would have to be relinquished in consequence of the visitor's 
 other pressing engagements, and bearing in mind the countless 
 channels to be successively watered. Our young man, one 
 December afternoon, pushed an evening paper across to his 
 companion, keeping his thumb on a paragraph at which she 
 glanced without eagerness. She might, from her manner, have 
 known by instinct what it would be, and her exclamation had the 
 note of satiety. " Oh, he's working them now ? " 
 
 "If he has begun he'll work them hard. By the time that 
 has gone round the world there'll be something else to say. 
 * We are authorised to state that the marriage of Miss Miranda 
 Beadel-Muffet to Captain Guy Devereux, of the Fiftieth Rifles, 
 will not take place.' Authorised to state rather ! when every 
 wire in the machine has been pulled over and over. They're 
 authorised to state something every day in the year, and the 
 authorisation is not difficult to get. Only his daughters, now 
 that they're coming on, poor things and I believe there are 
 many will have to be chucked into the pot and produced on 
 occasions when other matter fails. How pleasant for them to 
 find themselves hurtling through the air, clubbed by the paternal 
 hand, like golf-balls in a suburb ! Not that I suppose they don't 
 like it why should one suppose anything of the sort?" Howard 
 Bight's impression of the general appetite appeared to-day to be 
 especially vivid, and he and his companion were alike prompted 
 to one of those slightly violent returns on themselves and the 
 work they were doing which none but the vulgar-minded alto- 
 gether avoid. "People as I see them would almost rather 
 be jabbered about unpleasantly than not be jabbered about at 
 all : whenever you try them whenever, at least, I do I'm con- 
 firmed in that conviction. It isn't only that if one holds out the 
 mere tip of the perch they jump at it like starving fish ; it is that 
 they leap straight out of the water themselves, leap in their thou- 
 sands and come flopping, open-mouthed and goggle-eyed, to one's 
 very door. What is the sense of the French expression about 
 a person's making des yeux de carpc ? It suggests the eyes that 
 
234 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 a young newspaper -man seems to see all round him, and I 
 declare I sometimes feel that, if one has the courage not to blink 
 at the show, the gilt is a good deal rubbed off the gingerbread 
 of one's early illusions. They all do it, as the song is at the 
 music-halls, and it's some of one's surprises that tell one most. 
 You've thought there were some high souls that didn't do it 
 that wouldn't, I mean, to work the oracle, lift a little finger of 
 their own. But, Lord bless you, give them a chance you'll find 
 some of the greatest the greediest. I give you my word for it, 
 I haven't a scrap of faith left in a single human creature. 
 Except, of course," the young man added, " the grand creature 
 that you are, and the cold, calm, comprehensive one whom you 
 thus admit to your familiarity. We face the music. We see, we 
 understand ; we know we've got to live, and how we do it. But 
 at least, like this, alone together, we take our intellectual revenge, 
 we escape the indignity of being fools dealing with fools. I don't 
 say we shouldn't enjoy it more if we were. But it can't be 
 helped ; we haven't the gift the gift, I mean, of not seeing. 
 We do the worst we can for the money." 
 
 " You certainly do the worst you can," Maud Blandy soon 
 replied, " when you sit there, with your wanton wiles, and take 
 the spirit out of me. I require a working faith, you know. If 
 one isn't a fool, in our world, where is one ? " 
 
 " Oh, I say ! " her companion groaned without alarm. " Don't 
 you fail me^ mind you." 
 
 They looked at each other across their clean platters, and, 
 little as the light of romance seemed superficially to shine in 
 them or about them, the sense was visibly enough in each of 
 being involved in the other. He would have been sharply alone, 
 the softly sardonic young man, if the somewhat dry young 
 woman hadn't affected him, in a way he was even too nervous 
 to put to the test, as saving herself up for him ; and the 
 consciousness of absent resources that was on her own side 
 quite compatible with this economy grew a shade or two less 
 dismal with the imagination of his somehow being at costs 
 for her. It wasn't an expense of shillings there was not much 
 question of that ; what it came to was perhaps nothing more 
 than that, being, as he declared himself, "in the know," he kept 
 pulling her in too, as if there had been room for them both. 
 He told her everything, all his secrets. He talked and talked, 
 often making her think of herself as a lean, stiff person, desti- 
 tute of skill or art, but with ear enough to be performed to, 
 sometimes strangely touched, at moments completely ravished, 
 by a fine violinist. He was her fiddler and genius ; she was 
 
THE PAPERS 235 
 
 sure neither of her taste nor of his tunes, but if she could do 
 nothing else for him she could hold the case while he handled 
 the instrument. It had never passed between them that they 
 could draw nearer, for they seemed near, near verily for pleasure, 
 when each, in a decent young life, was so much nearer to the 
 other than to anything else. There was no pleasure known 
 to either that wasn't further off. What held them together was 
 in short that they were in the same boat, a cockle-shell in 
 a great rough sea, and that the movements required for keeping 
 it afloat not only were what the situation safely permitted, but 
 also made for reciprocity and intimacy. These talks over greasy 
 white slabs, repeatedly mopped with moist grey cloths by young 
 women in black uniforms, with inexorable braided " buns " in the 
 nape of weak necks, these sessions, sometimes prolonged, in 
 halls of oilcloth, among penal-looking tariffs and pyramids of 
 scones, enabled them to rest on their oars ; the more that they 
 were on terms with the whole families, chartered companies, of 
 food-stations, each a race of innumerable and indistinguishable 
 members, and had mastered those hours of comparative elegance, 
 the earlier and the later, when the little weary ministrants were 
 limply sitting down and the occupants of the red benches 
 bleakly interspaced. So it was, that, at times, they renewed 
 their understanding, and by signs, mannerless and meagre, that 
 would have escaped the notice of witnesses. Maud Blandy had 
 no need to kiss her hand across to him to show she felt what he 
 meant; she had moreover never in her life kissed her hand to 
 anyone, and her companion couldn't have imagined it of her. 
 His romance was so grey that it wasn't romance at all; it was 
 a reality arrived at without stages, shades, forms. If he had 
 been ill or stricken she would have taken him other resources 
 failing into her lap ; but would that, which would scarce even 
 have been motherly, have been romantic? She nevertheless 
 at this moment put in her plea for the general element. " I can't 
 help it, about Beadel-Muffet ; it's too magnificent it appeals to 
 me. And then I've a particular feeling about him I'm waiting 
 to see what will happen. It is genius, you know, to get yourself 
 so celebrated for nothing to carry out your idea in the face 
 of everything. I mean your idea of being celebrated. It isn't 
 as if he had done even one little thing. What has he done 
 when you come to look ? " 
 
 " Why, my dear chap, he has done everything. He has missed 
 nothing. He has been in everything, of everything, at every- 
 thing, over everything, under everything, that has taken place for 
 the last twenty years. He's always present, and, though he never 
 
236 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 makes a speech, he never fails to get alluded to in the speeches of 
 others. That's doing it cheaper than anyone else does it, but it's 
 thoroughly doing it which is what we're talking about. And so 
 far," the young man contended, " from its being * in the face ' of 
 anything, it's positively with the help of everything, since the 
 Papers are everything and more. They're made for such people, 
 though no doubt he's the person who has known best how to use 
 them. I've gone through one of the biggest sometimes, from 
 beginning to end it's quite a thrilling little game to catch him 
 once out. It has happened to me to think I was near it when, on 
 the last column of the last page I count 'advertisements,' heaven 
 help us, out ! I've found him as large as life and as true as the 
 needle to the pole. But at last, in a way, it goes, it can't help 
 going, of itself. He comes in, he breaks out, of himself; the 
 letters, under the compositor's hand, form themselves, from the 
 force of habit, into his name-^-any connection for it, any context, 
 being as good as any other, and the wind, which he has originally 
 ' raised,' but which continues to blow, setting perpetually in his 
 favour. The thing would really be now, don't you see, for him to 
 keep himself out. That would be, on my honour, it strikes me 
 his getting himself out the biggest fact in his record." 
 
 The girl's attention, as her friend developed the picture, had 
 become more present. "He carit get himself out. There he 
 is." She had a pause ; she had been thinking. " That's just my 
 idea." 
 
 " Your idea ? Well, an idea's always a blessing. What do you 
 want for it ? " 
 
 She continued to turn it over as if weighing its value. " Some- 
 thing perhaps could be done with it only it would take imagina- 
 tion." 
 
 He wondered, and she seemed to wonder that he didn't see. 
 " Is it a situation for a ' ply ' ? " 
 
 " No, it's too good for a ply yet it isn't quite good enough for 
 a short story." 
 
 " It would do then for a novel ? " 
 
 "Well, I seem to see it," Maud said "and with a lot in it to 
 be got out. But I seem to see it as a question not of what you 
 or I might be able to do with it, but of what the poor man him- 
 self may. That's what I meant just now," she explained, " by my 
 having a creepy sense of what may happen for him. It has 
 already more than once occurred to me. Then" she wound up, 
 " we shall have real life, the case itself." 
 
 " Do you know you've got imagination ? " Her friend, rather 
 interested, appeared by this time to have seized her thought. 
 
THE PAPERS 237 
 
 " I see him having for some reason, very imperative, to seek 
 retirement, lie low, to hide, in fact, like a man 'wanted,' but 
 pursued all the while by the lurid glare that he has himself so 
 started and kept up, and at last literally devoured (' like Franken- 
 stein,' of course !) by the monster he has created." 
 
 " I say, you have got it ! " and the young man flushed, visibly, 
 artistically, with the recognition of elements which his eyes had 
 for a minute earnestly fixed. " But it will take a lot of doing." 
 
 "Oh," said Maud, "we shan't have to do it. He'll do it 
 himself." 
 
 "I wonder." Howard Bight really wondered. "The fun 
 would be for him to do \ifor us. I mean for him to want us to 
 help him somehow to get out." 
 
 " Oh, ' us ' ! " the girl mournfully sighed. 
 
 " Why not, when he comes to us to get in ? " 
 
 Maud Blandy stared. "Do you mean to you personally ? You 
 surely know by this time that no one ever 'comes' to me." 
 
 " Why, I went to him in the first instance ; I made up to him 
 straight, I did him 'at home,' somewhere, as I've surely mentioned 
 to you before, three years ago. He liked, I believe for he's 
 really a delightful old ass the way I did it ; he knows my name 
 and has my address, and has written me three or four times since, 
 with his own hand, a request to be so good as to make use of my 
 (he hopes) still close connection with the daily Press to rectify the 
 rumour that he has reconsidered his opinion on the subject of the 
 blankets supplied to the Upper Tooting Workhouse Infirmary. 
 He has reconsidered his opinion on no subject whatever which 
 he mentions, in the interest of historic truth, without further 
 intrusion on my valuable time. And he regards that sort of 
 thing as a commodity that I can dispose of thanks to my ' close 
 connection ' for several shillings." 
 
 " And can you ? " 
 
 " Not for several pence. They're all tariffed, but he's tariffed 
 low having a value, apparently, that money doesn't represent. 
 He's always welcome, but he isn't always paid for. The beauty, 
 however, is in his marvellous memory, his keeping us all so apart 
 and not muddling the fellow to whom he has written that he 
 hasn't done this, that or the other with the fellow to whom he has 
 written that he has. He'll write to me again some day about 
 something else about his alleged position on the date of the 
 next school-treat of the Chelsea Cabmen's Orphanage. I shall 
 seek a market for the precious item, and that will keep us in 
 touch ; so that if the complication you have the sense of in your 
 bones does come into play the thought's too beautiful ! he 
 
238 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 may once more remember me. Fancy his coming to one with a 
 'What can you do for me now?'" Bight lost himself in the 
 happy vision ; it gratified so his cherished consciousness of the 
 "irony of fate" a consciousness so cherished that he never 
 could write ten lines without use of the words. 
 
 Maud showed however at this point a reserve which appeared 
 to have grown as the possibility opened out. " I believe in it 
 it must come. It can't not. It's the only end. He doesn't 
 know ; nobody knows the simple-minded all : only you and I 
 know. But it won't be nice, remember." 
 
 "It won't be funny?" 
 
 " It will be pitiful. There'll have to be a reason." 
 
 " For his turning round ? " the young man nursed the vision. 
 " More or less I see what you mean. But except for a ' ply ' 
 will that so much matter? His reason will concern himself. 
 What will concern us will be his funk and his helplessness, his 
 having to stand there in the blaze, with nothing and nobody to 
 put it out. We shall see him, shrieking for a bucket of water, 
 wither up in the central flame." 
 
 Her look had turned sombre. " It makes one cruel. That is 
 it makes you. I mean our trade does." 
 
 " I dare say I see too much. But I'm willing to chuck it." 
 
 " Well," she presently replied, " I'm not willing to, but it seems 
 pretty well on the cards that I shall have to. / don't see too 
 much. I don't see enough. So, for all the good it does me ! " 
 
 She had pushed back her chair and was looking round for 
 her umbrella. " Why, what's the matter ? " Howard Bight too 
 blankly inquired. 
 
 She met his eyes while she pulled on her rusty old gloves. 
 "Well, I'll tell you another time." 
 
 He kept his place, still lounging, contented where she had 
 again become restless. " Don't you call it seeing enough to 
 see to have had so luridly revealed to you the doom of 
 Beadel-Muffet?" 
 
 " Oh, he's not my business, he's yours. You're his man, or one 
 of his men he'll come back to you. Besides, he's a special case, 
 and, as I say, I'm too sorry for him." 
 
 "That's a proof then of what you do see." 
 
 Her silence for a moment admitted it, though evidently she 
 was making, for herself, a distinction, which she didn't express. 
 "I don't then see what I want, what I require. And he? she 
 added, "if he does have some reason, will have to have an awfully 
 strong one. To be strong enough it will have to be awful." 
 
 " You mean he'll have done something ? " 
 
THE PAPERS 239 
 
 " Yes, that may remain undiscovered if he can only drop out 
 of the papers, sit for a while in darkness. You'll know what it is; 
 you'll not be able to help yourself. But I shan't want to, for 
 anything." 
 
 She had got up as she said it, and he sat looking at her, thanks 
 to her odd emphasis, with an interest that, as he also rose, passed 
 itself off as a joke. "Ah, then, you sweet sensitive thing, I 
 promise to keep it from you." 
 
 II 
 
 THEY met again a few days later, and it seemed the law of their 
 meetings that these should take place mainly within moderate 
 eastward range of Charing Cross. An afternoon performance of 
 a play translated from the Finnish, already several times given, 
 on a series of Saturdays, had held Maud for an hour in a small, 
 hot, dusty theatre where the air hung as heavy about the great 
 "trimmed" and plumed hats of the ladies as over the flora and 
 fauna of a tropical forest ; at the end of which she edged out of 
 her stall in the last row, to join a small band of unattached 
 critics and correspondents, spectators with ulterior views and 
 pencilled shirtcuffs, who, coming together in the lobby for an 
 exchange of ideas, were ranging from " Awful rot " to " Rather 
 jolly." Ideas, of this calibre, rumbled and flashed, so that, lost 
 in the discussion, our young woman failed at first to make out 
 that a gentleman on the other side of the group, but standing a 
 little off, had his eyes on her for some extravagant, though 
 apparently quite respectable, purpose. He had been waiting for 
 her to recognise him, and as soon as he had caught her attention 
 he came round to her with an eager bow. She had by this time 
 entirely placed him placed him as the smoothest and most 
 shining subject with which, in the exercise of her profession, she 
 had yet experimented ; but her recognition was accompanied with 
 a pang that his amiable address made but the sharper. She had 
 her reason for awkwardness in the presence of a rosy, glossy, 
 kindly, but discernibly troubled personage whom she had waited 
 on " at home " at her own suggestion promptly welcomed and 
 the sympathetic element in whose "personality," the Chippen- 
 dale, the photographic, the autographic elements in whose flat in 
 the Earl's Court Road, she had commemorated in the liveliest 
 prose of which she was capable. She had described with 
 humour his favourite pug, she had revealed with permission his 
 favourite make of Kodak, she had touched upon his favourite 
 manner of spending his Sundays and had extorted from him the 
 
2 4 o THE BETTER SORT 
 
 shy confession that he preferred after all the novel of adventure 
 to the novel of subtlety. Her embarrassment was therefore now 
 the greater as, touching to behold, he so clearly had approached 
 her with no intention of asperity, not even at first referring at all 
 to the matter that couldn't have been gracefully explained. 
 
 She had seen him originally had had the instinct of it in 
 making up to him as one of the happy of the earth, and the 
 impression of him "at home," on his proving so good-natured 
 about the interview, had begotten in her a sharper envy, a 
 hungrier sense of the invidious distinctions of fate, than any her 
 literary conscience, which she deemed rigid, had yet had to 
 reckon with. He must have been rich, rich by such estimates 
 as hers ; he at any rate had everything, while she had nothing 
 nothing but the vulgar need of offering him to brag, on his be- 
 half, for money, if she could get it, about his luck. She hadn't 
 in fact got money, hadn't so much as managed to work in her 
 stuff anywhere ; a practical comment sharp enough on her having 
 represented to him with wasted pathos, she was indeed soon to 
 perceive how " important " it was to her that people should let 
 her get at them. This dim celebrity had not needed that 
 argument ; he had not only, with his alacrity, allowed her, as she 
 had said, to try her hand, but had tried with her, quite feverishly, 
 and all to the upshot of showing her that there were even greater 
 outsiders than herself. He could have put down money, could 
 have published, as the phrase was a bare two columns at his 
 own expense ; but it was just a part of his rather irritating luxury 
 that he had a scruple about that, wanted intensely to taste the 
 sweet, but didn't want to owe it to any wire-pulling. He wanted 
 the golden apple straight from the tree, where it yet seemed so 
 unable to grow for him by any exuberance of its own. He had 
 breathed to her his real secret that to be inspired, to work with 
 effect, he had to feel he was appreciated, to have it all somehow 
 come back to him. The artist, necessarily sensitive, lived on 
 encouragement, on knowing and being reminded that people 
 cared for him a little, cared even just enough to flatter him a wee 
 bit. They had talked that over, and he had really, as he called 
 it, quite put himself in her power. He had whispered in her 
 ear that it might be very weak and silly, but that positively to be 
 himself, to do anything, certainly to do his best, he required the 
 breath of sympathy. He did love notice, let alone praise there 
 it was. To be systematically ignored well, blighted him at the 
 root. He was afraid she would think he had said too much, 
 but she left him with his leave, none the less, to repeat a part of it. 
 They had agreed that she was to bring in prettily, somehow, tha 
 
THE PAPERS 241 
 
 he did love praise ; for just the right way he was sure he could 
 trust to her taste. 
 
 She had promised to send him the interview in proof, but she 
 had been able, after all, to send it but in type-copy. If she, 
 after all, had had a flat adorned as to the drawing-room alone 
 with eighty-three photographs, and all in plush frames ; if she 
 had lived in the Earl's Court Road, had been rosy and glossy and 
 well filled out ; and if she had looked withal, as she always made 
 a point of calling it when she wished to refer without vulgarity to 
 the right place in the social scale, " unmistakeably gentle " if she 
 had achieved these things she would have snapped her fingers at 
 all other sweets, have sat as tight as possible and let the world 
 wag, have spent her Sundays in silently thanking her stars, and 
 not have cared to know one Kodak, or even one novelist's 
 " methods," from another. Except for his unholy itch he was in 
 short so just the person she would have liked to be that the last 
 consecration was given for her to his character by his speaking 
 quite as if he had accosted her only to secure her view of the 
 strange Finnish "soul." He had come each time there had 
 been four Saturdays ; whereas Maud herself had had to wait till 
 to-day, though her bread depended on it, for the roundabout 
 charity of her publicly bad seat. It didn't matter why he had 
 come so that he might see it somewhere printed of him that he 
 was " a conspicuously faithful attendant " at the interesting 
 series ; it only mattered that he was letting her off so easily, and 
 yet that there was a restless hunger, odd on the part of one of 
 the filled-out, in his appealing eye, which she now saw not to be 
 a bit intelligent, though that didn't matter either. Howard Bight 
 came into view while she dealt with these impressions, whereupon 
 she found herself edging a little away from her patron. Her 
 other friend, who had but just arrived and was apparently waiting 
 to speak to her, would be a pretext for a break before the poor 
 gentleman should begin to accuse her of having failed him. She 
 had failed herself so much more that she would have been ready 
 to reply to him that he was scarce the one to complain ; fortu- 
 nately, however, the bell sounded the end of the interval and her 
 tension was relaxed. They all flocked back to their places, and 
 her camarade she knew enough often so to designate him was 
 enabled, thanks to some shifting of other spectators, to occupy a 
 seat beside her. He had brought with him the breath of busi- 
 ness ; hurrying from one appointment to another he might have 
 time but for a single act. .He had seen each of the others by 
 itself, and the way he now crammed in the third, after having 
 previously snatched the fourth, brought home again to the girl 
 
242 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 that he was leading the real life. Her own was a dull imitation 
 of it. Yet it happened at the same time that before the curtain 
 rose again he had, with a " Who's your fat friend ? " professed to 
 have caught her in the act of making her own brighter. 
 
 " ' Mortimer Marshal ' ? " he echoed after she had, a trifle dryly, 
 satisfied him. " Never heard of him." 
 
 "Well, I shan't tell him that. But you have? she said; 
 " you've only forgotten. I told you after I had been to him." 
 
 Her friend thought it came back to him. " Oh yes, and 
 showed me what you had made of it. I remember your stuff 
 was charming." 
 
 " I see you remember nothing," Maud a little more dryly said. 
 " I didn't show you what I had made of it. I've never made 
 anything. You've not seen my stuff, and nobody has. They 
 won't have it." 
 
 She spoke with a smothered vibration, but, as they were still 
 waiting, it had made him look at her ; by which she was slightly 
 the more disconcerted. " Who won't ? " 
 
 "Everyone, everything won't. Nobody, nothing will. He's 
 hopeless, or rather /am. I'm no good. And he knows it." 
 
 "O oh!" the young man kindly but vaguely protested. 
 " Has he been making that remark to you ? " 
 
 " NO that's the worst of it. He's too dreadfully civil. He 
 thinks I can do something." 
 
 " Then why do you say he knows you can't ? " 
 
 She was impatient; she gave it up. "Well, I don't know 
 what he knows except that he does want to be loved." 
 
 " Do you mean he has proposed to you to love him ? " 
 
 " Loved by the great heart of the public speaking through its 
 natural organ. He wants to be well, where Beadel-Muffet is." 
 
 " Oh, I hope not ! " said Bight with grim amusement. 
 
 His friend was struck with his tone. "Do you mean it's 
 coming on for Beadel-Muffet what we talked about?" And 
 then as he looked at her so queerly that her curiosity took a jump : 
 " It really and truly is f Has anything happened ? " 
 
 " The rummest thing in the world since I last saw you. 
 We're wonderful, you know, you and I together we see. And 
 what we see always takes place, usually within the week. It 
 wouldn't be believed. But it will do for us. At any rate it's high 
 sport." 
 
 "Do you mean," she asked, "that his scare has literally begun?" 
 
 He meant, clearly, quite as much as he said. " He has written 
 to me again he wants to see me, and we've an appointment for 
 Monday." 
 
THE PAPERS 243 
 
 " Then why isn't it the old game ? " 
 
 "Because it isn't. He wants to gather from me, as I have 
 served him before, if something can't be done. On a souvent 
 besoin (T un plus petit que soi. Keep quiet, and we shall see some- 
 thing." 
 
 This was very well ; only his manner visibly had for her the 
 effect of a chill in the air. " I hope," she said, " you're going at 
 least to be decent to him." 
 
 "Well, you'll judge. Nothing at all can be done it's too 
 ridiculously late. And it serves him right. I shan't deceive him, 
 certainly, but I might as well enjoy him." 
 
 The fiddles were still going, and Maud had a pause. " Well, 
 you know you've more or less lived on him. I mean it's the kind 
 of thing you are living on." 
 
 " Precisely that's just why I loathe it." 
 
 Again she hesitated. "You mustn't quarrel, you know, with 
 your bread and butter." 
 
 He looked straight before him, as if she had been consciously, 
 and the least bit disagreeably, sententious. " What in the world's 
 that but what I shall just be not doing ? If our bread and butter 
 is the universal push I consult our interest by not letting it trifle 
 with us. They're not to blow hot and cold it won't do. There 
 he is let him get out himself. What I call sport is to see if he 
 can." 
 
 " And not poor wretch to help him ? " 
 
 But Bight was ominously lucid. " The devil is that he can't be 
 helped. His one idea of help, from the day he opened his eyes, 
 has been to be prominently damn the word ! mentioned : it's 
 the only kind of help that exists in connection with him. What 
 therefore is a fellow to do when he happens to want it to stop 
 wants a special sort of prominence that will work like a trap in a 
 pantomime and enable him to vanish when the situation requires 
 it? Is one to mention that he wants not to be mentioned 
 never, never, please, any more ? Do you see the success of that, 
 all over the place, do you see the headlines in the American 
 papers ? No, he must die as he has lived the Principal Public 
 Person of his time." 
 
 "Well," she sighed, "it's all horrible." And then without a 
 transition : " What do you suppose has happened to him ? " 
 
 " The dreadfulness I wasn't to tell you ? '' 
 
 " I only mean if you suppose him in a really bad hole." 
 
 The young man considered. " It can't certainly be that he has 
 had a change of heart never. It may be nothing worse than 
 that the woman he wants to marry has turned against it." 
 
244 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 "But I supposed him with his children all so boomed to 
 be married." 
 
 " Naturally ; else he couldn't have got such a boom from the 
 poor lady's illness, death and burial. Don't you remember two 
 years ago? 'We are given to understand that Sir A. B. C. 
 Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., particularly desires that no flowers 
 be sent for the late Hon. Lady Beadel-Muffet's funeral.' And 
 then, the next day : ' We are authorised to state that the im- 
 pression, so generally prevailing, that Sir A. B. C. Beadel- 
 Muffet has expressed an objection to flowers in connection with 
 the late Hon. Lady Beadel-Muffet's obsequies, rests on a mis- 
 apprehension of Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet's markedly individual 
 views. The floral tributes already delivered in Queen's Gate 
 Gardens, and remarkable for number and variety, have been the 
 source of such gratification to the bereaved gentleman as his 
 situation permits.' With a wind-up of course for the following 
 week the inevitable few heads of remark, on the part of the 
 bereaved gentleman, on the general subject of Flowers at Funerals 
 as a Fashion, vouchsafed, under pressure possibly indiscreet, to a 
 rising young journalist always thirsting for the authentic word." 
 
 " I guess now," said Maud, after an instant, " the rising young 
 journalist. You egged him on." 
 
 " Dear, no. I panted in his rear." 
 
 " It makes you," she added, " more than cynical." 
 
 " And what do you call c more than ' cynical ? " 
 
 " It makes you sardonic. Wicked," she continued ; "devilish." 
 
 " That's it that is cynical. Enough's as good as a feast." 
 But he came back to the ground they had quitted. " What were 
 you going to say he's prominent for, Mortimer Marshal ? " 
 
 She wouldn't, however, follow him there yet, her curiosity on 
 the other issue not being spent. " Do you know then as a fact, 
 that he's marrying again, the bereaved gentleman ? " 
 
 Her friend, at this, showed impatience. " My dear fellow, do 
 you see nothing ? We had it all, didn't we, three months ago, and 
 then we didn't have it, and then we had it again ; and goodness 
 knows where we are. But I throw out the possibility. I forget 
 her bloated name, but she may be rich, and she may be decent. 
 She may make it a condition that he keeps out out, I mean, of 
 the only things he has really ever been ' in.' " 
 
 "The Papers?" 
 
 "The dreadful, nasty, vulgar Papers. She may put it to 
 him I see it dimly and queerly, but I see it that he must get 
 out first, and then they'll talk ; then she'll say yes, then he'll have 
 the money. I see it and much more sharply that he wants 
 
THE PAPERS 245 
 
 the money, needs it, I mean, badly, desperately, so that this 
 necessity may very well make the hole in which he finds himself. 
 Therefore he must do something what he's trying to do. It 
 supplies the motive that our picture, the other day, rather 
 missed." 
 
 Maud Blandy took this in, but it seemed to fail to satisfy her. 
 " It must be something worse. You make it out that, so that 
 your practical want of mercy, which you'll not be able to conceal 
 from me, shall affect me as less inhuman." 
 
 " I don't make it out anything, and I don't care what it is ; the 
 queerness, the grand ' irony ' of the case is itself enough for me. 
 You, on your side, however, I think, make it out what you call 
 ' something worse,' because of the romantic bias of your mind. 
 You ' see red.' Yet isn't it, after all, sufficiently lurid that he shall 
 lose his blooming bride ? " 
 
 "You're sure," Maud appealed, "that he'll lose her?" 
 
 " Poetic justice screams for it ; and my whole interest in the 
 matter is staked on it." 
 
 But the girl continued to brood. " I thought you contend that 
 nobody's half 'decent.' Where do you find a woman to make 
 such a condition ? " 
 
 " Not easily, I admit." The young man thought. " It will be 
 his luck to have found her. That's his tragedy, say, that she can 
 financially save him, but that she happens to be just the one 
 freak, the creature whose stomach has turned. The spark I 
 mean of decency has got, after all, somehow to be kept alive ; 
 and it may be lodged in this particular female form." 
 
 " I see. But why should a female form that's so particular 
 confess to an affinity with a male form that's so fearfully general ? 
 As he's all self-advertisement, why isn't it much more natural to 
 her simply to loathe him ? " 
 
 "Well, because, oddly enough, it seems that people don't." 
 
 " Vou do," Maud declared. " You'll kill him." 
 
 He just turned a flushed cheek to her, and she saw that she 
 had touched something that lived in him. " We can" he con- 
 sciously smiled, "deal death. And the beauty is that it's in 
 a perfectly straight way. We can lead them on. But have you 
 ever seen Beadel-Muffet for yourself?" he continued. 
 
 "No. How often, please, need I tell you that I've seen 
 nobody and nothing?" 
 
 " Well, if you had you'd understand." 
 
 " You mean he's so fetching ? " 
 
 " Oh, he's great. He's not ' all ' self-advertisement or at 
 least he doesn't seem to be : that's* his pull. But I see, you 
 
246 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 female humbug," Bight pursued, "how much you'd like him 
 yourself." 
 
 " I want, while I'm about it, to pity him in sufficient quantity." 
 
 " Precisely. Which means, for a woman, with extravagance 
 and to the point of immorality." 
 
 "I ain't a woman," Maud Blandy sighed. " I wish I were ! " 
 
 " Well, about the pity," he went on ; " you shall be immoral, 
 I promise you, before you've done. Doesn't Mortimer Marshal," 
 he asked, " take you for a woman ? " 
 
 " You'll have to ask him. How," she demanded, " does one 
 know those things?" And she stuck to her Beadel-Muffet 
 " If you're to see him on Monday shan't you then get to the 
 bottom of it ? " 
 
 "Oh, I don't conceal from you that I promise myself larks, 
 but I won't tell you, positively I won't," Bight said, " what I see. 
 You're morbid. If it's only bad enough I mean his motive 
 you'll want to save him." 
 
 "Well, isn't that what you're to profess to him that you want?" 
 
 "Ah," the young man returned, "I believe you'd really invent 
 a way." 
 
 "I would if I could." And with that she dropped it. "There's 
 my fat friend," she presently added, as the entr'acte still hung 
 heavy and Mortimer Marshal, from a row much in advance of 
 them, screwed himself round in his tight place apparently to 
 keep her in his eye. 
 
 " He does then," said her companion, " take you for a woman. 
 I seem to guess he's ' littery.' " 
 
 "That's it; so badly that he wrote that 'littery' ply Corisanda, 
 you must remember, with Beatrice Beaumont in the principal 
 part, which was given at three matinees in this very place and 
 which hadn't even the luck of being slated. Every creature 
 connected with the production, from the man himself and 
 Beatrice /forself down to the mothers and grandmothers of the 
 sixpenny young women, the young women of the programmes, 
 was interviewed both before and after, and he promptly published 
 the piece, pleading guilty to the 'littery' charge which is the 
 great stand he takes and the subject of the discussion." 
 
 Bight had wonderingly followed. " Of what discussion ? " 
 
 " Why, the one he thinks there ought to have been. There 
 hasn't been any, of course, but he wants it, dreadfully misses it. 
 People won't keep it up whatever they did do, though I don't 
 myself make out that they did anything. His state of mind 
 requires something to start with, which has got somehow to be 
 provided. There must have been a noise made, don't you see ? 
 
THE PAPERS 247 
 
 to make him prominent ; and in order to remain prominent he 
 has got to go for his enemies. The hostility to his ply, and all 
 because it's 'littery,' we can do nothing without that; but it's 
 uphill work to come across it. We sit up nights trying, but we 
 seem to get no for'arder. The public attention would seem 
 to abhor the whole matter even as nature abhors a vacuum. 
 We've nothing to go upon, otherwise we might go far. But there 
 we are." 
 
 " I see," Bight commented. " You're nowhere at all." 
 
 " No ; it isn't even that, for we're just where Corisanda, on the 
 stage and in the closet, put us at a stroke. Only there we stick 
 fast nothing seems to happen, nothing seems to come or to 
 be capable of being made to come. We wait." 
 
 " Oh, if he waits with you ! " Bight amicably jibed. 
 
 " He may wait for ever ? " 
 
 " No, but resignedly. You'll make him forget his wrongs." 
 
 " Ah, I'm not of that sort, and I could only do it by making 
 him come into his rights. And I recognise now that that's 
 impossible. There are different cases, you see, whole different 
 classes of them, and his is the opposite to Beadel-Muffet's." 
 
 Howard Bight gave a grunt. " Why the opposite if you also 
 pity him? I'll be hanged," he added, "if you won't save 
 him too." 
 
 But she shook her head. She knew. " No ; but it's nearly, 
 in its way, as lurid. Do you know," she asked, "what he has 
 done?" 
 
 " Why, the difficulty appears to be that he can't have done 
 anything. He should strike once more hard, and in the same 
 place. He should bring out another ply." 
 
 "Why so? You can't be more than prominent, and he is 
 prominent. You can't do more than subscribe, in your promi- 
 nence, to thirty-seven ' press-cutting ' agencies in England and 
 America, and, having done so, you can't do more than sit at 
 home with your ear on the postman's knock, looking out for 
 results. There comes in the tragedy there are no results. 
 Mortimer Marshal's postman doesn't knock ; the press-cutting 
 agencies can't find anything to cut. With thirty-seven, in the 
 whole English-speaking world, scouring millions of papers for 
 him in vain, and with a big slice of his private income all the 
 while going to it, the ' irony ' is too cruel, and the way he looks 
 at one, as in one's degree responsible, does make one wince. He 
 expected, naturally, most from the Americans, but it's they who 
 have failed him worst. Their silence is that of the tomb, and it 
 seems to grow, if the silence of the tomb can grow. He won't 
 
248 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 admit that the thirty-seven look far enough or long enough, and 
 he writes them, I infer, angry letters, wanting to know what the 
 deuce they suppose he has paid them for. But what are they 
 either, poor things, to do ? " 
 
 " Do ? They can print his angry letters. That, at least, will 
 break the silence, and he'll like it better than nothing." 
 
 This appeared to strike our young woman. " Upon my word, 
 I really believe he would." Then she thought better of it. " But 
 they'd be afraid, for they do guarantee, you know, that there's 
 something for everyone. They claim it's their strength that 
 there's enough to go round. They won't want to show that they 
 break down." 
 
 " Oh, well," said the young man, " if he can't manage to smash 
 a pane of glass somewhere ! " 
 
 " That's what he thought 7 would do. And it's what / thought 
 I might," Maud added; "otherwise I wouldn't have approached 
 him. I did it on spec, but I'm no use. I'm a fatal influence. 
 I'm a non-conductor." 
 
 She said it with such plain sincerity that it quickly took her 
 companion's attention. " I say /" he covertly murmured. " Have 
 you a secret sorrow ? " 
 
 " Of course I've a secret sorrow." And she stared at it, stiff 
 and a little sombre, not wanting it to be too freely handled, 
 while the curtain at last rose to the lighted stage. 
 
 Ill 
 
 SHE was later on more open about it, sundry other things, not 
 wholly alien, having meanwhile happened. One of these had 
 been that her friend had waited with her to the end of the Finnish 
 performance and that it had then, in the lobby, as they went out, 
 not been possible for her not to make him acquainted with Mr. 
 Mortimer Marshal. This gentleman had clearly waylaid her and 
 had also clearly divined that her companion was of the Papers 
 papery all through ; which doubtless had something to do with 
 his having handsomely proposed to them to accompany him 
 somewhere to tea. They hadn't seen why they shouldn't, it being 
 an adventure, all in their line, like another ; and he had carried 
 them, in a four-wheeler, to a small and refined club in a region 
 which was as the fringe of the Piccadilly region, where even their 
 own presence scarce availed to contradict the implication of the 
 exclusive. The whole occasion, they were further to feel, was 
 essentially a tribute to their professional connection, especially 
 that side of it which flushed and quavered, which panted and 
 
THE PAPERS 249 
 
 pined in their host's personal nervousness. Maud Blandy now 
 saw it vain to contend with his delusion that she^ underfed and 
 unprinted, who had never been so conscious as during these 
 bribed moments of her non-conducting quality, was papery to any 
 purpose a delusion that exceeded, by her measure, every other 
 form of pathos. The decoration of the tea-room was a pale, 
 aesthetic green, the liquid in the delicate cups a copious potent 
 amber ; the bread and butter was thin and golden, the muffins a 
 revelation to her that she was barbarously hungry. There were 
 ladies at other tables with other gentlemen ladies with long 
 feather boas and hats not of the sailor pattern, and gentlemen 
 whose straight collars were doubled up much higher than Howard 
 Bight's and their hair parted far more at the side. The talk was 
 so low, with pauses somehow so not of embarrassment that it 
 could only have been earnest, and the air, an air of privilege and 
 privacy to our young woman's sense, seemed charged with fine 
 things taken for granted. If it hadn't been for Bight's company 
 she would have grown almost frightened, so much seemed to be 
 offered her for something she couldn't do. That word of Bight's 
 about smashing a window-pane had lingered with her; it had 
 made her afterwards wonder, while they sat in their stalls, if there 
 weren't some brittle surface in range of her own elbow. She had 
 to fall back on the consciousness of how her elbow, in spite of 
 her type, lacked practical point, and that was just why the terms 
 in which she saw her services now, as she believed, bid for, had 
 the effect of scaring her. They came out most, for that matter, 
 in Mr. Mortimer Marshal's dumbly-insistent eyes, which seemed 
 to be perpetually saying: "You know what I mean when I'm too 
 refined like everything here, don't you see ? to say it out. 
 You know there ought to be something about me somewhere, 
 and that really, with the opportunities, the facilities you enjoy, it 
 wouldn't be so much out of your way just to well, reward this 
 little attention." 
 
 The fact that he was probably every day, in just the same 
 anxious flurry and with just the same superlative delicacy, paying 
 little attentions with an eye to little rewards, this fact by itself but 
 scantily eased her, convinced as she was that no luck but her own 
 was as hopeless as his. He squared the clever young wherever 
 he could get at them, but it was the clever young, taking them 
 generally, who fed from his hand and then forgot him. She 
 didn't forget him ; she pitied him too much, pitied herself, and 
 was more and more, as she found, now pitying everyone; only 
 she didn't know how to say to him that she could do, after all, 
 nothing for him. She oughtn't to have come, in the first place, 
 
250 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 and wouldn't if it hadn't been for her companion. Her com- 
 panion was increasingly sardonic which was the way in which, 
 at best, she now increasingly saw him ; he was shameless in 
 acceptance, since, as she knew, as she felt at his side, he had 
 come only, at bottom, to mislead and to mystify. He was, as 
 she wasn't, on the Papers and of them, and their baffled enter- 
 tainer knew it without either a hint on the subject from herself 
 or a need, on the young man's own lips, of the least vulgar 
 allusion. Nothing was so much as named, the whole connection 
 was sunk ; they talked about clubs, muffins, afternoon per- 
 formances, the effect of the Finnish soul upon the appetite, 
 quite as if they had met in society. Nothing could have been 
 less like society she innocently supposed at least than the real 
 spirit of their meeting ; yet Bight did nothing that he might do 
 to keep the affair within bounds. When looked at by their friend 
 so hard and so hintingly, he only looked back, just as dumbly, 
 but just as intensely and, as might be said, portentously; ever 
 so impenetrably, in fine, and ever so wickedly. He didn't 
 smile as if to cheer the least little bit; which he might be 
 abstaining from on purpose to make his promises solemn : so, as 
 he tried to smile she couldn't, it was all too dreadful she 
 wouldn't meet her friend's eyes, but kept looking, heartlessly, at 
 the " notes " of the place, the hats of the ladies, the tints of the 
 rugs, the intenser Chippendale, here and there, of the chairs and 
 tables, of the very guests, of the very waitresses. It had come to 
 her early : " I've done him, poor man, at home, and the obvious 
 thing now will be to do him at his club." But this inspira- 
 tion plumped against her fate even as an imprisoned insect 
 against the window-glass. She couldn't do him at his club 
 without decently asking leave ; whereby he would know of her 
 feeble feeler, feeble because she was so sure of refusals. She 
 would rather tell him, desperately, what she thought of him 
 than expose him to see again that she was herself nowhere, 
 herself nothing. Her one comfort was that, for the half-hour 
 it had made the situation quite possible he seemed fairly 
 hypnotised by her colleague; so that when they took leave he as 
 good as thanked her for what she had this time done for him. 
 It was one of the signs of his infatuated state that he clearly 
 viewed Bight as a mass of helpful cleverness, though the cruel 
 creature, uttering scarce a sound, had only fixed him in a manner 
 that might have been taken for the fascination of deference. He 
 might perfectly have been an idiot for all the poor gentleman 
 knew. But the poor gentleman saw a possible "leg up" in 
 every bush; and nothing but impertinence would have convinced 
 
THE PAPERS 251 
 
 him that she hadn't brought him, compunctiously as to the past, 
 a master of the proper art. Now, more than ever, how he would 
 listen for the postman ! 
 
 The whole occasion had broken so, for busy Bight, into matters 
 to be attended to before Fleet Street warmed to its work, that 
 the pair were obliged, outside, to part company on the spot, and 
 it was only on the morrow, a Saturday, that they could taste 
 again of that comparison of notes which made for each the 
 main savour, albeit slightly acrid, of their current consciousness. 
 The air was full, as from afar, of the grand indifference of spring, 
 of which the breath could be felt so much before the face could 
 be seen, and they had bicycled side by side out to Richmond 
 Park as with the impulse to meet it on its way. They kept a 
 Saturday, when possible, sacred to the Suburbs as distinguished 
 from the Papers when possible being largely when Maud 
 could achieve the use of the somewhat fatigued family machine. 
 Many sisters contended for it, under whose flushed pressure it 
 might have been seen spinning in many different directions. 
 Superficially, at Richmond, our young couple rested found a 
 quiet corner to lounge deep in the Park, with their machines 
 propped by one side of a great tree and their associated backs 
 sustained by another. But agitation, finer than the finest scorch- 
 ing, was in the air for them ; it was made sharp, rather abruptly, 
 by a vivid outbreak from Maud. It was very well, she observed, 
 for her friend to be clever at the expense of the general "greed"; 
 he saw it in the light of his own jolly luck, and what she saw, 
 as it happened, was nothing but the general art of letting you 
 starve, yourself, in your hole. At the end of five minutes her 
 companion had turned quite pale with having to face the large 
 extent of her confession. It was a confession for the reason 
 that in the first place it evidently cost her an effort that pride 
 had again and again successfully prevented, and because in the 
 second she had thus the air of having lived overmuch on swagger. 
 She could scarce have said at this moment what, for a good 
 while, she had really lived on, and she didn't let him know 
 now to complain either of her privation or of her disappoint- 
 ments. She did it to show why she couldn't go with him 
 when he was so awfully sweeping. There were at any rate 
 apparently, all over, two wholly different sets of people. If 
 everyone rose to his bait no creature had ever risen to hers ; 
 and that was the grim truth of her position, which proved at 
 the least that there were two quite different kinds of luck. 
 They told two different stories of human vanity; they couldn't 
 be reconciled. And the poor girl put it in a nutshell. " There's 
 
252 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 but one person I've ever written to who has so much as noticed 
 my letter." 
 
 He wondered, painfully affected it rather overwhelmed him ; 
 he took hold of it at the easiest point. " One person ? " 
 
 " The misguided man we had tea with. He alone he rose." 
 
 " Well then, you see that when they do rise they are misguided. 
 In other words they're donkeys." 
 
 "What I see is that I don't strike the right ones and that 
 I haven't therefore your ferocity ; that is my ferocity, if I have 
 any, rests on a different ground. You'll say that I go for the 
 wrong people ; but I don't, God knows witness Mortimer 
 Marshal fly too high. I picked him out, after prayer and 
 fasting, as just the likeliest of the likely not anybody a bit 
 grand and yet not quite a nobody ; and by an extraordinary 
 chance I was justified. Then I pick out others who seem just 
 as good, I pray and fast, and no sound comes back. But I work 
 through my ferocity too," she stiffly continued, " though at first 
 it was great, feeling as I did that when my bread and butter was 
 in it people had no right not to oblige me. It was their duty 
 what they were prominent for to be interviewed, so as to keep 
 me going ; and I did as much for them any day as they would 
 be doing for me." 
 
 Bight heard her, but for a moment said nothing. " Did you 
 tell them that ? I mean say to them it was your little all ? " 
 
 "Not vulgarly I know how. There are ways of saying it's 
 1 important ' ; and I hint it just enough to see that the importance 
 fetches them no more than anything else. It isn't important to 
 them. And I, in their place," Maud went on, " wouldn't answer 
 either ; I'll be hanged if ever I would. That's what it comes to, 
 that there are two distinct lots, and that my luck, being born so, 
 is always to try the snubbers. You were born to know by in- 
 stinct the others. But it makes me more tolerant." 
 
 "More tolerant of what?" her friend asked. 
 
 "Well, of what you described to me. Of what you rail at." 
 
 " Thank you for me ! " Bight laughed. 
 
 " Why not ? Don't you live on it ? " 
 
 "Not in such luxury you surely must see for yourself as 
 the distinction you make seems to imply. It isn't luxury to be 
 nine-tenths of the time sick of everything. People moreover are 
 worth to me but tuppence apiece ; there are too many, confound 
 them so many that I don't see really how any can be left over 
 for your superior lot. It is a chance," he pursued " I've had 
 refusals too though I confess they've sometimes been of the 
 funniest. Besides, I'm getting out of it," the young man wound 
 
THE PAPERS 253 
 
 up. " God knows I want to. My advice to you," he added in 
 the same breath, " is to sit tight. There are as good fish in 
 the sea !" 
 
 She waited a moment. " You're sick of everything and you're 
 getting out of it ; it's not good enough for you, in other words, 
 but it's still good enough for me. Why am I to sit tight when 
 you sit so loose ? " 
 
 "Because what you want will come can't help coming. 
 Then, in time, you'll also get out of it. But then you'll have 
 had it, as I have, and the good of it." 
 
 " But what, really, if it breeds nothing but disgust," she asked, 
 " do you call the good of it ? " 
 
 " Well, two things. First the bread and butter, and then the 
 fun. I repeat it sit tight." 
 
 " Where's the fun," she asked again, " of learning to despise 
 people ? " 
 
 " You'll see when it comes. It will all be upon you, it will 
 change for you any day. Sit tight, sit tight." 
 
 He expressed such confidence that she might for a minute 
 have been weighing it. " If you get out of it, what will you do ? " 
 
 " Well, imaginative work. This job has made me at least see. 
 It has given me the loveliest tips." 
 
 She had still another pause. "It has given me my expe- 
 rience has a lovely tip too." 
 
 "And what's that?" 
 
 " I've told you before the tip of pity. I'm so much sorrier 
 for them all panting and gasping for it like fish out of water 
 than I am anything else." 
 
 He wondered. " But I thought that was what just isn't your 
 experience." 
 
 " Oh, I mean then," she said impatiently, " that my tip is from 
 yours. It's only a different tip. I want to save them." 
 
 " Well," the young man replied, and as if the idea had had a 
 meaning for him, " saving them may perhaps work out as a 
 branch. The question is can you be paid for it ? " 
 
 " Beadel-Muffet would pay me," Maud suddenly suggested. 
 
 " Why, that's just what I'm expecting," her companion laughed, 
 "that he will, after to-morrow directly or indirectly do me." 
 
 "Will you take it from him then only to get him in deeper, 
 as that's what you perfectly know you'll do? You won't save 
 him ; you'll lose him." 
 
 " What then would you, in the case," Bight asked, " do for 
 your money ? " 
 
 Well, the girl thought. "I'd get him to see me I should 
 
254 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 have first, I recognise, to catch my hare and then I'd work up 
 my stuff. Which would be boldly, quite by a master-stroke, a 
 statement of his fix of the fix, I mean, of his wanting, his 
 supplicating to be dropped. I'd give out that it would really 
 oblige. Then I'd send my copy about, and the rest of the 
 matter would take care of itself. I don't say you could do it 
 that way you'd have a different effect. But I should be able 
 to trust the thing, being mine, not to be looked at, or, if looked 
 at, chucked straight into the basket. I should so have, to that 
 extent, handled the matter, and I should so, by merely touching 
 it, have broken the spell. That's my one line I stop things 
 off by touching them. There'd never be a word about him 
 more." 
 
 Her friend, with his legs out and his hands locked at the back 
 of his neck, had listened with indulgence. "Then hadn't 
 I better arrange it for you that Beadel-Muffet shall see you ? " 
 
 " Oh, not after you've damned him ! " 
 
 " You want to see him first ? " 
 
 "It will be the only way to be of any use to him. You 
 ought to wire him in fact not to open his mouth till he has seen 
 me." 
 
 "Well, I will," said Bight at last. "But, you know, we shall 
 lose something very handsome his struggle, all in vain, with his 
 fate. Noble sport, the sight of it all." He turned a little, to 
 rest on his elbow, and, cycling suburban young man as he was, 
 he might have been, outstretched under his tree, melancholy 
 Jacques looking off into a forest glade, even as sailor-hatted 
 Maud, in for elegance a new cotton blouse and a long-limbed 
 angular attitude, might have prosefully suggested the mannish 
 Rosalind. He raised his face in appeal to her. " Do you really 
 ask me to sacrifice it ? " 
 
 " Rather than sacrifice him ? Of course I do." 
 
 He said for a while nothing more ; only, propped on his elbow, 
 lost himself again in the Park. After which he turned back to 
 her. " Will you have me ? " he suddenly asked. 
 
 "'Have you' ?" 
 
 " Be my bonny bride. For better, for worse. I hadn't, upon 
 my honour," he explained with obvious sincerity, "understood 
 you were so down." 
 
 " Well, it isn't so bad as that," said Maud Blandy. 
 
 " So bad as taking up with me ? " 
 
 " It isn't as bad as having let you know when I didn't want 
 you to." 
 
 He sank back again with his head dropped, putting himself 
 
THE PAPERS 255 
 
 more at his ease. " You're too proud that's what's the matter 
 with you. And I'm too stupid." 
 
 " No, you're not," said Maud grimly. " Not stupid." 
 
 " Only cruel, cunning, treacherous, cold-blooded, vile ? " He 
 drawled the words out softly, as if they sounded fair. 
 
 " And I'm not stupid either," Maud Blandy went on. " We 
 just, poor creatures well, we just know" 
 
 " Of course we do. So why do you want us to drug ourselves 
 with rot ? to go on as if we didn't know ? " 
 
 She made no answer for a moment ; then she said : " There's 
 good to be known too." 
 
 " Of course, again. There are all sorts of things, and some 
 much better than others. That's why," the young man added, 
 " I just put that question to you." 
 
 " Oh no, it isn't. You put it to me because you think I feel 
 I'm no good." 
 
 " How so, since I keep assuring you that you've only to wait ? 
 How so, since I keep assuring you that if you do wait it will all 
 come with a rush ? But say I am sorry for you," Bight lucidly 
 pursued; "how does that prove either that my motive is base or 
 that I do you a wrong ? " 
 
 The girl waived this question, but she presently tried another. 
 "Is it your idea that we should live on all the people ? " 
 
 " The people we catch ? Yes, old man, till we can do better." 
 
 " My conviction is," she soon returned, " that if I were to 
 marry you I should dish you. I should spoil the business. It 
 would fall off; and, as I can do nothing myself, then where 
 should we be ? " 
 
 "Well," said Bight, "we mightn't be quite so high up in the 
 scale of the morbid." 
 
 " It's you that are morbid," she answered. " You've, in your 
 way like everyone else, for that matter, all over the place 
 ' sport ' on the brain." 
 
 " Well," he demanded, " what is sport but success ? What is 
 success but sport ? " 
 
 "Bring that out somewhere. If it be true," she said, "I'm 
 glad I'm a failure." 
 
 After which, for a longish space, they sat together in silence, a 
 silence finally broken by a word from the young man. "But 
 about Mortimer Marshal how do you propose to save him ? " 
 
 It was a change of subject that might, by its so easy introduc- 
 tion of matter irrelevant, have seemed intended to dissipate 
 whatever was left of his proposal of marriage. That proposal, 
 however, had been somehow both too much in the tone of 
 
256 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 familiarity to linger and too little in that of vulgarity to drop. 
 It had had no form, but the mild air kept perhaps thereby the 
 better the taste of it. This was sensibly moreover in what the 
 girl found to reply. " I think, you know, that he'd be no such 
 bad friend. I mean that, with his appetite, there would be some- 
 thing to be done. He doesn't half hate me." 
 
 "Ah, my dear," her friend ejaculated, "don't, for God's sake, 
 be low." 
 
 But she kept it up. "He clings to me. You saw. It's 
 hideous, the way he's able to ' do ' himself." 
 
 Bight lay quiet, then spoke as with a recall of the Chippendale 
 Club. " Yes, I couldn't ' do ' you as he could. But if you don't 
 bring it off ? " 
 
 "Why then does he cling? Oh, because, all the same, I'm 
 potentially the Papers still. I'm at any* rate the nearest he has 
 got to them. And then I'm other things." 
 
 " I see." 
 
 "I'm so awfully attractive," said Maud Blandy. She got up 
 with this and, snaking out her frock, looked at her resting 
 bicycle, looked at the distances possibly still to be gained. Her 
 companion paused, but at last also rose, and by that time she was 
 awaiting him, a little gaunt and still not quite cool, as an illustra- 
 tion of her last remark. He stood there watching her, and she 
 followed this remark up. " I do, you know, really pity him." 
 
 It had almost a feminine fineness, and their eyes continued to 
 meet. " Oh, you'll work it ! " And the young man went to his 
 machine. 
 
 IV 
 
 IT was not till five days later that they again came together, and 
 during these days many things had happened. Maud Blandy had, 
 with high elation, for her own portion, a sharp sense of this ; if 
 it had at the time done nothing more intimate for her the Sunday 
 of bitterness just spent with Howard Bight had started, all 
 abruptly, a turn of the tide of her luck. This turn had not in 
 the least been in the young man's having spoken to her of 
 marriage since she hadn't even, up to the late hour of their 
 parting, so much as answered him straight : she dated the sense 
 of difference much rather from the throb of a happy thought 
 that had come to her while she cycled home to Kilburnia in the 
 darkness. The throb had made her for the few minutes, tired as 
 she was, put on speed, and it had been the cause of still further 
 proceedings for her the first thing the next morning. The 
 active step that was the essence of these proceedings had almost 
 
THE PAPERS 257 
 
 got itself taken before she went to bed ; which indeed was what 
 had happened to the extent of her writing, on the spot, a medi- 
 tated letter. She sat down to it by the light of the guttering 
 candle that awaited her on the dining-room table and in the stale 
 air of family food that only liad been a residuum so at the 
 mercy of mere ventilation that she didn't so much as peep into a 
 cupboard; after which she had been on the point of nipping 
 over, as she would have said, to drop it into that opposite pillar- 
 box whose vivid maw, opening out through thick London nights, 
 had received so many of her fruitless little ventures. But she 
 had checked herself and waited, waited to be sure, with the 
 morning, that her fancy wouldn't fade; posting her note in the 
 end, however, with a confident jerk, as soon as she was up. She 
 had, later on, had business, or at least had sought it, among the 
 haunts that she had taught herself to regard as professional ; but 
 neither on the Monday nor on either of the days that directly 
 followed had she encountered there the friend whom it would 
 take a difference in more matters than could as yet be dealt with 
 to enable her to regard, with proper assurance or with proper 
 modesty, as a lover. Whatever he was, none the less, it couldn't 
 otherwise have come to her that it was possible to feel lonely in 
 the Strand. That showed, after all, how thick they must con- 
 stantly have been which was perhaps a thing to begin to think 
 of in a new, in a steadier light. But it showed doubtless still 
 more that her companion was probably up to something rather 
 awful; it made her wonder, holding her breath a little, about 
 Beadel-Muffet, made her certain that he and his affairs would 
 partly account for Bight's whirl of absence. 
 
 Ever conscious of empty pockets, she had yet always a penny, 
 or at least a ha'penny, for a paper, and those she now scanned, 
 she quickly assured herself, were edited quite as usual. Sir 
 A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P. had returned on Monday 
 from Undertone, where Lord and Lady Wispers had, from the 
 previous Friday, entertained a very select party; Sir A. B. C. 
 Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P. was to attend on Tuesday the 
 weekly meeting of the society of the Friends of Rest ; Sir A. B. C. 
 Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P. had kindly consented to preside on 
 Wednesday, at Samaritan House, at the opening of the Sale of 
 Work of the Middlesex Incurables. These familiar announce- 
 ments, however, far from appeasing her curiosity, had an effect 
 upon her nerves ; she read into them mystic meanings that she 
 had never read before. Her freedom of mind in this direction 
 was indeed at the same time limited, for her own horizon was 
 already, by the Monday night, bristling with new possibilities, and 
 
258 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 the Tuesday itself well, what had the Tuesday itself become, 
 with this eruption, from within, of interest amounting really to a 
 revelation, what had the Tuesday itself become but the greatest 
 day yet of her life ? Such a description of it would have appeared 
 to apply predominantly to the morning had she not, under the 
 influence, precisely, of the morning's thrill, gone, towards evening, 
 with her design, into the Charing Cross Station. There, at the 
 bookstall, she bought them all, every rag that was hawked ; and 
 there, as she unfolded one at a venture, in the crowd and under 
 the lamps, she felt her consciousness further, felt it for the 
 moment quite impressively, enriched. " Personal Peeps Number 
 Ninety-Three : a Chat with the New Dramatist " needed neither 
 the " H. B." as a terminal signature nor a text spangled, to the 
 exclusion of almost everything else, with Mortimer Marshals 
 that looked as tall as if lettered on posters, to help to account for 
 her young man's use of his time. And yet, as she soon made 
 out, it had been used with an economy that caused her both to 
 wonder and to wince; the " peep " commemorated being none 
 other than their tea with the artless creature the previous 
 Saturday, and the meagre incidents and pale impressions of that 
 occasion furnishing forth the picture. 
 
 Bight had solicited no new interview; he hadn't been such 
 a fool for she saw, soon enough, with all her intelligence, 
 that this was what he would have been, and that a repetition 
 of contact would have dished him. What he had done, she 
 found herself perceiving and perceiving with an emotion that 
 caused her face to glow was journalism of the intensest 
 essence; a column concocted of nothing, an omelette made, 
 as it were, without even the breakage of the egg or two that 
 might have been expected to be the price. The poor gentle- 
 man's whereabouts at five o'clock was the only egg broken, 
 and this light and delicate crash was the sound in the world 
 that would be sweetest to him. What stuff it had to be, since 
 the writer really knew nothing about him, yet how its being 
 just such stuff made it perfectly serve its purpose ! She might 
 have marvelled afresh, with more leisure, at such purposes, but 
 she was lost in the wonder of seeing how, without matter, without 
 thought, without an excuse, without a fact and yet at the same 
 time sufficiently without a fiction, he had managed to be as 
 resonant as if he had beaten a drum on the platform of a booth. 
 And he had not been too personal, not made anything awkward 
 for her> had given nothing and nobody away, had tossed the 
 Chippendale Club into the air with such a turn that it had 
 fluttered down again, like a blown feather, miles from its site. 
 
THE PAPERS 259 
 
 The thirty-seven agencies would already be posting to their 
 subscriber thirty-seven copies, and their subscriber, on his side, 
 would be posting, to his acquaintance, many times thirty-seven, 
 and thus at least getting something for his money; but this didn't 
 tell her why her friend had taken the trouble if it had been a 
 trouble ; why at all events he had taken the time, pressed as he 
 apparently was for that commodity. These things she was indeed 
 presently to learn, but they were meanwhile part of a suspense 
 composed of more elements than any she had yet tasted. And 
 the suspense was prolonged, though other affairs too, that were 
 not part of it, almost equally crowded upon her ; the week having 
 almost waned when relief arrived in the form of a cryptic post- 
 card. The post-card bore the H. B., like the precious " Peep," 
 which had already had a wondrous sequel, and it appointed, for 
 the tea-hour, a place of meeting familiar to Maud, with the simple 
 addition of the significant word " Larks ! " 
 
 When the time he had indicated came she waited for him, at 
 their small table, swabbed like the deck of a steam-packet, nose 
 to nose with a mustard-pot and a price-list, in the consciousness 
 of perhaps after all having as much to tell him as to hear from 
 him. It appeared indeed at first that this might well be the 
 case, for the questions that came up between them when he had 
 taken his place were overwhelmingly those he himself insisted on 
 putting. " What has he done, what has he, and what will he ? " 
 that inquiry, not loud but deep, had met him as he sat down ; 
 without however producing the least recognition. Then she as 
 soon felt that his silence and his manner were enough for her, or 
 that, if they hadn't been, his wonderful look, the straightest she 
 had ever had from him, would instantly have made them so. He 
 looked at her hard, hard, as if he had meant " I say, mind your 
 eyes ! " and it amounted really to a glimpse, rather fearful, of the 
 subject. It was no joke, the subject, clearly, and her friend had 
 fairly gained age, as he had certainly lost weight, in his recent 
 dealings with it. It struck her even, with everything else, that 
 this was positively the way she would have liked him to show if 
 their union had taken the form they hadn't reached the point of 
 discussing ; wearily coming back to her from the thick of things, 
 wanting to put on his slippers and have his tea, all prepared by 
 her and in their place, and beautifully to be trusted to regale her 
 in his turn. He was excited, disavowedly, and it took more dis- 
 avowal still after she had opened her budget which she did, in 
 truth, by saying to him as her first alternative : " What did you do 
 him for, poor Mortimer Marshal ? It isn't that he's not in the 
 seventh heaven ! " 
 
2<5o THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " He is in the seventh heaven! " Bight quickly broke in. " He 
 doesn't want my blood ? " 
 
 " Did you do him," she asked, " that he should want it ? It's 
 splendid how you could simply on that show." 
 
 " That show ? Why," said Howard Bight, " that show was an 
 immensity. That show was volumes, stacks, abysses." 
 
 He said it in such a tone that she was a little at a loss. " Oh, 
 you don't want abysses." 
 
 "Not much, to knock off such twaddle. There isn't a breath in 
 it of what I saw. What I saw is my own affair. I've got the 
 abysses for myself. They're in my head it's always something. 
 But the monster," he demanded, " has written you ? " 
 
 "How couldn't he that night? I got it the next morning, 
 telling me how much he wanted to thank me and asking me 
 where he might see me. So I went," said Maud, " to see him." 
 
 " At his own place again ? " 
 
 "At his own place again. What do I yearn for but to be 
 received at people's own places?" 
 
 "Yes, for the stuff. But when you've had as you had had 
 from him the stuff?" 
 
 " Well, sometimes, you see, I get more. He gives me all I can 
 take." It was in her head to ask if by chance Bight were jealous, 
 but she gave it another turn. "We had a big palaver, partly 
 about you. He appreciates." 
 
 "Me?" 
 
 " Mefirst of all, I think. All the more that I've had fancy ! 
 a proof of my stuff, the despised and rejected, as originally 
 concocted, and that he has now seen it. I tried it on again 
 with Brains^ the night of your thing sent it off with your thing 
 enclosed as a rouser. They took it, by return, like a shot you'll 
 see on Wednesday. And if the dear man lives till then, for 
 impatience, I'm to lunch with him that day." 
 
 "I see," said Bight. "Well, that was what I did it for. It 
 shows how right I was." 
 
 They faced each other, across their thick crockery, with eyes 
 that said more than their words, and that, above all, said, and 
 asked, other things. So she went on in a moment : " I don't 
 know what he doesn't expect. And he thinks I can keep it 
 up." 
 
 " Lunch with him every Wednesday ? " 
 
 "Oh, he'd give me my lunch, and more. It was last Sunday 
 that you were right about my sitting close," she pursued. " I'd 
 have been a pretty fool to jump. Suddenly, I see, the music 
 begins. I'm awfully obliged to you." 
 
THE PAPERS 261 
 
 " You feel," he presently asked, " quite differently so differ- 
 ently that I've missed my chance ? I don't care for that serpent, 
 but there's something else that you don't tell me." The young 
 man, detached and a little spent, with his shoulder against the 
 wall and a hand vaguely playing over the knives, forks and 
 spoons, dropped his succession of sentences without an apparent 
 direction. " Something else has come up, and you're as pleased 
 as Punch. Or, rather, you're not quite entirely so, because you 
 can't goad me to fury. You can't worry me as much as you'd 
 like. Marry me first, old man, and then see if I mind. Why 
 shouldn't you keep it up? I mean lunching with him?" His 
 questions came as in play that was a little pointless, without his 
 waiting more than a moment for answers; though it was not 
 indeed that she might not have answered even in the moment, 
 had not the pointless play been more what she wanted. " Was it 
 at the place," he went on, " that he took us to ? " 
 
 " Dear no at his flat, where I've been before. You'll see, in 
 Brains^ on Wednesday. I don't think I've muffed it it's really 
 rather there. But he showed me everything this time the bath- 
 room, the refrigerator, and the machines for stretching his 
 trousers. He has nine, and in constant use." 
 
 " Nine ? " said Bight gravely. 
 
 "Nine." 
 
 " Nine trousers ? " 
 
 " Nine machines. I don't know how many trousers." 
 
 "Ah, my dear," he said, "that's a grave omission; the want of 
 the information will be felt and resented. But does it all, at any 
 rate," he asked, "sufficiently fetch you?" After which, as she 
 didn't speak, he lapsed into helpless sincerity. " Is it really, you 
 think, his dream to secure you ? " 
 
 She replied, on this, as if his tone made it too amusing. 
 " Quite. There's no mistaking it. He sees me as, most days in 
 the year, pulling the wires and beating the drum somewhere; 
 that is he sees me of course not exactly as writing about 'our 
 home ' once I've got one myself, but as procuring others to do 
 it through my being (as you've made him believe) in with the 
 Organs of Public Opinion. He doesn't see, if I'm half decent, 
 why there shouldn't be something about him every day in the 
 week. He's all right, and he's all ready. And who, after all, can 
 do him so well as the partner of his flat ? It's like making, in one 
 of those big domestic siphons, the luxury of the poor, your own 
 soda-water. It comes cheaper, and it's always on the sideboard. 
 * Vichy chez soi? The interviewer at home." 
 
 Her companion took it in. " Your place is on my sideboard 
 
262 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 you're really a first-class fizz ! He steps then, at any rate, into 
 Beadel-Muffet's place." 
 
 "That," Maud assented, "is what he would like to do." And 
 she knew more than ever there was something to wait for. 
 
 " It's a lovely opening," Bight returned. But he still said, for 
 the moment, nothing else ; as if, charged to the brim though he 
 had originally been, she had rather led his thought away. 
 
 " What have you done with poor Beadel ? " she consequently 
 asked. "What is it, in the name of goodness, you're doing to him? 
 It's worse than ever." 
 
 "Of course it's worse than ever." 
 
 "He capers," said Maud, "on every housetop he jumps out 
 of every bush." With which her anxiety really broke out. " Is it 
 you that are doing it ? " 
 
 " If you mean am I seeing him, I certainly am. I'm seeing 
 nobody else. I assure you he's spread thick." 
 
 " But you're acting for him ? " 
 
 Bight waited. " Five hundred people are acting for him ; but 
 the difficulty is that what he calls the ' terrific forces of publicity ' 
 by which he means ten thousand other persons are acting 
 against him. We've all in fact been turned on to turn every- 
 thing off, and that's exactly the job that makes the biggest noise. 
 It appears everywhere, in every kind of connection and every 
 kind of type, that Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P. desires 
 to cease to appear anywhere ; and then it appears that his desiring 
 to cease to appear is observed to conduce directly to his more 
 tremendously appearing, or certainly, and in the most striking 
 manner, to his not in the least ^appearing. The workshop of 
 silence roars like the Zoo at dinner-time. He can't disappear; he 
 hasn't weight enough to sink; the splash the diver makes, you 
 know, tells where he is. If you ask me what I'm doing," Bight 
 wound up, "I'm holding him under water. But we're in the 
 middle of the pond, the banks are thronged with spectators, and 
 I'm expecting from day to day to see stands erected and gate- 
 money taken. There," he wearily smiled, "you have it. Besides," 
 he then added with an odd change of tone, " I rather think you'll 
 see to-morrow." 
 
 He had made her at last horribly nervous. " What shall 
 I see?" 
 
 " It will all be out." 
 
 " Then why shouldn't you tell me ? " 
 
 "Well," the young man said, "he has disappeared. There 
 you are. I mean personally. He's not to be found. But 
 nothing could make more, you see, for ubiquity. The country 
 
THE PAPERS 263 
 
 will ring with it. He vanished on Tuesday night was then last 
 seen at his club. Since then he has given no sign. How can 
 a man disappear who does that sort of thing? It is, as you 
 say, to caper on the housetops. But it will only be known to- 
 night." 
 
 "Since when, then," Maud asked, "have you known it?" 
 
 " Since three o'clock to-day. But I've kept it. I am a while 
 longer keeping it." 
 
 She wondered ; she was full of fears. " What do you expect 
 to get for it ? " 
 
 " Nothing if you spoil my market I seem to make out that 
 you want to." 
 
 She gave this no heed ; she had her thought. " Why then did 
 you three days ago wire me a mystic word ? " 
 
 "Mystic ?" 
 
 " What do you call ' Larks ' ? " 
 
 " Oh, I remember. Well, it was because I saw larks coming ; 
 because I saw, I mean, what has happened. I was sure it would 
 have to happen." 
 
 "And what the mischief is it?" 
 
 Bight smiled. "Why, what I tell you. That he has gone." 
 
 "Gone where?" 
 
 " Simply bolted to parts unknown. ' Where ' is what nobody 
 who belongs to him is able in the least to say, or seems likely to 
 be able." 
 
 " Any more than why ? " 
 
 " Any more than why." 
 
 " Only you are able to say that ? " 
 
 " Well," said Bight, " I can say what has so lately stared me in 
 the face, what he has been thrusting at me in all its grotesqueness : 
 his desire for a greater privacy worked through the Papers them- 
 selves. He came to me with it," the young man presently 
 added. " I didn't go to him" 
 
 " And he trusted you," Maud replied. 
 
 "Well, you see what I have given him the very flower of my 
 genius. What more do you want ? I'm spent, seedy, sore. I'm 
 sick," Bight declared, " of his beastly funk." 
 
 Maud's eyes, in spite of it, were still a little hard. "Is he 
 thoroughly sincere ? " 
 
 " Good God, no ! How can he be ? Only trying it as a cat, 
 for a jump, tries too smooth a wall. He drops straight back." 
 
 " Then isn't his funk real ? " 
 
 " As real as he himself is." 
 
 Maud wondered. " Isn't his flight ? " 
 
264 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 "That's what we shall see !" 
 
 " Isn't," she continued, " his reason ? " 
 
 " Ah," he laughed out, " there you are again ! " 
 
 But she had another thought and was not discouraged. " Mayn't 
 he be, honestly, mad ? " 
 
 "Mad oh yes. But not, I think, honestly. He's not 
 honestly anything in the world but the Beadel-Muffet of our 
 delight." 
 
 "Your delight," Maud observed after a moment, "revolts me." 
 And then she said : " When did you last see him ? " 
 
 " On Tuesday at six, love. I was one of the last." 
 
 " Decidedly, too, then, I judge, one of the worst." She gave 
 him her idea. " You hounded him on." 
 
 " I reported," said Bight, " success. Told him how it was 
 going." 
 
 " Oh, I can see you ! So that if he's dead " 
 
 " Well ? " asked Bight blandly. 
 
 " His blood is on your hands." 
 
 He eyed his hands a moment. " They are dirty for him ! 
 But now, darling," he went on, "be so good as to show me 
 yours." 
 
 "Tell me first," she objected, "what you believe. Is it 
 suicide ? " 
 
 " I think that's the thing for us to make it. Till somebody," 
 he smiled, " makes it something else." And he showed how he 
 warmed to the view. " There are weeks of it, dearest, yet." 
 
 He leaned more toward her, with his elbows on the table, and 
 in this position, moved by her extreme gravity, he lightly flicked 
 her chin with his finger. She threw herself, still grave, back from 
 his touch, but they remained thus a while closely confronted. 
 "Well," she at last remarked, "I shan't pity you." 
 
 " You make it, then, everyone except me ? " 
 
 " I mean," she continued, "if you do have to loathe yourself." 
 
 " Oh, I shan't miss it." And then as if to show how little, " I 
 did mean it, you know, at Richmond," he declared. 
 
 " I won't have you if you've killed him," she presently 
 returned. 
 
 "You'll decide in that case for the nine? " And as the allusion, 
 with its funny emphasis, left her blank : " You want to wear all 
 the trousers ? " 
 
 " You deserve," she said, when light came, " that I should take 
 him." And she kept it up. " It's a lovely flat." 
 
 Well, he could do as much. " Nine, I suppose, appeals to you 
 as the number of the muses ? " 
 
THE PAPERS 265 
 
 This short passage, remarkably, for all its irony, brought them 
 together again, to the extent at least of leaving Maud's elbows 
 on the table and of keeping her friend, now a little back in his 
 chair, firm while he listened to her. So the girl came out. " I've 
 seen Mrs. Chorner three times. I wrote that night, after our talk 
 at Richmond, asking her to oblige. And I put on cheek as I 
 had never, never put it. I said the public would be so glad to 
 hear from her ' on the occasion of her engagement.' " 
 
 " Do you call that cheek ? " Bight looked amused. " She at 
 any rate rose straight." 
 
 " No, she rose crooked ; but she rose. What you had told me 
 there in the Park well, immediately happened. She did consent 
 to see me, and so far you had been right in keeping me up to it. 
 But what do you think it was for ? " 
 
 " To show you her flat, her tub, her petticoats ? " 
 
 " She doesn't live in a flat ; she lives in a house of her own, 
 and a jolly good one, in Green Street, Park Lane ; though I did, 
 as happened, see her tub, which is a dream all marble and 
 silver, like a kind of a swagger sarcophagus, a thing for the 
 Wallace Collection ; and though her petticoats, as she first shows, 
 seem all that, if you wear petticoats yourself, you can look at. 
 There's no doubt of her money given her place and her things, 
 and given her appearance too, poor dear, which would take some 
 doing." 
 
 " She squints ? " Bight sympathetically asked. 
 
 " She's so ugly that she has to be rich she couldn't afford it 
 on less than five thousand a year. As it is, I could well see, she 
 can afford anything even such a nose. But she's funny and 
 decent; sharp, but a really good sort. And they're not en- 
 gaged." 
 
 " She told you so ? Then there you are ! " 
 
 "It all depends," Maud went on; "and you don't know 
 where I am at all. / know what it depends on." 
 
 ''Then there you are again ! It's a mine of gold." 
 
 "Possibly, but not in your sense. She wouldn't give me the 
 first word of an interview it wasn't for that she received me. 
 It was for something much better." 
 
 Well, Bight easily guessed. " For my job ? " 
 
 " To see what can be done. She loathes his publicity." 
 
 The young man's face lighted. "She told you so?" 
 
 " She received me on purpose to tell me." 
 
 "Then why do you question my 'larks'? What do you 
 want more?" 
 
 " I want nothing with what I have : nothing, I mean, but to 
 
266 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 help her. We made friends I like her. And she likes me? 
 said Maud Blandy. 
 
 "Like Mortimer Marshal, precisely." 
 
 "No, precisely not like Mortimer Marshal. I caught, on the 
 spot, her idea that was what took her. Her idea is that I can 
 help her help her to keep them quiet about Beadel : for which 
 purpose I seem to have struck her as falling from the skies, just 
 at the right moment, into her lap." 
 
 Howard Bight followed, yet lingered by the way. " To keep 
 whom quiet ? " 
 
 "Why, the beastly Papers what we've been talking about. 
 She wants him straight out of them straight" 
 
 " She too ? " Bight wondered. " Then she's in terror ? " 
 
 "No, not in terror or it wasn't that when I last saw her. 
 But in mortal disgust. She feels it has gone too far which is 
 what she wanted me, as an honest, decent, likely young woman, 
 up to my neck in it, as she supposed, to understand from her. 
 My relation with her is now that I do understand and that if an 
 improvement takes place I shan't have been the worse for it. 
 Therefore you see," Maud went on, "you simply cut my 
 throat when you prevent improvement." 
 
 " Well, my dear," her friend returned, " I won't let you bleed 
 to death." And he showed, with this, as confessedly struck. 
 "She doesn't then, you think, know ?" 
 
 " Know what ? " 
 
 "Why, what, about him, there may be to be known. Doesn't 
 know of his flight." 
 
 "She didn't certainly." 
 
 " Nor of anything to make it likely ? " 
 
 " What you call his queer reason ? No she named it to me 
 no more than you have; though she does mention, distinctly, 
 that he himself hates, or pretends to hate, the exhibition daily 
 made of him." 
 
 " She speaks of it," Bight asked, " as pretending ? " 
 
 Maud straightened it out. " She feels him that she practi- 
 cally told me as rather ridiculous. She honestly has her 
 feeling; and, upon my word, it's what I like her for. Her 
 stomach has turned and she has made it her condition. 
 'Muzzle your Press,' she says; 'then we'll talk.' She gives 
 him three months she'll give him even six. And this, mean- 
 while when he comes to you is how you forward the 
 muzzling." 
 
 "The Press, my child," Bight said, "is the watchdog of 
 civilisation, and the watchdog happens to be it can't be helped 
 
THE PAPERS 267 
 
 in a chronic state of rabies. Muzzling is easy talk; one can but 
 keep the animal on the run. Mrs. Chorner, however," he added, 
 " seems a figure of fable." 
 
 " It's what I told you she would have to be when, some time 
 back, you threw out, as a pure hypothesis, to supply the man 
 with a motive, your exact vision of her. Your motive has come 
 true," Maud went on "with the difference only, if I understand 
 you, that this doesn't appear the whole of it. That doesn't 
 matter" she frankly paid him a tribute. "Your forecast was 
 inspiration." 
 
 " A stroke of genius " he had been the first to feel it. But 
 there were matters less clear. "When did you see her last?" 
 
 " Four days ago. It was the third time." 
 
 " And even then she didn't imagine the truth about him ? " 
 
 "I don't know, you see," said Maud, "what you call the 
 truth." 
 
 "Well, that he quite by that time didn't know where the 
 deuce to turn. That's truth enough." 
 
 Maud made sure. " I don't see how she can have known it 
 and not have been upset. She wasn't," said the girl, "upset. 
 She isn't upset. But she's original." 
 
 "Well, poor thing," Bight remarked, " she'll have to be." 
 
 "Original?" 
 
 " Upset. Yes, and original too, if she doesn't give up the 
 job." It had held him an instant but there were many things. 
 " She sees the wild ass he is, and yet she's willing ? " 
 
 " ' Willing ' is just what I asked you three months ago," Maud 
 returned, " how she could be." 
 
 He had lost it he tried to remember. "What then did 
 I say?" 
 
 "Well, practically, that women are idiots. Also, I believe, 
 that he's a dazzling beauty." 
 
 "Ah yes, he is, poor wretch, though beauty to-day in distress." 
 
 " Then there you are," said Maud. They had got up, as at 
 the end of their story, but they stood a moment while he 
 waited for change. "If it comes out," the girl dropped, "that 
 will save him. If he's dishonoured as I see her she'll have 
 him, because then he won't be ridiculous. And I can under- 
 stand it." 
 
 Bight looked at her in such appreciation that he forgot, as he 
 pocketed it, to glance at his change. " Oh, you creatures ! " 
 
 " Idiots, aren't we ? " 
 
 Bight let the question pass, but still with his eyes on her, 
 " You ought to want him to be dishonoured." 
 
268 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " I can't want him, then if he's to get the good of it to 
 be dead." 
 
 Still for a little he looked at her. " And if you're to get the 
 good ? " But she had turned away, and he went with her to 
 the door, before which, when they had passed out, they had 
 in the side-street, a backwater to the flood of the Strand, a further 
 sharp colloquy. They were alone, the small street for a moment 
 empty, and they felt at first that they had adjourned to a greater 
 privacy, of which, for that matter, he took prompt advantage. 
 " You're to lunch again with the man of the flat ? " 
 
 "Wednesday, as I say; 1.45." 
 
 " Then oblige me by stopping away." 
 
 " You don't like it ? " Maud asked. 
 
 "Oblige me, oblige me," he repeated. 
 
 "And disoblige him?" 
 
 " Chuck him. We've started him. It's enough." 
 
 Well, the girl but wanted to be fair. " It's you who started 
 him ; so I admit you're quits." 
 
 " That then started you made Brains repent ; so you see 
 what you both owe me. I let the creature off, but I hold you to 
 your debt. There's only one way for you to meet it." And then 
 as she but looked into the roaring Strand : " With worship." It 
 made her, after a minute, meet his eyes, but something just then 
 occurred that stayed any word on the lips of either. A sound 
 reached their ears, as yet unheeded, the sound of newsboys in 
 the great thoroughfare shouting " extra-specials " and mingling 
 with the shout a catch that startled them. The expression in 
 their eyes quickened as they heard, borne on the air, "Mysterious 
 
 Disappearance ! " and then lost it in the hubbub. It was 
 
 easy to complete the cry, and Bight himself gasped. "Beadel- 
 Muffet ? Confound them ! " 
 
 " Already ? " Maud had turned positively pale. 
 
 " They've got it first be hanged to them ! " 
 
 Bight gave a laugh a tribute to their push but her hand was 
 on his arm for a sign to listen again. It was there, in the raucous 
 throats ; it was there, for a penny, under the lamps and in the 
 thick of the stream that stared and passed and left it. They 
 caught the whole thing " Prominent Public Man !" And there 
 was something brutal and sinister in the way it was given to the 
 flaring night, to the other competing sounds, to the general 
 hardness of hearing and sight which was yet, on London pave- 
 ments, compatible with an interest sufficient for cynicism. He 
 had been, poor Beadel, public and prominent, but he had never 
 affected Maud Blandy at least as so marked with this character 
 
THE PAPERS 269 
 
 as while thus loudly committed to extinction. It was horrid it 
 was tragic ; yet her lament for him was dry. "If he's gone 
 I'm dished." 
 
 " Oh, he's gone now," said Bight. 
 
 " I mean if he's dead." 
 
 " Well, perhaps he isn't. I see," Bight added, " what you do 
 mean. If he's dead you can't kill him." 
 
 " Oh, she wants him alive," said Maud. 
 
 "Otherwise she can't chuck him?" 
 
 To which the girl, however, anxious and wondering, made no 
 direct reply. "Good-bye to Mrs. Chorner. And I owe it to 
 you." 
 
 " Ah, my love ! " he vaguely appealed. 
 
 "Yes, it's you who have destroyed him, and it makes up for 
 what you've done for me." 
 
 "I've done it, you mean, against you? I didn't know," he 
 said, " you'd take it so hard." 
 
 Again, as he spoke, the cries sounded out : " Mysterious Dis- 
 appearance of Prominent Public Man ! " It seemed to swell as 
 they listened ; Maud started with impatience. " I hate it too 
 much," she said, and quitted him to join the crowd. 
 
 He was quickly at her side, however, and before she reached 
 the Strand he had brought her again to a pause. " Do you mean 
 you hate it so much you won't have me ? " 
 
 It had pulled her up short, and her answer was proportionately 
 straight. " I won't have you if he's dead." 
 
 "Then will you if he's not?" 
 
 At this she looked at him hard. " Do you know, first ? " 
 
 No blessed if I do." 
 
 " On your honour ? " 
 
 " On my honour." 
 
 "Well," she said after a hesitation, "if she doesn't drop 
 me " 
 
 " It's an understood thing ? " he pressed. 
 
 But again she hung fire. " Well, produce him first." 
 
 They stood there striking their bargain, and it was made, by 
 the long look they exchanged, a question of good faith. "I'll 
 produce him," said Howard Bight. 
 
2;o THE BETTER SORT 
 
 IF it had not been a disaster, Beadel-Muffet's plunge into the 
 obscure, it would have been a huge success ; so large a space did 
 the prominent public man occupy, for the next few days, in the 
 Papers, so near did he come, nearer certainly than ever before, to 
 supplanting other topics. The question of his whereabouts, of 
 his antecedents, of his habits, of his possible motives, of his 
 probable, or improbable, embarrassments, fairly raged, from day 
 to day and from hour to hour, making the Strand, for our two 
 young friends, quite fiercely, quite cruelly vociferous. They met 
 again promptly, in the thick of the uproar, and no other eyes 
 could have scanned the current rumours and remarks so eagerly 
 as Maud's unless it had been those of Maud's companion. The 
 rumours and remarks were mostly very wonderful, and all of 
 a nature to sharpen the excitement produced in the comrades by 
 their being already, as they felt, "in the know." Even for the 
 girl this sense existed, so that she could smile at wild surmises ; 
 she struck herself as knowing much more than she did, especially 
 as, with the alarm once given, she abstained, delicately enough, 
 from worrying, from catechising Bight. She only looked at him 
 as to say " See, while the suspense lasts, how generously I spare 
 you," and her attitude was not affected by the interested promise 
 he had made her. She believed he knew more than he said, 
 though he had sworn as to what he didn't ; she saw him in short 
 as holding some threads but having lost others, and his state of 
 mind, so far as she could read it, represented in equal measure 
 assurances unsupported and anxieties unconfessed. He would 
 have liked to pass for having, on cynical grounds, and for the 
 mere ironic beauty of it, believed that the hero of the hour was 
 only, as he had always been, "up to" something from which he 
 would emerge more than ever glorious, or at least conspicuous ; 
 but, knowing the gentleman was more than anything, more than 
 all else, asinine, he was not deprived of ground in which fear 
 could abundantly grow. If Beadel, in other words, was ass 
 enough, as was conceivable, to be working the occasion, he was 
 by the same token ass enough to have lost control of it, to have 
 committed some folly from which even fools don't rebound. 
 That was the spark of suspicion lurking in the young man's ease, 
 and that, Maud knew, explained something else. 
 
 The family and friends had but too promptly been approached, 
 been besieged; yet Bight, in all the promptness, had markedly 
 withdrawn from the game had had, one could easily judge, 
 already too much to do with it. Who but he, otherwise, would 
 
THE PAPERS 271 
 
 have been so naturally let loose upon the forsaken home, the 
 bewildered circle, the agitated club, the friend who had last con- 
 versed with the eminent absentee, the waiter, in exclusive halls, 
 who had served him with five-o'clock tea, the porter, in august 
 Pall Mall, who had called his last cab, the cabman, supremely 
 privileged, who had driven him where? "The Last Cab" 
 would, as our young woman reflected, have been a heading so 
 after her friend's own heart, and so consonant with his genius, 
 that it took all her discretion not to ask him how he had resisted 
 it. She didn't ask, she but herself noted the title for future use 
 she would have at least got that, " The Last Cab," out of the 
 business; and, as the days went by and the extra-specials 
 swarmed, the situation between them swelled with all the un- 
 spoken. Matters that were grave depended on it for each and 
 nothing so much, for instance, as her seeing Mrs. Chorner again. 
 To see that lady as things had been had meant that the poor 
 woman might have been helped to believe in her. Believing in 
 her she would have paid her, and Maud, disposed as she was, 
 really had felt capable of earning the pay. Whatever, as the 
 case stood, was caused to hang in the air, nothing dangled more 
 free than the profit derivable from muzzling the Press. With 
 the watchdog to whom Bight had compared it barking for dear 
 life, the moment was scarcely adapted for calling afresh upon 
 a person who had offered a reward for silence. The only silence, 
 as we say, was in the girl's not mentioning to her friend how 
 these embarrassments affected her. Mrs. Chorner was a person 
 she liked a connection more to her taste than any she had 
 professionally made, and the thought of her now on the rack, 
 tormented with suspense, might well have brought to her lips 
 a "See there what you've done ! " 
 
 There was, for that matter, in Bight's face he couldn't keep 
 it out precisely the look of seeing it ; which was one of her 
 reasons too for not insisting on her wrong. If he couldn't 
 conceal it this was a part of the rest of the unspoken ; he didn't 
 allude to the lady lest it might be too sharply said to him that it 
 was on her account he should most blush. Last of all he was 
 hushed by the sense of what he had himself said when the news 
 first fell on their ears. His promise to "produce" the fugitive 
 was still in the air, but with every day that passed the prospect 
 turned less to redemption. Therefore if her own promise, on 
 a different head, depended on it, he was naturally not in a hurry 
 to bring the question to a test So it was accordingly that they 
 but read the Papers and looked at each other. Maud felt in 
 truth that these organs had never been so worth it, nor either she 
 
272 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 or her friend whatever the size of old obligations so much 
 beholden to them. They helped them to wait, and the better, 
 really, the longer the mystery lasted. It grew of course daily 
 richer, adding to its mass as it went and multiplying its features, 
 looming especially larger through the cloud of correspondence, 
 communication, suggestion, supposition, speculation, with which 
 it was presently suffused. Theories and explanations sprouted at 
 night and bloomed in the morning, to be overtopped at noon by 
 a still thicker crop and to achieve by evening the density of 
 a tropical forest. These, again, were the green glades in which 
 our young friends wandered. 
 
 Under the impression of the first night's shock Maud had 
 written to Mortimer Marshal to excuse herself from her engage- 
 ment to luncheon a step of which she had promptly advised 
 Bight as a sign of her playing fair. He took it, she could see, 
 for what it was worth, but she could see also how little he now 
 cared. He was thinking of the man with whose strange agita- 
 tion he had so cleverly and recklessly played, and, in the face of 
 the catastrophe of which they were still so likely to have news, 
 the vanities of smaller fools, the conveniences of first-class flats, 
 the memory of Chippendale teas, ceased to be actual or ceased 
 at any rate to be importunate. Her old interview, furbished into 
 freshness, had appeared, on its Wednesday, in Brains, but she 
 had not received in person the renewed homage of its author 
 she had only, once more, had the vision of his inordinate 
 purchase and diffusion of the precious number. It was a vision, 
 however, at which neither Bight nor she smiled ; it was funny on 
 so poor a scale compared with their other show. But it befell 
 that when this latter had, for ten days, kept being funny to the 
 tune that so lengthened their faces, the poor gentleman glorified 
 in Brains succeeded in making it clear that he was not easily to 
 be dropped. He wanted now, evidently, as the girl said to her- 
 self, to live at concert pitch, and she gathered, from three or four 
 notes, to which, at short intervals, he treated her, that he was 
 watching in anxiety for reverberations not as yet perceptible. 
 His expectation of results from what our young couple had done 
 for him would, as always, have been a thing for pity with 
 a young couple less imbued with the comic sense ; though 
 indeed it would also have been a comic thing for a young couple 
 less attentive to a different drama. Disappointed of the girl's 
 company at home the author of Corisanda had proposed fresh 
 appointments, which she had desired at the moment, and 
 indeed more each time, not to take up ; to the extent even that, 
 catching sight of him, unperceived, on one of these occasions, 
 
THE PAPERS 273 
 
 in her inveterate Strand, she checked on the spot a first impulse 
 to make herself apparent. He was before her, in the crowd, 
 and going the same way. He had stopped a little to look at 
 a shop, and it was then that she swerved in time not to pass 
 close to him. She turned and reversed, conscious and con- 
 vinced that he was, as she mentally put it, on the prowl for her. 
 
 She herself, poor creature as she also mentally put it she 
 herself was shamelessly on the prowl, but it wasn't, for her self- 
 respect, to get herself puffed, it wasn't to pick up a personal 
 advantage. It was to pick up news of Beadel-Muffet, to be near 
 the extra-specials, and it was, also as to this she was never blind 
 to cultivate that nearness by chances of Howard Bight. The 
 blessing of blindness, in truth, at this time, she scantily enjoyed 
 being perfectly aware of the place occupied, in her present 
 attitude to that young man, by the simple impossibility of not see- 
 ing him. She had done with him, certainly, if he had killed Beadel, 
 and nothing was now growing so fast as the presumption in 
 favour of some catastrophe, yet shockingly to be revealed, en- 
 acted somewhere in desperate darkness though probably "on 
 lines," as the Papers said, anticipated by none of the theorists in 
 their own columns, any more than by clever people at the clubs, 
 where the betting was so heavy. She had done with him, indubit- 
 ably, but she had not it was equally unmistakeable done with 
 letting him see how thoroughly she would have done ; or, to feel 
 about it otherwise, she was laying up treasure in time as against 
 the privations of the future. She was affected moreover perhaps 
 but half-consciously by another consideration; her attitude to 
 Mortimer Marshal had turned a little to fright; she wondered, 
 uneasily, at impressions she might have given him ; and she had 
 it, finally, on her mind that, whether or no the vain man believed 
 in them, there must be a limit to the belief she had communi- 
 cated to her friend. He was her friend, after all whatever should 
 happen ; and there were things that, even in that hampered char- 
 acter, she couldn't allow him to suppose. It was a queer business 
 now, in fact, for her to ask herself if she, Maud Blandy, had 
 produced on any sane human sense an effect of flirtation. 
 
 She saw herself in this possibility as in some grotesque reflec- 
 tor, a full-length looking-glass of the inferior quality that deforms 
 and discolours. It made her, as a flirt, a figure for frank derision, 
 and she entertained, honest girl, none of the self-pity that would 
 have spared her a shade of this sharpened consciousness, have 
 taken an inch from facial proportion where it would have been 
 missed with advantage, or added one in such other quarters as 
 would have welcomed the gift. She might have counted the hairs 
 
274 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 of her head, for any wish she could have achieved to remain vague 
 about them, just as she might have rehearsed, disheartened, 
 postures of grace, for any dream she could compass of having 
 ever accidentally struck one. Void, in short, of a personal illusion, 
 exempt with an exemption which left her not less helplessly aware 
 of where her hats and skirts and shoes failed, than of where her 
 nose and mouth and complexion, and, above all, where her poor 
 figure, without a scrap of drawing, did, she blushed to bethink 
 herself that she might have affected her young man as really 
 bragging of a conquest. Her other young man's pursuit of her, 
 what was it but rank greed not in the least for her person, but 
 for the connection of which he had formed so preposterous a 
 view ? She was ready now to say to herself that she had 
 swaggered to Bight for the joke odd indeed though the wish to 
 undeceive him at the moment when he would have been more 
 welcome than ever to think what he liked. The only thing she 
 wished him not to think, as she believed, was that she thought 
 Mortimer Marshal thought her or anyone on earth thought her 
 intrinsically charming. She didn't want to put to him " Do 
 
 you suppose I suppose that if it came to the point ? " her 
 
 reasons for such avoidance being easily conceivable. He was not 
 to suppose that, in any such quarter, she struck herself as either 
 casting a spell or submitting to one ; only, while their crisis 
 lasted, rectifications were scarce in order. She couldn't remind 
 him even, without a mistake, that she had but wished to worry 
 him ; because in the first place that suggested again a pretension 
 in her (so at variance with the image in the mirror) to put forth 
 arts suggested possibly even that she used similar ones when 
 she lunched, in bristling flats, with the pushing ; and because in 
 the second it would have seemed a sort of challenge to him 
 to renew his appeal. 
 
 Then, further and most of all, she had a doubt which by itself 
 would have made her wary, as it distinctly, in her present sus- 
 pended state, made her uncomfortable ; she was haunted by the 
 after-sense of having perhaps been fatuous. A spice of con- 
 viction, in respect to what was open to her, an element of elation, 
 in her talk to Bight about Marshal, had there not, after all, 
 been ? Hadn't she a little liked to think the wretched man could 
 cling to her ? and hadn't she also a little, for herself, filled out 
 the future, in fancy, with the picture of the droll relation ? She 
 had seen it as droll, evidently ; but had she seen it as impossible, 
 unthinkable ? It had become unthinkable now, and she was not 
 wholly unconscious of how the change had worked. Such work- 
 ings were queer but there they were; the foolish man had 
 
THE PAPERS 275 
 
 become odious to her precisely because she was hardening her 
 face for Bight. The latter was no foolish man, but this it was 
 that made it the more a pity he should have placed the impass- 
 able between them. That was what, as the days went on, she 
 felt herself take in. It was there, the impassable she couldn't 
 lucidly have said why, couldn't have explained the thing on the 
 real scale of the wrong her comrade had done. It was a wrong, 
 it was a wrong she couldn't somehow get out of that ; which 
 was a proof, no doubt, that she confusedly tried. The author of 
 Corisanda was sacrificed in the effort for ourselves it may come 
 to that. Great to poor Maud Blandy as well, for that matter, 
 great, yet also attaching, were the obscurity and ambiguity in 
 which some impulses lived and moved the rich gloom of their 
 combinations, contradictions, inconsistencies, surprises. It rested 
 her verily a little from her straightness the line of a character, 
 she felt, markedly like the line of the Edgware Road and of 
 Maida Vale that she could be queerly inconsistent, and incon- 
 sistent in the hustling Strand, where, if anywhere, you had, 
 under pain of hoofs and wheels, to decide whether or no you 
 would cross. She had moments, before shop -windows, into 
 which she looked without seeing, when all the unuttered came 
 over her. She had once told her friend that she pitied everyone, 
 and at these moments, in sharp unrest, she pitied Bight for their 
 tension, in which nothing was relaxed. 
 
 It was all too mixed and too strange each of them in a 
 different corner with a different impossibility. There was her 
 own, in far Kilburnia ; and there was her friend's, everywhere 
 for where didn't he go? and there was Mrs. Chorner's, on the 
 very edge of Park " Line," in spite of all petticoats and marble 
 baths; and there was Beadel-Muffet's, the wretched man, God 
 only knew where which was what made the whole show 
 supremely incoherent : he ready to give his head, if, as seemed 
 so unlikely, he still had a head, to steal into cover and keep 
 under, out of the glare ; he having scoured Europe, it might so 
 well be guessed, for some hole in which the Papers wouldn't find 
 him out, and then having what else was there by this time to 
 presume ? died, in the hole, as the only way not to see, to hear, 
 to know, let alone be known, heard, seen. Finally, while he lay 
 there relieved by the only relief, here was poor Mortimer Marshal, 
 undeterred, undismayed, unperceiving, so hungry to be para- 
 graphed in something like the same fashion and published on 
 something like the same scale, that, for the very blindness of it, 
 he couldn't read the lesson that was in the air, and scrambled, to 
 his utmost, toward the boat itself that ferried the warning ghost. 
 
276 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 Just that, beyond everything, was the incoherence that made for 
 rather dismal farce, and on which Bight had put his finger in 
 naming the author of Corisanda as a candidate, in turn, for the 
 comic, the tragic vacancy. It was a wonderful moment for such 
 an ideal, and the sight was not really to pass from her till she 
 had seen the whole of the wonder. A fortnight had elapsed 
 since the night of Beadel's disappearance, and the conditions 
 attending the afternoon performances of the Finnish drama had 
 in some degree reproduced themselves to the extent, that is, 
 of the place, the time and several of the actors involved ; the 
 audience, for reasons traceable, being differently composed. 
 A lady of " high social position," desirous still further to elevate 
 that character by the obvious aid of the theatre, had engaged a 
 playhouse for a series of occasions on which she was to affront 
 in person whatever volume of attention she might succeed in 
 collecting. Her success had not immediately been great, and 
 by the third or the fourth day the public consciousness was so 
 markedly astray that the means taken to recover it penetrated, in 
 the shape of a complimentary ticket, even to our young woman. 
 Maud had communicated with Bight, who could be sure of a 
 ticket, proposing to him that they should go together and offer- 
 ing to await him in the porch of the theatre. He joined her 
 there, but with so queer a face for her subtlety that she 
 paused before him, previous to their going in, with a straight 
 " You know something ! " 
 
 " About that rank idiot ? " He shook his head, looking kind 
 enough; but it didn't make him, she felt, more natural. "My 
 dear, it's all beyond me." 
 
 "I mean," she said with a shade of uncertainty, "about poor 
 dear Beadel." 
 
 " So do I. So does everyone. No one now, at any moment, 
 means anything about anyone else. But I've lost intellectual 
 control of the extraordinary case. I flattered myself I still had 
 a certain amount. But the situation at last escapes me. I break 
 down. Non comprenny ? I give it up." 
 
 She continued to look at him hard. " Then what's the matter 
 with you ? " 
 
 "Why, just that, probably that I feel like a clever man 
 'done,' and that your tone with me adds to the feeling. Or, 
 putting it otherwise, it's perhaps only just one of the ways in 
 which I'm so interesting ; that, with the life we lead and the age 
 we live in, there's always something the matter with me there 
 can't help being : some rage, some disgust, some fresh amaze- 
 ment against which one hasn't, for all one's experience, been 
 
THE PAPERS 277 
 
 proof. That sense of having been sold again produces 
 emotions that may well, on occasion, be reflected in the counte- 
 nance. There you are." 
 
 Well, he might say that, " There you are," as often as he liked 
 without, at the pass they had come to, making her in the least 
 see where she was. She was only just where she stood, a little 
 apart in the lobby, listening to his words, which she found 
 eminently characteristic of him, struck with an odd impression 
 of his talking against time, and, most of all, tormented to 
 recognise that she could fairly do nothing better, at such a 
 moment, than feel he was awfully nice. The moment that of 
 his most blandly (she would have said in the case of another 
 most impudently) failing, all round, to satisfy her was appro- 
 priate only to some emotion consonant with her dignity. It was 
 all crowded and covered, hustled and interrupted now ; but what 
 really happened in this brief passage, and with her finding no 
 words to reply to him, was that dignity quite appeared to 
 collapse and drop from her, to sink to the floor, under the feet 
 of people visibly bristling with " paper," where the young man's 
 extravagant offer of an arm, to put an end and help her in, had 
 the effect of an invitation to leave it lying to be trampled on. 
 
 Within, once seated, they kept their places through two 
 intervals, but at the end of the third act there were to be no 
 less than five they fell in with a movement that carried half the 
 audience to the outer air. Howard Bight desired to smoke, and 
 Maud offered to accompany him-, for the purpose, to the portico, 
 where, somehow, for both of them, the sense was immediately 
 strong that this, the squalid Strand, damp yet incandescent, ugly 
 yet eloquent, familiar yet fresh, was life, palpable, ponderable, 
 possible, much more than the stuff, neither scenic nor cosmic, 
 they had quitted. The difference came to them, from the street, 
 in a moist mild blast, which they simply took in, at first, in a 
 long draught, as more amusing than their play, and which, for the 
 moment, kept them conscious of the voices of the air as of 
 something mixed and vague. The next thing, of course, how- 
 ever, was that they heard the hoarse newsmen, though with the 
 special sense of the sound not standing out which, so far as it 
 did come, made them exchange a look. There was no hawker 
 just then within call. 
 
 " What are they crying ? " 
 
 " Blessed if I care ! " Bight said while he got his light which 
 he had but just done when they saw themselves closely ap- 
 proached. The Papers had come into sight in the form of a 
 small boy bawling the "Winner" of something, and at the same 
 
278 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 moment they recognised their reprieve they recognised also the 
 presence of Mortimer Marshal. 
 
 He had no shame about it. "I fully believed I should find 
 you." 
 
 " But you haven't been," Bight asked, " inside ? " 
 
 " Not at to-day's performance I only just thought I'd pass. 
 But at each of the others," Mortimer Marshal confessed. 
 
 " Oh, you're a devotee," said Bight, whose reception of the poor 
 man contended, for Maud's attention, with this extravagance of 
 the poor man's own importunity. Their friend had sat through 
 the piece three times on the chance of her being there for one or 
 other of the acts, and if he had given that up in discouragement 
 he still hovered and waited. Who now, moreover, was to say he 
 wasn't rewarded ? To find her companion as well as at last to 
 find herself gave the reward a character that it took, somehow, 
 for her eye, the whole of this misguided person's curiously large 
 and flat, but distinctly bland, sweet, solicitous countenance to 
 express. It came over the girl with horror that here was a 
 material object the incandescence, on the edge of the street, 
 didn't spare it which she had had perverse moments of seeing 
 fixed before her for life. She asked herself, in this agitation, 
 what she would have likened it to ; more than anything perhaps 
 to a large clean china plate, with a neat " pattern," suspended, to 
 the exposure of hapless heads, from the centre of the domestic 
 ceiling. Truly she was, as by the education of the strain under- 
 gone, learning something every hour it seemed so to be the 
 case that a strain enlarged the mind, formed the taste, enriched, 
 even, the imagination. Yet in spite of this last fact, it must be 
 added, she continued rather mystified by the actual pitch of her 
 comrade's manner, Bight really behaving as if he enjoyed their 
 visitor's " note." He treated him so decently, as they said, that 
 he might suddenly have taken to liking his company ; which was 
 an odd appearance till Maud understood it whereupon it became 
 for her a slightly sinister one. For the effect of the honest gentle- 
 man, she by that time saw, was to make her friend nervous and 
 vicious, and the form taken by his irritation was just this danger- 
 ous candour, which encouraged the candour of the victim. She 
 had for the latter a residuum of pity, whereas Bight, she felt, had 
 none, and she didn't want him, the poor man, absolutely to pay 
 with his life. 
 
 It was clear, however, within a few minutes, that this was what 
 he was bent on doing, and she found herself helpless before his 
 smug insistence. She had taken his measure; he was made 
 incorrigibly to try, irredeemably to fail to be, in short, eternally 
 
THE PAPERS 279 
 
 defeated and eternally unaware. He wouldn't rage he couldrit, 
 for the citadel might, in that case, have been carried by his 
 assault ; he would only spend his life in walking round and round 
 it, asking everyone he met how in the name of goodness one did 
 get in. And everyone would make a fool of him though no one 
 so much as her companion now and everything would fall from 
 him but the perfection of his temper, of his tailor, of his manners, 
 of his mediocrity. He evidently rejoiced at the happy chance 
 which had presented him again to Bight, and he lost as little 
 time as possible in proposing, the play ended, an adjournment 
 again to tea. The spirit of malice in her comrade, now inordi- 
 nately excited, met this suggestion with an amendment that fairly 
 made her anxious ; Bight threw out, in a word, the idea that he 
 himself surely, this time, should entertain Mr. Marshal. 
 
 " Only I'm afraid I can take you but to a small pothouse that 
 we poor journalists haunt." 
 
 " They're just the places I delight in it would be of an extra- 
 ordinary interest. I sometimes venture into them feeling awfully 
 strange and wondering, I do assure you, who people are. But to 
 
 go there with you /" And he looked from Bight to Maud and 
 
 from Maud back again with such abysses of appreciation that she 
 knew him as lost indeed. 
 
 VI 
 
 IT was demonic of Bight, who immediately answered that he would 
 tell him with pleasure who everyone was, and she felt this the more 
 when her friend, making light of the rest of the entertainment 
 they had quitted, advised their sacrificing it and proceeding to the 
 other scene. He was really too eager for his victim she wondered 
 what he wanted to do with him. He could only play him at the 
 most a practical joke invent appetising identities, once they 
 were at table, for the dull consumers around. No one, at the 
 place they most frequented, had an identity in the least appe- 
 tising, no one was anyone or anything. It was apparently of the 
 essence of existence on such terms the terms, at any rate, to 
 which she was reduced that people comprised in it couldn't even 
 minister to each other's curiosity, let alone to envy or awe. She 
 would have wished therefore, for their pursuer, to intervene a 
 little, to warn him against beguilement ; but they had moved 
 together along the Strand and then out of it, up a near cross 
 street, without her opening her mouth. Bight, as she felt, was 
 acting to prevent this ; his easy talk redoubled, and he led his 
 lamb to the shambles. The talk had jumped to poor Beadel 
 
280 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 her friend had startled her by causing it, almost with violence, at 
 a given moment, to take that direction, and he thus quite 
 sufficiently stayed her speech. The people she lived with 
 mightn't make you curious, but there was of course always a 
 sharp exception for him. She kept still, in fine, with the wonder 
 of what he wanted ; though indeed she might, in the presence of 
 their guest's response, have felt he was already getting it. He was 
 getting, that is and she was, into the bargain the fullest 
 illustration of the ravage of a passion; so sublimely Marshal 
 rose to the proposition, infernally thrown off, that, in whatever 
 queer box or tight place Beadel might have found himself, it was 
 something, after all, to have so powerfully interested the public. 
 The insidious artless way in which Bight made his point! "I 
 don't know that I've ever known the public (and I watch it, as in 
 my trade we have to, day and night) so consummately interested." 
 They had that phenomenon the present consummate interest 
 well before them while they sat at their homely meal, served with 
 accessories so different from those of the sweet Chippendale 
 (another chord on which the young man played with just the 
 right effect !), and it would have been hard to say if the guest were, 
 for the first moments, more under the spell of the marvellous 
 " hold " on the town achieved by the great absentee, or of that of 
 the delicious coarse tablecloth, the extraordinary form of the 
 saltcellars, and the fact that he had within range of sight, at the 
 other end of the room, in the person of the little quiet man with 
 blue spectacles and an obvious wig, the greatest authority in 
 London about the inner life of the criminal classes. Beadel, none 
 the less, came up again and stayed up would clearly so have 
 been kept up, had there been need, by their host, that the girl 
 couldn't at last fail to see how much it was for herself that his 
 intention worked. What was it, all the same since it couldn't 
 be anything so simple as to expose their hapless visitor ? What 
 had she to learn about him? especially at the hour of seeing 
 what there was still to learn about Bight. She ended by deciding 
 for his appearance bore her out that his explosion was but the 
 form taken by an inward fever. The fever, on this theory, was 
 the result of the final pang of responsibility. The mystery of 
 Beadel had grown too dark to be borne which they would 
 presently feel ; and he was meanwhile in the phase of bluffing it 
 off, precisely because it was to overwhelm him. 
 
 "And do you mean you too would pay with your lifel" He 
 put the question, agreeably, across the table to his guest ; agree- 
 ably of course in spite of his eye's dry glitter. 
 
 His guest's expression, at this, fairly became beautiful. " Well, 
 
THE PAPERS 281 
 
 it's an awfully nice point. Certainly one would like to feel the 
 great murmur surrounding one's name, to be there, more or less, 
 so as not to lose the sense of it, and as I really think, you know, 
 the pleasure ; the great city, the great empire, the world itself for 
 the moment, hanging literally on one's personality and giving a 
 start, in its suspense, whenever one is mentioned. -Big sensation, 
 you know, that," Mr. Marshal pleadingly smiled, "and of course 
 if one were dead one wouldn't enjoy it. One would have to 
 come to life for that." 
 
 " Naturally," Bight rejoined" only that's what the dead don't 
 do. You can't eat your cake and have it. The question is," he 
 good-naturedly explained, "whether you'd be willing, for the 
 certitude of the great murmur you speak of, to part with your 
 life under circumstances of extraordinary mystery." 
 
 His guest earnestly fixed it. "Whether / would be will- 
 ing?" 
 
 " Mr. Marshal wonders," Maud said to Bight, " if you are, as 
 a person interested in his reputation, definitely proposing to him 
 some such possibility." 
 
 He looked at her, on this, with mild, round eyes, and she felt, 
 wonderfully, that he didn't quite see her as joking. He smiled 
 he always smiled, but his anxiety showed, and he turned it again 
 to their companion. " You mean a the knowing how it might 
 be going to be felt ? " 
 
 "Well, yes call it that. The consciousness of what one's 
 unexplained extinction given, to start with, one's high position 
 would mean, wouldn't be able to help meaning, for millions 
 and millions of people. The point is and I admit it's, as you 
 call it, a 'nice' one if you can think of the impression so 
 made as worth the purchase. Naturally, naturally, there's but 
 the impression you make. You don't receive any. You can't. 
 You've only your confidence so far as that's an impression. 
 Oh, it is indeed a nice point ; and I only put it to you," Bight 
 wound up, " because, you know, you do like to be recognised." 
 
 Mr. Marshal was bewildered, but he was not so bewildered as 
 not to be able, a trifle coyly, but still quite bravely, to confess to 
 that. Maud, with her eyes on her friend, found herself thinking 
 of him as of some plump, innocent animal, more or less of the 
 pink-eyed rabbit or sleek guinea-pig order, involved in the slow 
 spell of a serpent of shining scales. Bight's scales, truly, had 
 never so shone as this evening, and he used to admiration 
 which was just a part of the lustre the right shade of gravity. 
 He was neither so light as to fail of the air of an attractive offer, 
 nor yet so earnest as to betray a gibe. He might conceivably 
 
282 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 have been, as an undertaker of improvements in defective 
 notorieties, placing before his guest a practical scheme. It was 
 really quite as if he were ready to guarantee the " murmur " if 
 Mr. Marshal was ready to pay the price. And the price wouldn't 
 of course be only Mr. Marshal's existence. All this, at least, if 
 Mr. Marshal felt moved to take it so. The prodigious thing, 
 next, was that Mr. Marshal was so moved though, clearly, as 
 was to be expected, with important qualifications. " Do you 
 really mean," he asked, " that one would excite this delightful 
 interest ? " 
 
 " You allude to the charged state of the air on the subject of 
 Beadel ? " Bight considered, looking volumes. " It would depend 
 a good deal upon who one is" 
 
 He turned, Mr. Marshal, again to Maud Blandy, and his eyes 
 seemed to suggest to her that she should put his question for 
 him. They forgave her, she judged, for having so oddly forsaken 
 him, but they appealed to her now not to leave him to struggle 
 alone. Her own difficulty was, however, meanwhile, that she 
 feared to serve him as he suggested without too much, by way of 
 return, turning his case to the comic ; whereby she only looked 
 at him hard and let him revert to their friend. " Oh," he said, 
 with a rich wistfulness from which the comic was not absent, " of 
 course everyone can't pretend to be Beadel." 
 
 " Perfectly. But we're speaking, after all, of those who do 
 count." 
 
 There was quite a hush, for the minute, while the poor man 
 faltered. " Should you say that / in any appreciable way 
 count ? " 
 
 Howard Bight distilled honey. " Isn't it a little a question of 
 how much we should find you did, or, for that matter, might, as 
 it were, be made to, in the event of a real catastrophe ? " 
 
 Mr. Marshal turned pale, yet he met it too with sweetness. 
 " I like the way " and he had a glance for Maud " you talk of 
 catastrophes ! " 
 
 His host did the comment justice. "Oh, it's only because, 
 you see, we're so peculiarly in the presence of one. Beadel 
 shows so tremendously what a catastrophe does for the right 
 person. His absence, you may say, doubles, quintuples, his 
 presence." 
 
 " I see, I see ! " Mr. Marshal was all there. " It's awfully 
 interesting to be so present. And yet it's rather dreadful to be 
 so absent." It had set him fairly musing; for couldn't the 
 opposites be reconciled ? " If he is" he threw out, " absent !" 
 
 " Why, he's absent, of course," said Bight, " if he's dead." 
 
THE PAPERS 283 
 
 " And really dead is what you believe him to be ? " 
 
 He breathed it with a strange break, as from a mind too full. 
 It was on the one hand a grim vision for his own case, but was 
 on the other a kind of clearance of the field. With Beadel out 
 of the way his own case could live, and he was obviously thinking 
 what it might be to be as dead as that and yet as much alive. 
 What his demand first did, at any rate, was to make Howard 
 Bight look straight at Maud. Her own look met him, but she 
 asked nothing now. She felt him somehow fathomless, and his 
 practice with their infatuated guest created a new suspense. He 
 might indeed have been looking at her to learn how to reply, 
 but even were this the case she had still nothing to answer. 
 So in a moment he had spoken without her. " I've quite given 
 him up." 
 
 It sank into Marshal, after which it produced something. " He 
 ought then to come back. I mean," he explained, "to see for 
 himself to have the impression." 
 
 " Of the noise he has made ? Yes "Bight weighed it" that 
 would be the ideal." 
 
 " And it would, if one must call it ' noise,' " Marshal limpidly 
 pursued, " make a more." 
 
 "Oh, but if you,W//" 
 
 " Can't, you mean, through having already made so much, add 
 to the quantity ? " 
 
 " Can't "Bight was a wee bit sharp "come back, confound 
 it, at all. Can't return from the dead ! " 
 
 Poor Marshal had to take it. " No not if you are dead." 
 
 " Well, that's what we're talking about." 
 
 Maud, at this, for pity, held out a perch. " Mr. Marshal, I 
 think, is talking a little on the basis of the possibility of your not 
 being ! " He threw her an instant glance of gratitude, and it 
 gave her a push. " So long as you're not quite too utterly, you 
 can come back." 
 
 "Oh," said Bight, "in time for the fuss?" 
 
 " Before "Marshal met it "the interest has subsided. It 
 naturally then wouldn't would it ? subside ! " 
 
 " No," Bight granted ; " not if it hadn't, through wearing out 
 I mean your being lost too long already died out." 
 
 " Oh, of course," his guest agreed, " you mustn't be lost too 
 long." A vista had plainly opened to him, and the subject led 
 him on. He had, before its extent, another pause. " About how 
 long, do you think ? " 
 
 Well, Bight had to think. " I should say Beadel had rather 
 overdone it." 
 
284 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 The poor gentleman stared. " But if he can't help him- 
 self ?" 
 
 Bight gave a laugh. " Yes ; but in case he could." 
 
 Maud again intervened, and, as her question was for their 
 host, Marshal was all attention. " Do you consider Beadel has 
 overdone it ? " 
 
 Well, once more, it took consideration. The issue of Bight's, 
 however, was not of the clearest. "I don't think we can tell 
 unless he were to. I don't think that, without seeing it, and 
 judging by the special case, one can quite know how it would be 
 taken. He might, on the one side, have spoiled, so to speak, 
 his market; and he might, on the other, have scored as never 
 before." 
 
 "It might be," Maud threw in, "just the making of him." 
 
 "Surely" Marshal glowed " there's just that chance." 
 
 " What a pity then," Bight laughed, " that there isn't someone 
 to take it ! For the light it would throw, I mean, on the laws so 
 mysterious, so curious, so interesting that govern the great 
 currents of public attention. They're not wholly whimsical 
 wayward and wild; they have their strange logic, their obscure 
 reason if one could only get at it ! The man who does, you 
 see and who can keep his discovery to himself! will make his 
 everlasting fortune, as well, no doubt, as that of a few others. 
 It's our branch, our preoccupation, in fact, Miss Blandy's and 
 mine this pursuit of the incalculable, this study, to that end, of 
 the great forces of publicity. Only, of course, it must be re- 
 membered," Bight went on, " that in the case we're speaking of 
 the man disappearing as Beadel has now disappeared, and sup- 
 planting for the time every other topic must have someone on 
 the spot for him, to keep the pot boiling, someone acting, with 
 real intelligence, in his interest. I mean if he's to get the good 
 of it when he does turn up. It would never do, you see, that 
 that should be flat ! " 
 
 " Oh no, not flat, never ! " Marshal quailed at the thought. 
 Held as in a vise by his host's high lucidity, he exhaled his 
 interest at every pore. " It wouldn't be flat for Beadel, would it ? 
 I mean if he were to come." 
 
 " Not much ! It wouldn't be flat for Beadel I think I can 
 undertake." And Bight undertook so well that he threw himself 
 back in his chair with his thumbs in the armholes of his waist- 
 coat and his head very much up. " The only thing is that for 
 poor Beadel it's a luxury, so to speak, wasted and so dreadfully, 
 upon my word, that one quite regrets there's no one to step in." 
 
 " To step in ? " His visitor hung upon his lips. 
 
THE PAPERS 285 
 
 "To do the thing better, so to speak to do it right; to 
 having raised the whirlwind really ride the storm. To seize the 
 psychological hour." 
 
 Marshal met it, yet he wondered. " You speak of the reappear- 
 ance? I see. But the man of the reappearance would have, 
 wouldn't he ? or perhaps I don't follow ? to be the same as the 
 man of the ^appearance. It wouldn't do as well would it ? 
 for somebody else to turn up ? " 
 
 Bight considered him with attention as if there were fine 
 possibilities. " No ; unless such a person should turn up, say 
 well, with news of him." 
 
 " But what news ? " 
 
 "With lights the more lurid the better on the darkness. 
 With the facts, don't you see, 0/"the disappearance." 
 
 Marshal, on his side, threw himself back. " But he'd have to 
 know them ! " 
 
 " Oh," said Bight, with prompt portentousness, " that could be 
 managed." 
 
 It was too much, by this time, for his victim, who simply turned 
 on Maud a dilated eye and a flushed cheek. " Mr. Marshal," it 
 made her say " Mr. Marshal would like to turn up." 
 
 Her hand was on the table, and the effect of her words, 
 combined with this, was to cause him, before responsive speech 
 could come, to cover it respectfully but expressively with his own. 
 "Do you mean," he panted to Bight, "that you have, amid the 
 general collapse of speculation, facts to give ? " 
 
 " I've always facts to give." 
 
 It begot in the poor man a large hot smile. " But how shall 
 I say? authentic, or as I believe you clever people say, 'in- 
 spired' ones?" 
 
 " If I should undertake such a case as we're supposing, I 
 would of course by that circumstance undertake that my facts 
 should be well, worthy of it. I would take," Bight on his own 
 part modestly smiled, " pains with them." 
 
 It finished the business. " Would you take pains for me ? " 
 
 Bight looked at him now hard. " Would you like to appear ? " 
 
 " Oh, * appear ' ! " Marshal weakly murmured. 
 
 " Is it, Mr. Marshal, a real proposal ? I mean are you 
 prepared ? " 
 
 Wonderment sat in his eyes an anguish of doubt and desire. 
 " But wouldn't you prepare me ? " 
 
 "Would you prepare me that's the point," Bight laughed 
 " to prepare you ? " 
 
 There was a minute's mutual gaze, but Marshal took it in. 
 
286 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " I don't know what you're making me say ; I don't know what 
 you're making me fee!. When one is with people so up in these 
 
 things " and he turned to his companions, alternately, a look 
 
 as of conscious doom lighted with suspicion, a look that was like 
 a cry for mercy " one feels a little as if one ought to be saved 
 from one's self. For I dare say one's foolish enough with one's 
 poor little wish " 
 
 " The little wish, my dear sir " Bight took him up " to stand 
 out in the world ! Your wish is the wish of all high spirits." 
 
 " It's dear of you to say it." Mr. Marshal was all response. 
 " I shouldn't want, even if it were weak or vain, to have lived 
 wholly unknown. And if what you ask is whether I understand 
 you to speak, at it were, professionally " 
 
 " You do understand me ? " Bight pushed back his chair. 
 
 " Oh, but so well ! when I've already seen what you can do. 
 I need scarcely say, that having seen it, I shan't bargain." 
 
 "Ah, then, /shall," Bight smiled. "I mean with the Papers. 
 It must be half profits." 
 
 " ' Profits ' ? " His guest was vague. 
 
 "Our friend," Maud explained to Bight, "simply wants the 
 position." 
 
 Bight threw her a look. "Ah, he must take what I give him." 
 
 " But what you give me/' their friend handsomely contended, 
 " is the position." 
 
 " Yes ; but the terms that I shall get ! I don't produce you, 
 of course," Bight went on, "till I've prepared you. But when 
 I do produce you it will be as a value." 
 
 "You'll get so much for me?" the poor gentleman quavered. 
 
 "I shall be able to get, I think, anything I ask. So we divide." 
 And Bight jumped up. 
 
 Marshal did the same, and, while, with his hands on the back 
 of his chair, he steadied himself from the vertiginous view, they 
 faced each other across the table. " Oh, it's too wonderful ! " 
 
 "You're not afraid?" 
 
 He looked at a card on the wall, framed, suspended and 
 marked with the word "Soups." He looked at Maud, who had 
 not moved. " I don't know ; I may be ; I must feel. What 
 I should fear," he added, " would be his coming back." 
 
 "Beadel's? Yes, that would dish you. But since he 
 can't !" 
 
 " I place myself," said Mortimer Marshal, " in your hands." 
 
 Maud Blandy still hadn't moved ; she stared before her at the 
 cloth. A small sharp sound, unheard, she saw, by the others, 
 had reached her from the street, and with her mind instinctively 
 
THE PAPERS 287 
 
 catching at it, she waited, dissimulating a little, for its repetition 
 or its effect. It was the howl of the Strand, it was news of 
 the absent, and it would have a bearing. She had a hesitation, 
 for she winced even now with the sense of Marshal's intensest 
 look at her. He couldn't be saved from himself, but he might 
 be, still, from Bight; though it hung of course, her chance to 
 warn him, on what the news would be. She thought with con- 
 centration, while her friends unhooked their overcoats, and by 
 the time these garments were donned she was on her feet. 
 Then she spoke. " I don't want you to be ' dished.' " 
 
 He allowed for her alarm. " But how can I be ? " 
 
 " Something has come." 
 
 " Something ? " The men had both spoken. 
 
 They had stopped where they stood; she again caught the 
 sound. " Listen ! They're crying." 
 
 They waited then, and it came came, of a sudden, with a 
 burst and as if passing the place. A hawker, outside, with his 
 "extra," called by someone and hurrying, bawled it as he 
 moved. " Death of Beadel-Muffet Extraordinary News ! " 
 
 They all gasped, and Maud, with her eyes on Bight, saw him, 
 to her satisfaction at first, turn pale. But his guest drank it in. 
 " If it's true then" Marshal triumphed at her "I'm ^/ dished." 
 
 But she only looked hard at Bight, who struck her as having, 
 at the sound, fallen to pieces, and as having above all, on the 
 instant, turned cold for his worried game. "Is it true?" she 
 austerely asked. 
 
 His white face answered. " It's true." 
 
 VII 
 
 THE first thing, on the part of our friends after each inter- 
 locutor, producing a penny, had plunged into the unfolded 
 " Latest " was this very evidence of their dispensing with their 
 companion's further attendance on their agitated state, and all 
 the more that Bight was to have still, in spite of agitation, his 
 function with him to accomplish : a result much assisted by the 
 insufflation of wind into Mr. Marshal's sails constituted by the 
 fact before them. With Beadel publicly dead this gentleman's 
 opportunity, on the terms just arranged, opened out; it was 
 quite as if they had seen him, then and there, step, with a kind 
 of spiritual splash, into the empty seat of the boat so launched, 
 scarcely even taking time to master the essentials before he gave 
 himself to the breeze. The essentials indeed he was, by their 
 understanding, to receive in full from Bight at their earliest 
 
288 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 leisure ; but nothing could so vividly have marked his confidence 
 in the young man as the promptness with which he appeared 
 now ready to leave him to his inspiration. The news moreover, 
 as yet, was the rich, grim fact a sharp flare from an Agency, 
 lighting into blood-colour the locked room, finally, with the 
 police present, forced open, of the first hotel at Frankfort-on-the- 
 Oder; but there was enough of it, clearly, to bear scrutiny, the 
 scrutiny represented in our young couple by the act of perusal 
 prolonged, intensified, repeated, so repeated that it was exactly 
 perhaps with this suggestion of doubt that poor Mr. Marshal had 
 even also a little lost patience. He vanished, at any rate, while 
 his supporters, still planted in the side-street into which they had 
 lately issued, stood extinguished, as to any facial communion, 
 behind the array of printed columns. It was only after he had 
 gone that, whether aware or not, the others lowered, on either 
 side, the absorbing page and knew that their eyes had met. A 
 remarkable thing, for Maud Blandy, then happened, a thing quite 
 as remarkable at least as poor Beadel's suicide, which we recall 
 her having so considerably discounted. 
 
 Present as they thus were at the tragedy, present in far Frank- 
 fort just where they stood, by the door of their stale pothouse 
 and in the thick of London air, the logic of her situation, she 
 was sharply conscious, would have been an immediate rupture with 
 Bight. He was scared at what he had done he looked his 
 scare so straight out at her that she might almost have seen in it 
 the dismay of his question of how far his responsibility, given 
 the facts, might, if pried into, be held and not only at the 
 judgment-seat of mere morals to reach. The dismay was to 
 that degree illuminating that she had had from him no such 
 avowal of responsibility as this amounted to, and the limit to any 
 laxity on her own side had therefore not been set for her with 
 any such sharpness. It put her at last in the right, his scare 
 quite richly in the right; and as that was naturally but where 
 she had waited to find herself, everything that now silently passed 
 between them had the merit, if it had none other, of simplifying. 
 Their hour had struck, the hour after which she was definitely 
 not to have forgiven him. Yet what occurred, as I say, was that, 
 if, at the end of five minutes, she had moved much further, it 
 proved to be, in spite of logic, not in the sense away from him, 
 but in the sense nearer. He showed to her, at these strange 
 moments, as blood-stained and literally hunted ; the yell of the 
 hawkers, repeated and echoing round them, was like a cry for his 
 life ; and there was in particular a minute during which, gazing 
 down into the roused Strand, all equipped both with mob and 
 
THE PAPERS 289 
 
 with constables, she asked herself whether she had best get off 
 with him through the crowd, where they would be least noticed, 
 or get him away through quiet Covent Garden, empty at that 
 hour, but with policemen to watch a furtive couple, and with the 
 news, more bawled at their heels in the stillness, acquiring the 
 sound of the very voice of justice. It was this last sudden 
 terror that presently determined her, and determined with it an 
 impulse of protection that had somehow to do with pity without 
 having to do with tenderness. It settled, at all events, the ques- 
 tion of leaving him ; she couldn't leave him there and so ; she 
 must see at least what would have come of his own sense of the 
 shock. 
 
 The way he took it, the shock, gave her afresh the measure of 
 how perversely he had played with Marshal of how he had 
 tried so, on the very edge of his predicament, to cheat his fears 
 and beguile his want of ease. He had insisted to his victim on 
 the truth he had now to reckon with, but had insisted only 
 because he didn't believe it. Beadel, by that attitude, was but 
 lying low ; so that he would have no promise really to redeem. 
 At present he had one, indeed, and Maud could ask herself if 
 the redemption of it, with the leading of their wretched friend 
 a further fantastic dance, would be what he depended on to drug 
 the pain of remorse. By the time she had covered as much 
 ground as this, however, she had also, standing before him, taken 
 his special out of his hand and, folding it up carefully with her 
 own and smoothing it down, packed the two together into such 
 a small tight ball as she might toss to a distance without the air, 
 which she dreaded, of having, by any looser proceeding, disowned 
 or evaded the news. Howard Bight, helpless and passive, put- 
 ting on the matter no governed face, let her do with him as she 
 liked, let her, for the first time in their acquaintance, draw his 
 hand into her arm as if he were an invalid or as if she were 
 a snare. She took with him, thus guided and sustained, their 
 second plunge ; led him, with decision, straight to where their 
 shock was shared and amplified, pushed her way, guarding him, 
 across the dense thoroughfare and through the great westward 
 current which fairly seemed to meet and challenge them, and 
 then, by reaching Waterloo Bridge with him and descending the 
 granite steps, set him down at last on the Embankment. It was 
 a fact, none the less, that she had in her eyes, all the while, and 
 too strangely for speech, the vision of the scene in the little 
 German city : the smashed door, the exposed horror, the wonder- 
 ing, insensible group, the English gentleman, in the disordered 
 room, driven to bay among the scattered personal objects that 
 
290 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 only too floridly announced and emblazoned him, and several of 
 which the Papers were already naming the poor English gentle- 
 man, hunted and hiding, done to death by the thing he yet, for 
 so long, always would have, and stretched on the floor with his 
 beautiful little revolver still in his hand and the effusion of his 
 blood, from a wound taken, with rare resolution, full in the face, 
 extraordinary and dreadful. 
 
 She went on with her friend, eastward and beside the river, 
 and it was as if they both, for that matter, had, in their silence, the 
 dire material vision. Maud Blandy, however, presently stopped 
 short one of the connections of the picture so brought her to a 
 stand. It had come over her, with a force she couldn't check, 
 that the catastrophe itself would have been, with all the un- 
 fathomed that yet clung to it, just the thing for her companion's 
 professional hand; so that, queerly but absolutely, while she 
 looked at him again in reprobation and pity, it was as much as 
 she could do not to feel it for him as something missed, not to 
 wish he might have been there to snatch his chance, and not, 
 above all, to betray to him this reflection. It had really risen to 
 her lips " Why aren't you, old man, on the spot ? " and indeed 
 the question, had it broken forth, might well have sounded as a 
 provocation to him to start without delay. Such was the effect, 
 in poor Maud, for the moment, of the habit, so confirmed in her, 
 of seeing time marked only by the dial of the Papers. She had 
 admired in Bight the true journalist that she herself was so 
 clearly not though it was also not what she had most admired 
 in him; and she might have felt, at this instant, the charm of 
 putting true journalism to the proof. She might have been on 
 the point of saying: "Real business, you know, would be for 
 you to start now, just as you are, before anyone else, sure as you 
 can so easily be of having the pull"; and she might, after a 
 moment, while they paused, have been looking back, through the 
 river-mist, for a sign of the hour, at the blurred face of Big Ben. 
 That she grazed this danger yet avoided it was partly the result 
 in truth of her seeing for herself quickly enough that the last 
 thing Bight could just then have thought of, even under provoca- 
 tion of the most positive order, was the chance thus failing him, 
 or the train, the boat, the advantage, that the true journalist 
 wouldn't have missed. He quite, under her eyes, while they 
 stood together, ceased to be the true journalist ; she saw him, as 
 she felt, put off the character as definitely as she might have 
 seen him remove his coat, his hat, or the contents of his pockets, 
 in order to lay them on the parapet before jumping into the 
 river. Wonderful was the difference that this transformation, 
 
THE PAPERS 291 
 
 marked by no word and supported by no sign, made in the man 
 she had hitherto known. Nothing, again, could have so ex- 
 pressed for her his continued inward dismay. It was as if, for 
 that matter, she couldn't have asked him a question without 
 adding to it ; and she didn't wish to add to it, since she was by 
 this time more fully aware that she wished to be generous. 
 When she at last uttered other words it was precisely so that 
 she mightn't press him. 
 
 " I think of her poor thing : that's what it makes me do. I 
 think of her there at this moment just out of the ' Line ' with 
 this stuff shrieked at her windows." With which, having so at 
 once contained and relieved herself, she caused him to walk on. 
 
 "Are you talking of Mrs. Chorner?" he after a moment 
 asked. And then, when he had had her quick " Of course of 
 who else?" he said what she didn't expect. "Naturally one 
 thinks of her. But she has herself to blame. I mean she drove 
 
 him " What he meant, however, Bight suddenly dropped, 
 
 taken as he was with another idea, which had brought them the 
 next minute to a halt. " Mightn't you, by the way, see her ? " 
 
 " See her now ? " 
 
 "'Now' or never for the good of it. Now's just your 
 time." 
 
 " But how can it be hers, in the very midst ? " 
 
 " Because it's in the very midst. She'll tell you things to-night 
 that she'll never tell again. To-night she'll be great." 
 
 Maud gaped almost wildly. " You want me, at such an hour, 
 to call ?" 
 
 "And send up your card with the word oh, of course the 
 right one ! on it." 
 
 "What do you suggest," Maud asked, "as the right one?" 
 
 "Well, ' The world wants you ' that usually does. I've seldom 
 known it, even in deeper distress than is, after all, here supposable, 
 to fail. Try it, at any rate." 
 
 The girl, strangely touched, intensely wondered. " Demand of 
 her, you mean, to let me explain for her ? " 
 
 "There you are. You catch on. Write that if you like 
 * Let me explain.' She'll want to explain." 
 
 Maud wondered at him more he had somehow so turned the 
 tables on her. " But she doesn't. It's exactly what she doesn't ; 
 she never has. And that he, poor wretch, was always wanting 
 
 " Was precisely what made her hold off? I grant it." He had 
 waked up. " But that was before she had killed him. Trust 
 me, she'll chatter now." 
 
292 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 This, for his companion, simply forced it out. " It wasn't she 
 who killed him. That, my dear, you know." 
 
 " You mean it was I who did ? Well then, my child, interview 
 me" And, with his hands in his pockets and his idea apparently 
 genuine, he smiled at her, by the grey river and under the high 
 lamps, with an effect strange and suggestive. " That would be 
 a go!" 
 
 " You mean " she jumped at it " you'll tell me what you 
 know?" 
 
 " Yes, and even what I've done ! But if you'll take it so for 
 the Papers. Oh, for the Papers only ! " 
 
 She stared. " You mean you want me to get it in ? " 
 
 " I don't 'want ' you to do anything, but I'm ready to help you, 
 ready to get it in for you, like a shot, myself, if it's a thing you 
 yourself want." 
 
 " A thing I want to give you away ? " 
 
 " Oh," he laughed, " I'm just now worth giving ! You'd really 
 do it, you know. And, to help you, here I am. It would be for 
 you only judge ! a leg up." 
 
 It would indeed, she really saw ; somehow, on the spot, she 
 believed it. But his surrender made her tremble. It wasn't a 
 joke she could give him away ; or rather she could sell him for 
 money. Money, thus, was what he offered her, or the value of 
 money, which was the same ; it was what he wanted her to have. 
 She was conscious already, however, that she could have it only 
 as he offered it, and she said therefore, but half-heartedly, " I'll 
 keep your secret." 
 
 He looked at her more gravely. "Ah, as a secret I can't 
 give it." Then he hesitated. " I'll get you a hundred pounds 
 for it." 
 
 "Why don't you," she asked, "get them for 5 7 ourself?" 
 
 " Because I don't care for myself. I care only for you." 
 
 She waited again. "You mean for my taking you?" And 
 then as he but looked at her : " How should I take you if I had 
 dealt with you that way ? " 
 
 " What do I lose by it," he said, " if, by our understanding of 
 the other day, since things have so turned out, you're not to take 
 me at all? So, at least, on my proposal, you get something 
 else." 
 
 " And what," Maud returned, "do you get ?" 
 
 "I don't 'get'; I lose. I have lost. So I don't matter." 
 The eyes with which she covered him at this might have signified 
 either that he didn't satisfy her or that his last word as his 
 word rather imposed itself. Whether or no, at all events, she 
 
THE PAPERS 293 
 
 decided that he still did matter. She presently moved again, and 
 they walked some minutes more. He had made her tremble, 
 and she continued to tremble. So unlike anything that had ever 
 come to her was, if seriously viewed, his proposal. The quality 
 of it, while she walked, grew intenser with each step. It struck 
 her as, when one came to look at it, unlike any offer any man 
 could ever have made or any woman ever have received ; and it 
 began accordingly, on the instant, to affect her as almost incon- 
 ceivably romantic, absolutely, in a manner, and quite out of the 
 blue, dramatic ; immeasurably more so, for example, than the 
 sort of thing she had come out to hear in the afternoon the sort 
 of thing that was already so far away. If he was joking it was 
 poor, but if he was serious it was, properly, sublime. And he 
 wasn't joking. He was, however, after an interval, talking again, 
 though, trembling still, she had not been attentive ; so that she 
 was unconscious of what he had said until she heard him once 
 more sound Mrs. Chorner's name. " If you don't, you know, 
 someone else will, and someone much worse. You told me she 
 likes you." She had at first no answer for him, but it presently 
 made her stop again. It was beautiful, if she would, but it was 
 odd this pressure for her to push at the very hour he himself 
 had renounced pushing. A part of the whole sublimity of his 
 attitude, so far as she was concerned, it clearly was ; since, 
 obviously, he was not now to profit by anything she might do. 
 She seemed to see that, as the last service he could render, he 
 wished to launch her and leave her. And that came out the 
 more as he kept it up. " If she likes you, you know, she really 
 wants you. Go to her as a friend." 
 
 " And bruit her abroad as one ? " Maud Blandy asked. 
 
 "Oh, as a friend from the Papers from them and for them, 
 and with just your half-hour to give her before you rush back to 
 them. Take it even oh, you can safely" the young man 
 developed "a little high with her. That's the way the real 
 way." And he spoke the next moment as if almost losing his 
 patience. " You ought by this time, you know, to understand." 
 
 There was something in her mind that it still charmed his 
 mastery of the horrid art. He could see, always, the superior 
 way, and it was as if, in spite of herself, she were getting the 
 truth from him. Only she didn't want the truth at least not 
 that one. " And if she simply, for my impudence, chucks me 
 out of window ? A short way is easy for them, you know, when 
 one doesn't scream or kick, or hang on to the furniture or the 
 banisters. And I usually, you see" she said it pensively 
 " don't I've always, from the first, had my retreat prepared for 
 
294 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 any occasion, and flattered myself that, whatever hand I might, 
 or mightn't, become at getting in, no one would ever be able so 
 beautifully to get out. Like a flash, simply. And if she does, 
 as I say, chuck me, it's you who fall to the ground." 
 
 He listened to her without expression, only saying " If you 
 feel for her, as you insist, it's your duty." And then later, as if 
 he had made an impression, "Your duty, I mean, to try. I 
 admit, if you will, that there's a risk, though I don't, with my 
 experience, feel it. Nothing venture, at any rate, nothing have ; 
 and it's all, isn't it? at the worst, in the day's work. There's 
 but one thing you can go on, but it's enough. The greatest 
 probability." 
 
 She resisted, but she was taking it in. " The probability that 
 she will throw herself on my neck ? " 
 
 " It will be either one thing or the other," he went on as if he 
 had not heard her. " She'll not receive you, or she will. But if 
 she does your fortune's made, and you'll be able to look higher 
 than the mere common form of donkey." She recognised the 
 reference to Marshal, but that was a thing she needn't mind now, 
 and he had already continued. " She'll keep nothing back. And 
 you mustn't either." 
 
 " Oh, won't I ? " Maud murmured. 
 
 "Then you'll break faith with her." 
 
 And, as if to emphasise it, he went on, though without leaving 
 her an infinite time to decide, for he looked at his watch as they 
 proceeded, and when they came, in their spacious walk, abreast 
 of another issue, where the breadth of the avenue, the expanses 
 of stone, the stretch of the river, the dimness of the distance, 
 seemed to isolate them, he appeared, by renewing their halt and 
 looking up afresh toward the town, to desire to speed her on her 
 way. Many things meanwhile had worked within her, but it was 
 not till she had kept him on past the Temple Station of the 
 Underground that she fairly faced her opportunity. Even then 
 too there were still other things, under the assault of which she 
 dropped, for the moment, Mrs. Chorner. " Did you really," she 
 asked, " believe he'd turn up alive ? " 
 
 With his hands in his pockets he continued to gloom at her. 
 "Up there, just now, with Marshal what did you take me as 
 believing ? " 
 
 " I gave you up. And I do give you. You're beyond me. 
 Only," she added, " I seem to have made you out since then as 
 really staggered. Though I don't say it," she ended, " to bear 
 hard upon you." 
 
 " Don't bear hard," said Howard Bight very simply. 
 
THE PAPERS 295 
 
 It moved her, for all she could have said ; so that she had for 
 a moment to wonder if it were bearing hard to mention some 
 features of the rest of her thought. If she was to have him, 
 certainly, it couldn't be without knowing, as she said to herself, 
 something something she might perhaps mitigate a little the 
 solitude of his penance by possessing. " There were moments 
 when I even imagined that, up to a certain point, you were still in 
 communication with him. Then I seemed to see that you lost 
 touch though you braved it out for me ; that you had begun 
 to be really uneasy and were giving him up. I seemed to see," 
 she pursued after a hesitation, "that it was coming home to 
 you that you had worked him up too high that you were feeling, 
 if I may say it, that you had better have stopped short. I mean 
 short of this!' 
 
 " You may say it," Bight answered. " I had better." 
 
 She looked at him a moment. " There was more of him than 
 you believed." 
 
 "There was more of him. And now," Bight added, looking 
 across the river, " here's all of him." 
 
 " Which you feel you have on your heart ? " 
 
 " I don't know where I have it." He turned his eyes to her. 
 " I must wait" 
 
 " For more facts ? " 
 
 " Well," he returned after a pause, " hardly perhaps for ' more ' 
 if with what we have this is all. But I've things to think out. 
 I must wait to see how I feel. I did nothing but what he wanted. 
 But we were behind a bolting horse whom neither of us could 
 have stopped." 
 
 " And he" said Maud, " is the one dashed to pieces." 
 
 He had his grave eyes on her. "Would you like it to have 
 been me ? " 
 
 " Of course not. But you enjoyed it the bolt; everything up 
 to the smash. Then, with that ahead, you were nervous." 
 
 " I'm nervous still," said Howard Bight. 
 
 Even in his unexpected softness there was something that 
 escaped her, and it made in her, just a little, for irritation. 
 "What I mean is that you enjoyed his terror. That was what 
 led you on." 
 
 " No doubt it was so grand a case. But do you call charging 
 me with it," the young man asked, " not bearing hard ? " 
 
 "No" she pulled herself up "it is. I don't charge you. 
 Only I feel how little about what has been, all the while, behind 
 you tell me. Nothing explains." 
 
 "Explains what?" 
 
296 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 "Why, his act." 
 
 He gave a sign of impatience. " Isn't the explanation what I 
 offered a moment ago to give you ? " 
 
 It came, in effect, back to her. " For use ? " 
 
 " For use." 
 
 "Only?" 
 
 "Only." It was sharp. 
 
 They stood a little, on this, face to face ; at the end of which 
 she turned away. "I'll go to Mrs. Chorner." And she was off 
 while he called after her to take a cab. It was quite as if she 
 were to come upon him, in his strange insistence, for the fare. 
 
 VIII 
 
 IF she kept to herself, from the morrow on, for three days, her 
 adoption of that course was helped, as she thankfully felt, by the 
 great other circumstance and the great public commotion under 
 cover of which it so little mattered what became of private 
 persons. It was not simply that she had her reasons, but she 
 couldn't during this time have descended again to Fleet Street 
 even had she wished, though she said to herself often enough 
 that her behaviour was rank cowardice. She left her friend alone 
 with what he had to face, since, as she found, she could in 
 absence from him a little recover herself. In his presence, the 
 night of the news, she knew she had gone to pieces, had yielded, 
 all too vulgarly, to a weakness proscribed by her original view. 
 Her original view had been that if poor Beadel, worked up, as 
 she inveterately kept seeing him, should embrace the tragic 
 remedy, Howard Bight wouldn't be able not to show as practically 
 compromised. He wouldn't be able not to smell of the wretched 
 man's blood, morally speaking, too strongly for condonations or 
 complacencies. There were other things, truly, that, during their 
 minutes on the Embankment, he had been able to do, but they 
 constituted just the sinister subtlety to which it was well that she 
 should not again, yet awhile, be exposed. They were of the 
 order from the safe summit of Maida Hill she could make it 
 out that had proved corrosive to the muddled mind of the 
 Frankfort fugitive, deprived, in the midst of them, of any honest 
 issue. Bight, of course, rare youth, had meant no harm; but 
 what was precisely queerer, what, when you came to judge, less 
 human, than to be formed for offence, for injury, by the mere 
 inherent play of the spirit of observation, of criticism, by the in- 
 extinguishable flame, in fine, of the ironic passion ? The ironic 
 passion, in such a world as surrounded one, might assert itself as 
 
THE PAPERS 297 
 
 half the dignity, the decency, of life ; yet, none the less, in cases 
 where one had seen it prove gruesomely fatal (and not to one's 
 self, which was nothing, but to others, even the stupid and the 
 vulgar) one was plainly admonished to well, stand off a little 
 and think. 
 
 This was what Maud Blandy, while the Papers roared and 
 resounded more than ever with the new meat flung to them, 
 tried to consider that she was doing ; so that the attitude held 
 her fast during the freshness of the event. The event grew, as 
 she had felt it would, with every further fact from Frankfort and 
 with every extra-special, and reached its maximum, inevitably, in 
 the light of comment and correspondence. These features, before 
 the catastrophe, had indubitably, at the last, flagged a little, but 
 they revived so prodigiously, under the well-timed shock, that, for 
 the period we speak of, the poor gentleman seemed, with a 
 continuance, with indeed an enhancement, of his fine old knack, 
 to have the successive editions all to himself. They had been 
 always of course, the Papers, very largely about him, but it was 
 not too much to say that at this crisis they were about nothing 
 else worth speaking of ; so that our young woman could but groan 
 in spirit at the direful example set to the emulous. She spared 
 an occasional moment to the vision of Mortimer Marshal, saw 
 him drunk, as she might have said, with the mere fragrance of the 
 wine of glory, and asked herself what art Bight would now use to 
 furnish him forth as he had promised. The mystery of Beadel's 
 course loomed, each hour, so much larger and darker that the 
 plan would have to be consummate, or the private knowledge 
 alike beyond cavil and beyond calculation, which should attempt 
 either to sound or to mask the appearances. Strangely enough, 
 none the less, she even now found herself thinking of her rash 
 colleague as attached, for the benefit of his surviving victim, to 
 this idea ; she went in fact so far as to imagine him half-upheld, 
 while the public wonder spent itself, by the prospect of the fun he 
 might still have with Marshal. This implied, she was not 
 unconscious, that his notion of fun was infernal, and would of 
 course be especially so were his knowledge as real as she supposed 
 it. He would inflate their foolish friend with knowledge that was 
 false and so start him as a balloon for the further gape of the 
 world. This was the image, in turn, that would yield the last 
 sport the droll career of the wretched man as wandering forever 
 through space under the apprehension, in time duly gained, that 
 the least touch of earth would involve the smash of his car. 
 Afraid, thus, to drop, but at the same time equally out of conceit 
 of the chill air of the upper and increasing solitudes to which he 
 
298 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 had soared, he would become such a diminishing speck, though 
 traceably a prey to wild human gyrations, as she might conceive 
 Bight to keep in view for future recreation. 
 
 It wasn't however the future that was actually so much in 
 question for them all as the immediately near present, offered to 
 her as the latter was in the haunting light of the inevitably un- 
 limited character of any real inquiry. The inquiry of the Papers, 
 immense and ingenious, had yet for her the saving quality that 
 she didn't take it as real. It abounded, truly, in hypotheses, 
 most of them lurid enough, but a certain ease of mind as to what 
 these might lead to was perhaps one of the advantages she owed 
 to her constant breathing of Fleet Street air. She couldn't quite 
 have said why, but she felt it wouldn't be the Papers that, pro- 
 ceeding from link to link, would arrive vindictively at Bight's 
 connection with his late client. The enjoyment of that consum- 
 mation would rest in another quarter, and if the young man were 
 as uneasy now as she thought he ought to be even while she 
 hoped he wasn't, it would be from the fear in his eyes of such 
 justice as was shared with the vulgar. The Papers held an inquiry, 
 but the Authorities, as they vaguely figured to her, would hold an 
 inquest; which was a matter even when international, compli- 
 cated and arrangeable, between Frankfort and London, only on 
 some system unknown to her more in tune with possibilities of 
 exposure. It was not, as need scarce be said, from the exposure 
 of Beadel that she averted herself; it was from the exposure of 
 the person who had made of Beadel's danger, Beadel's dread 
 whatever these really represented the use that the occurrence at 
 Frankfort might be shown to certify. It was well before her, at 
 all events, that if Howard Bight's reflections, so stimulated, kept 
 pace at all with her own, he would at the worst, or even at the 
 best, have been glad to meet her again. It was her knowing that 
 and yet lying low that she privately qualified as cowardice ; it was 
 the instinct of watching and waiting till she should see how great 
 the danger might become. And she had moreover another reason, 
 which we shall presently learn. The extra-specials meanwhile 
 were to be had in Kilburnia almost as soon as in the Strand ; the 
 little ponied and painted carts, tipped at an extraordinary angle, 
 by which they were disseminated, had for that matter, she 
 observed, never rattled up the Edgware Road at so furious a 
 rate. Each evening, it was true, when the flare of Fleet Street 
 would have begun really to smoke, she had, in resistance to old 
 habit, a little to hold herself; but for three successive days she 
 tided over that crisis. It was not till the fourth night that her 
 reaction suddenly declared itself, determined as it partly was by 
 
THE PAPERS 299 
 
 the latest poster that dangled free at the door of a small shop just 
 out of her own street. The establishment dealt in buttons, pins, 
 tape, and silver bracelets, but the branch of its industry she 
 patronised was that of telegrams, stamps, stationery, and the 
 " Edinburgh rock " offered to the appetite of the several small 
 children of her next-door neighbour but one. "The Beadel- 
 Muffet Mystery, Startling Disclosures, Action of the Treasury " 
 at these words she anxiously gazed; after which she decided. 
 It was as if from her hilltop, from her very housetop, to which 
 the window of her little room was contiguous, she had seen the 
 red light in the east. It had, this time, its colour. She went on, 
 she went far, till she met a cab, which she hailed, " regardless," 
 she felt, as she had hailed one after leaving Bight by the river. 
 " To Fleet Street " she simply said, and it took her that she felt 
 too back into life. 
 
 Yes, it was life again, bitter, doubtless, but with a taste, when, 
 having stopped her cab, short of her indication, in Covent Garden, 
 she walked across southward and to the top of the street in which 
 she and her friend had last parted with Mortimer Marshal. She 
 came down to their favoured pothouse, the scene of Bight's high 
 compact with that worthy, and here, hesitating, she paused, un- 
 certain as to where she had best look out. Her conviction, on 
 her way, had but grown ; Howard Bight would be looking out 
 that to a certainty ; something more, something portentous, had 
 happened (by her evening paper, scanned in the light of her little 
 shop window, she had taken instant possession of it), and this 
 would have made him know that she couldn't keep up what he 
 would naturally call her "game." There were places where they 
 often met, and the diversity of these not too far apart, however 
 would be his only difficulty. He was on the prowl, in fine, 
 with his hat over his eyes ; and she hadn't known, till this vision 
 of him came, what seeds of romance were in her soul. Romance, 
 the other night, by the river, had brushed them with a wing that 
 was like the blind bump of a bat, but that had been something on 
 his part, whereas this thought of bringing him succour as to a 
 Russian anarchist, to some victim of society or subject of extradi- 
 tion, was all her own, and was of this special moment. She saw 
 him with his hat over his eyes ; she saw him with his overcoat 
 collar turned up ; she saw him as a hunted hero cleverly drawn 
 in one of the serialising weeklies or, as they said, in some popular 
 " ply," and the effect of it was to open to her on the spot a sort of 
 happy sense of all her possible immorality. That was the romantic 
 sense, and everything vanished but the richness of her thrill. She 
 knew little enough what she might have to do for him, but her 
 
300 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 hope, as sharp as a pang, was that, if anything, it would put her 
 in danger too. The hope, as it happened then, was crowned on 
 the very spot ; she had never so felt in danger as when, just now, 
 turning to the glazed door of their cookshop, she saw a man, 
 within, close behind the glass, still, stiff and ominous, looking at 
 her hard. The light of the place was behind him, so that his face, 
 in the dusk of the side-street, was dark, but it was visible that she 
 showed for him as an object of interest. The next thing, of 
 course, she had seen more seen she could be such an object, in 
 such a degree, only to her friend himself, and that Bight had been 
 thus sure of her ; and the next thing after that had passed straight 
 in and been met by him, as he stepped aside to admit her, in 
 silence. He had his hat pulled down and, quite forgetfully, in 
 spite of the warmth within, the collar of his mackintosh up. 
 
 It was his silence that completed the perfection of these things 
 the perfection that came out most of all, oddly, after he had 
 corrected them by removal and was seated with her, in their 
 common corner, at tea, with the room almost to themselves and 
 no one to consider but Marshal's little man in the obvious wig 
 and the blue spectacles, the great authority on the inner life of the 
 criminal classes. Strangest of all, nearly, was it, that, though now 
 essentially belonging, as Maud felt, to this order, they were not 
 conscious of the danger of his presence. What she had wanted 
 most immediately to learn was how Bight had known; but he made, 
 and scarce to her surprise, short work of that. "I've known 
 every evening known, that is, that you've wanted to come ; and 
 I've been here every evening, waiting just there till I should see 
 you. It was but a question of time. To-night, however, I was 
 sure for there's, after all, something of me left. Besides, 
 
 besides ! " He had, in short, another certitude. " You've 
 
 been ashamed I knew, when I saw nothing come, that you 
 would be. But also that that would pass." 
 
 Maud found him, as she would have said, all there. "I've 
 been ashamed, you mean, of being afraid ? " 
 
 "You've been ashamed about Mrs. Chorner; that is, about 
 me. For that you did go to her I know." 
 
 "Have you been then yourself?" 
 
 " For what do you take me ? " He seemed to wonder. " What 
 had I to do with her except for you ? " And then before she 
 could say : " Didn't she receive you ? " 
 
 " Yes, as you said, she ' wanted ' me." 
 
 " She jumped at you ? " 
 
 "Jumped at me. She gave me an hour." 
 
 He flushed with an interest that, the next moment, had flared 
 
THE PAPERS 301 
 
 in spite of everything into amusement. " So that I was right, 
 in my perfect wisdom, up to the hilt ? " 
 
 " Up to the hilt. She took it from me." 
 
 "That the public wants her?" 
 
 " That it won't take a refusal. So she opened up." 
 
 "Overflowed?" 
 
 " Prattled." 
 
 "Gushed?" 
 
 "Well, recognised and embraced her opportunity. Kept me 
 there till midnight. Told me, as she called it, everything about 
 everything." 
 
 They looked at each other long on it, and it determined 
 in Bight at last a brave clatter of his crockery. "They're 
 stupendous ! " 
 
 " It's you that are," Maud replied, " to have found it out so. 
 You know them down to the ground." 
 
 " Oh, what I've found out ! " But it was more than he 
 
 could talk of then. "If I hadn't really felt sure, I wouldn't 
 so have urged you. Only now, if you please, I don't understand 
 your having apparently but kept her in your pocket." 
 
 "Of course you don't," said Maud Blandy. To which she 
 added, "And I don't quite myself. I only know that now that 
 I have her there nothing will induce me to take her out." 
 
 " Then you potted her, permit me to say," he answered, " on 
 absolutely false pretences." 
 
 "Absolutely ; which is precisely why I've been ashamed. 
 I made for home with the whole thing," she explained, "and 
 there, that night, in the hours till morning, when, turning it over, 
 I saw all it really was, I knew that I couldn't that I would rather 
 choose that shame, that of not doing for her what I had offered, 
 than the hideous honesty of bringing it out. Because, you see," 
 Maud declared, " it was well, it was too much." 
 
 Bight followed her with a sharpness ! "It was so good ? " 
 
 " Quite beautiful ! Awful!" 
 
 He wondered. " Really charming ? " 
 
 " Charming, interesting, horrible. It was true and it was the 
 whole thing. It was herself and it was him, all of him too. 
 Not a bit made up, but just the poor woman melted and over- 
 flowing, yet at the same time raging like the hot-water tap when 
 it boils. I never saw anything like it ; everything, as you 
 guaranteed, came out ; it has made me know things. So, to 
 have come down here with it, to have begun to hawk it, either 
 through you, as you kindly proposed, or in my own brazen 
 person, to the highest bidder well, I felt that I didn't have to, 
 
302 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 after all, if I didn't want to, and that if it's the only way I can 
 get money I would much rather starve." 
 
 ^1 see." Howard Bight saw all. "And that's why you're 
 asriamed ? " 
 
 She hesitated she was both so remiss and so firm. " I knew 
 that by my not coming back to you, you would have guessed, 
 have found me wanting; just, for that matter, as she has found 
 me. And I couldn't explain. I can't I can't to her. So that," 
 the girl went on, " I shall have done, so far as her attitude to me 
 was to be concerned, something more indelicate, something more 
 indecent, than if I had passed her on. I shall have wormed 
 it all out of her, and then, by not having carried it to market, 
 disappointed and cheated her. She was to have heard it cried 
 like fresh herring." 
 
 Bight was immensely taken. " Oh, beyond all doubt. You're 
 in a fix. You've played, you see, a most unusual game. The 
 code allows everything but that." 
 
 "Precisely. So I must take the consequences. I'm dis- 
 honoured, but I shall have to bear it. And I shall bear it by 
 getting out. Out, I mean, of the whole thing. I shall chuck 
 them." 
 
 " Chuck the Papers ? " he asked in his simplicity. 
 
 But his wonder, she saw, was overdone their eyes too frankly 
 met. " Damn the Papers ! " said Maud Blandy. 
 
 It produced in his sadness and weariness the sweetest smile 
 that had yet broken through. " We shall, between us, if we keep 
 it up, ruin them ! And you make nothing," he went on, " of 
 one's having at last so beautifully started you ? Your complaint," 
 he developed, "was that you couldn't get in. Then suddenly, 
 with a splendid jump, you are in. Only, however, to look round 
 you and say with disgust ' Oh, here 1 ' Where the devil do you 
 want to be ? " 
 
 "Ah, that's another question. At least," she said, "I can 
 scrub floors. I can take it out perhaps my swindle of Mrs. 
 Chorner," she pursued " in scrubbing hers" 
 
 He only, after this, looked at her a little. " She has written 
 to you ? " 
 
 " Oh, in high dudgeon. I was to have attended to the ' press- 
 cutting ' people as well, and she was to have seen herself, at the 
 furthest, by the second morning (that was day-before-yesterday) 
 all over the place. She wants to know what I mean." 
 
 " And what do you answer ? " 
 
 "That it's hard, of course, to make her understand, but 
 that I've felt her, since parting with her, simply to be too good." 
 
THE PAPERS 303 
 
 " Signifying by it, naturally," Bight amended, " that you've felt 
 yourself to be so." 
 
 " Well, that too if you like. But she was exquisite." 
 
 He considered. " Would she do for a ply ? " 
 
 "Oh God, no!" 
 
 "Then for a tile?" 
 
 " Perhaps," said Maud Blandy at last. 
 
 He understood, visibly, the shade, as well as the pause ; which, 
 together, held him a moment. But it was of something else he 
 spoke. " And you who had found they would never bite ! " 
 
 "Oh, I was wrong," she simply answered. "Once they've 
 tasted blood ! ' 
 
 "They want to devour," her friend laughed, "not only the bait 
 and the hook, but the line and the rod and the poor fisherman 
 himself? Except," he continued, "that poor Mrs. Chorner 
 hasn't yet even * tasted.' However," he added, " she obviously 
 will." 
 
 Maud's assent was full. " She'll find others. She'll appear." 
 
 He waited a moment his eye had turned to the door of 
 the street. "Then she must be quick. These are things of 
 the hour." 
 
 " You hear something ? " she asked, his expression having 
 struck her. 
 
 He listened again, but it was nothing. " No but it's somehow 
 in the air." 
 
 "What is?" 
 
 "Well, that she must hurry. She must get in. She must get 
 out." He had his arms on the table, and, locking his hands and 
 inclining a little, he brought his face nearer to her. "My sense 
 
 to-night's of an openness ! I don't know what's the matter. 
 
 Except, that is, that you're great." 
 
 She looked at him, not drawing back. "You know everything 
 so immeasurably more than you admit or than you tell me. You 
 mortally perplex and worry me." 
 
 It made him smile. " You're great, you're great," he only 
 repeated. "You know it's quite awfully swagger, what you've 
 done." 
 
 "What I haven't, you mean; what I never shall. Yes," she 
 added, but now sinking back "of course you see that too. 
 What dorit you see, and what, with such ways, is to be the end 
 of you?" 
 
 " You're great, you're great " he kept it up. " And I like you. 
 That's to be the end of me." 
 
 So, for a minute, they left it, while she came to the thing that, 
 
304 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 for the last half-hour, had most been with her. " What is the 
 * action/ announced to-night, of the Treasury ? " 
 
 " Oh, they've sent somebody out, partly, it would seem, at the 
 request of the German authorities, to take possession." 
 
 "Possession, you mean, of his effects?" 
 
 " Yes, and legally, administratively, of the whole matter." 
 
 " Seeing, you mean, that there's still more in it ? " 
 
 "Than meets the eye," said Bight, "precisely. But it won't 
 be till the case is transferred, as it presently will be, to this 
 country, that they will see. Then it will be funny." 
 
 "Funny?" Maud Blandy asked. 
 
 "Oh, lovely." 
 
 "Lovely for you?" 
 
 " Why not ? The bigger the whole thing grows, the lovelier." 
 
 " You've odd notions," she said, " of loveliness. Do you ex- 
 pect his situation won't be traced to you? Don't you suppose 
 you'll be forced to speak ? " 
 
 "To 'speak' ?" 
 
 " Why, if it is traced. What do you make, otherwise, of the 
 facts to-night ? " 
 
 " Do you call them facts ? " the young man asked. 
 
 " I mean the Astounding Disclosures." 
 
 "Well, do you only read your headlines? 'The most as- 
 tounding disclosures are expected' thafs the valuable text. 
 Is it" he went on, " what fetched you ? " 
 
 His answer was so little of one that she made her own scant. 
 " What fetched me is that I can't rest." 
 
 " No more can I," he returned. " But in what danger do you 
 think me?" 
 
 "In any in which you think yourself. Why not, if I don't 
 mean in danger of hanging ? " 
 
 He looked at her so that she presently took him for serious at 
 last which was different from his having been either worried or 
 perverse. "Of public discredit, you mean for having so un- 
 mercifully baited him ? Yes," he conceded with a straightness 
 that now surprised her, " I've thought of that. But how can the 
 baiting be proved ? " 
 
 "If they take possession of his effects won't his effects be 
 partly his papers, and won't they, among them, find letters from 
 you, and won't your letters show it ? " 
 
 "Well, show what?" 
 
 "Why, the frenzy to which you worked him and thereby 
 your connection." 
 
 " They won't show it to dunderheads." 
 
THE PAPERS 305 
 
 " And are they all dunderheads ? " 
 
 " Every mother's son of them where anything so beautiful is 
 concerned." 
 
 11 Beautiful ? " Maud murmured. 
 
 "Beautiful, my letters are gems of the purest ray. I'm 
 covered." 
 
 She let herself go she looked at him long. "You're a 
 wonder. But all the same," she added, "you don't like it." 
 
 "Well, I'm not sure." Which clearly meant, however, that he 
 almost was, from the way in which, the next moment, he had 
 exchanged the question for another. " You haven't anything to 
 tell me of Mrs. Chorner's explanation ? " 
 
 Oh, as to this, she had already considered and chosen. 
 "What do you want of it when you know so much more? So 
 much more, I mean, than even she has known." 
 
 " Then she hasn't known ? " 
 
 "There you are! What," asked Maud, "are you talking 
 about ? " 
 
 She had made him smile, even though his smile was percep- 
 tibly pale; and he continued. "Of what was behind. Behind 
 any game of mine. Behind everything." 
 
 " So am I then talking of that. No," said Maud, " she hasn't 
 known, and she doesn't know I judge, to this hour. Her ex- 
 planation therefore doesn't bear upon that. It bears upon some- 
 thing else." 
 
 "Well, my dear, on what?" 
 
 He was not, however, to find out by simply calling her his 
 dear; for she had not sacrificed the reward of her interview in 
 order to present the fine flower of it, unbribed, even to him. 
 " You know how little you've ever told me, and you see how, at 
 this instant, even while you press me to gratify you, you give me 
 nothing. I give," she smiled yet not a little flushed "nothing 
 for nothing." 
 
 He showed her he felt baffled, but also that she was perverse. 
 "What you want of me is what, originally, you wouldn't hear of: 
 anything so dreadful, that is, as his predicament must be. You 
 saw that to make him want to keep quiet he must have something 
 to be ashamed of, and that was just what, in pity, you positively 
 objected to learning. You've grown," Bight smiled, " more inter- 
 ested since." 
 
 " If I have," said Maud, " it's because you have. Now, at 
 any rate, I'm not afraid." 
 
 He waited a moment. "Are you very sure?" 
 
 " Yes, for my mystification is greater at last than my delicacy. 
 
306 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 I don't know till I do know " and she expressed this even with 
 difficulty " what it has been, all the while, that it was a question 
 of, and what, consequently, all the while, we've been talking 
 about." 
 
 "Ah, but why should you know?" the young man inquired. 
 " I can understand your needing to, or somebody's needing to, if 
 we were in a ply, or even, though in a less degree, if we were in 
 a tile. But since, my poor child, we're only in the delicious 
 muddle of life itself ! " 
 
 "You may have all the plums of the pudding, and I nothing 
 but a mouthful of cold suet ? " Maud pushed back her chair ; 
 she had taken up her old gloves ; but while she put them on she 
 kept in view both her friend and her grievance. "I don't 
 believe," she at last brought out, "that there is, or that there 
 ever was, anything." 
 
 " Oh, oh, oh ! " Bight laughed. 
 
 "There's nothing," she continued, "'behind.' There's no 
 horror." 
 
 "You hold, by that," said Bight, "that the poor man's deed 
 is all me ? That does make it, you see, bad for me." 
 
 She got up and, there before him, finished smoothing her 
 creased gloves. "Then we are if there's such richness in a 
 ply." 
 
 " Well, we are not, at all events so far as we ourselves are 
 concerned the spectators." And he also got up. "The 
 spectators must look out for themselves." 
 
 " Evidently, poor things ! " Maud sighed. And as he still 
 stood as if there might be something for him to come from her, 
 she made her attitude clear which was quite the attitude now of 
 tormenting him a little. "If you know something about him 
 which she doesn't, and also which / don't, she knows something 
 about him as I do too which you don't." 
 
 " Surely : when it's exactly what I'm trying to get out of you. 
 Are you afraid /'//sell it?" 
 
 But even this taunt, which she took moreover at its worth, 
 didn't move her. "You definitely then won't tell me?" 
 
 "You mean that if I will you'll tell me?" 
 
 She thought again. "Well yes. But on that condition alone." 
 
 " Then you're safe," said Howard Bight. " I can't, really, my 
 dear, tell you. Besides, if it's to come out ! " 
 
 " I'll wait in that case till it does. But I must warn you," she 
 added, " that my facts won't come out." 
 
 He considered. " Why not, since the rush at her is probably 
 even now being made ? Why not, if she receives others ? " 
 
THE PAPERS 307 
 
 Well, Maud could think too. "She'll receive them, but they 
 won't receive her. Others are like your people dunderheads. 
 Others won't understand, won't count, won't exist." And she 
 moved to the door. " There are no others." Opening the door, 
 she had reached the street with it, even while he replied, over- 
 taking her, that there were certainly none such as herself; but 
 they had scarce passed out before her last remark was, to their 
 somewhat disconcerted sense, sharply enough refuted. There 
 was still the other they had forgotten, and that neglected 
 quantity, plainly in search of them and happy in his instinct of 
 the chase, now stayed their steps in the form of Mortimer 
 Marshal. 
 
 IX 
 
 HE was coming in as they came out ; and his "I hoped I might 
 find you," an exhalation of cool candour that they took full in 
 the face, had the effect, the next moment, of a great soft carpet, 
 all flowers and figures, suddenly unrolled for them to walk upon 
 and before which they felt a scruple. Their ejaculation, Maud 
 was conscious, couldn't have passed for a welcome, and it 
 wasn't till she saw the poor gentleman checked a little, in turn, 
 by their blankness, that she fully perceived how interesting they 
 had just become to themselves. His face, however, while, in their 
 arrest, they neither proposed to re-enter the shop with him nor 
 invited him to proceed with them anywhere else his face, gaping 
 there, for Bight's promised instructions, like a fair receptacle, 
 shallow but with all the capacity of its flatness, brought back so to 
 our young woman the fond fancy her companion had last excited 
 in him that he profited just a little and for sympathy in spite 
 of his folly by her sense that with her too the latter had some- 
 how amused himself. This placed her, for the brief instant, in a 
 strange fellowship with their visitor's plea, under the impulse of 
 which, without more thought, she had turned to Bight. "Your 
 eager claimant," she, however, simply said, " for the opportunity 
 now so beautifully created." 
 
 "I've ventured," Mr. Marshal glowed back, "to come and 
 remind you that the hours are fleeting." 
 
 Bight had surveyed him with eyes perhaps equivocal. " You're 
 afraid someone else will step in ? " 
 
 "Well, with the place so tempting and so empty ! " 
 
 Maud made herself again his voice. " Mr. Marshal sees it 
 empty itself perhaps too fast." 
 
 He acknowledged, in his large, bright way, the help afforded 
 
308 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 him by her easy lightness. " I do want to get in, you know, 
 before anything happens." 
 
 " And what," Bight inquired, " are you afraid may happen ? " 
 
 " Well, to make sure," he smiled, " I want myself, don't you 
 see, to happen first." 
 
 Our young woman, at this, fairly fell, for her friend, into his 
 sweetness. " Do let him happen ! " 
 
 " Do let me happen ! " Mr. Marshal followed it up. 
 
 They stood there together, where they had paused, in their 
 strange council of three, and their extraordinary tone, in connec- 
 tion with their number, might have marked them, for some passer 
 catching it, as persons not only discussing questions supposedly 
 reserved for the Fates, but absolutely enacting some encounter 
 of these portentous forces. " Let you let you ? " Bight gravely 
 echoed, while on the sound, for the moment, immensities might 
 have hung. It was as far, however, as he was to have time to 
 speak, for even while his voice was in the air another, at first 
 remote and vague, joined it there on an ominous note and hushed 
 all else to stillness. It came, through the roar of thoroughfares, 
 from the direction of Fleet Street, and it made our interlocutors 
 exchange an altered look. They recognised it, the next thing, as 
 the howl, again, of the Strand, and then but an instant elapsed 
 before it flared into the night. " Return of Beadel-Muffet ! 
 Tremenjous Sensation ! " 
 
 Tremenjous indeed, so tremenjous that, each really turning as 
 pale with it as they had turned, on the same spot, the other time 
 and with the other news, they stood long enough stricken and 
 still for the cry, multiplied in a flash, again to reach them. 
 They couldn't have said afterwards who first took it up. " Re- 
 turn ?" 
 
 " From the Dead I say / " poor Marshal piercingly quavered. 
 
 "Then he hasn't been ?" Maud gasped it with him at 
 
 Bight. 
 
 But that genius, clearly, was not less deeply affected. " He's 
 alive?" he breathed in a long, soft wail in which admiration 
 appeared at first to contend with amazement and then the sense 
 of the comic to triumph over both. Howard Bight uncon- 
 trollably it might have struck them as almost hysterically 
 laughed. 
 
 The others could indeed but stare. "Then who's dead?" 
 piped Mortimer Marshal. 
 
 "I'm afraid, Mr. Marshal, that^w are," the young man returned, 
 more gravely, after a minute. He spoke as if he saw how dead. 
 
 Poor Marshal was lost. " But someone was killed ! " 
 
THE PAPERS 309 
 
 
 
 "Someone undoubtedly was, but Beadel somehow has sur- 
 vived it." 
 
 "Has he, then, been playing the game ?" It baffled 
 
 comprehension. 
 
 Yet it wasn't even that what Maud most wondered. " Have 
 you all the while really known ? " she asked of Howard Bight 
 
 He met it with a look that puzzled her for the instant, but 
 that she then saw to mean, half with amusement, half with 
 sadness, that his genius was, after all, simpler. " I wish I had. 
 I really believed." 
 
 "All along?" 
 
 " No ; but after Frankfort," 
 
 She remembered things. "You haven't had a notion this 
 evening ? " 
 
 " Only from the state of my nerves." 
 
 " Yes, your nerves must be in a state ! " And somehow now 
 she had no pity for him. It was almost as if she were, frankly, 
 disappointed. " /," she then boldly said, " didn't believe." 
 
 " If you had mentioned that then," Marshal observed to her, 
 " you would have saved me an awkwardness." 
 
 But Bight took him up. " She did believe so that she might 
 punish me." 
 
 "Punish you ?" 
 
 Maud raised her hand at her friend. "He doesn't under- 
 stand." 
 
 He was indeed, Mr. Marshal, fully pathetic now. "No, I 
 don't understand. Not a wee bit." 
 
 " Well," said Bight kindly, " we none of us do. We must give 
 it up." 
 
 "You think /really must ?" 
 
 " You, sir," Bight smiled, " most of all. The places seem so 
 taken." 
 
 His client, however, clung. " He won't die again ? " 
 
 " If he does he'll again come to life. He'll never die. Only 
 we shall die. He's immortal." 
 
 He looked up and down, this inquirer ; he listened to the howl 
 of the Strand, not yet, as happened, brought nearer to them by 
 one of the hawkers. And yet it was as if, overwhelmed by his 
 lost chance, he knew himself too weak even for their fond aid. 
 He still therefore appealed. " Will this be a boom for him ? " 
 
 " His return ? Colossal. For fancy ! it was exactly what we 
 talked of, you remember, the other day, as the ideal. I mean," 
 Bight smiled, "for a man to be lost, and yet at the same 
 time " 
 
310 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " To be found ? " poor Marshal too hungrily mused. 
 
 "To be boomed," Bight continued, "by his smash and yet 
 never to have been too smashed to know how he was booming." 
 
 It was wonderful for Maud too. " To have given it all up, and 
 yet to have it all." 
 
 " Oh, better than that," said her friend : " to have more than 
 all, and more than you gave up. Beadel," he was careful to 
 explain to their companion, " will have more." 
 
 Mr. Marshal struggled with it. " More than if he were 
 dead?" 
 
 " More," Bight laughed, " than if he weren't ! It's what you 
 would have liked, as I understand you, isn't it? and what you 
 would have got. It's what /would have helped you to." 
 
 " But who then," wailed Marshal, " helps him ? " 
 
 " Nobody. His star. His genius." 
 
 Mortimer Marshal glared about him as for some sign of such 
 aids in his own sphere. It embraced, his own sphere too, the 
 roaring Strand, yet mystification and madness ! it was with 
 Beadel the Strand was roaring. A hawker, from afar, at sight of 
 the group, was already scaling the slope. "Ah, but how the 
 devil ?" 
 
 Bight pointed to this resource. " Go and see." 
 
 "But don't you want them?" poor Marshal asked as the others 
 retreated. 
 
 " The Papers ? " They stopped to answer. " No, never again. 
 We've done with them. We give it up." 
 
 " I mayn't again see you ? " 
 
 Dismay and a last clutch were in Marshal's face, but Maud, 
 who had taken her friend's meaning in a flash, found the word to 
 meet them. "We retire from business." 
 
 With which they turned again to move in the other sense, 
 presenting their backs to Fleet Street. They moved together up 
 the rest of the hill, going on in silence, not arrested by another 
 little shrieking boy, not diverted by another extra-special, not 
 pausing again till, at the end of a few minutes, they found them- 
 selves in the comparative solitude of Covent Garden, encumbered 
 with the traces of its traffic, but now given over to peace. The 
 howl of the Strand had ceased, their client had vanished for- 
 ever, and from the centre of the empty space they could look up 
 and see stars. One of these was of course Beadel-Muffet's, and 
 the consciousness of that, for the moment, kept down any 
 arrogance of triumph. He still hung above them, he ruled, 
 immortal, the night ; they were far beneath, and he now trans- 
 cended their world ; but a sense of relief, of escape, of the light, 
 
THE PAPERS 311 
 
 still unquenched, of their old irony, made them stand there face 
 to face. There was more between them now than there had 
 ever been, but it had ceased to separate them, it sustained them 
 in fact like a deep water on which they floated closer. Still, 
 however, there was something Maud needed. " It had been all 
 the while worked?" 
 
 "Ah, not, before God since I lost sight of him by me." 
 
 "Then by himself?" 
 
 "I dare say. But there are plenty for him. He's beyond 
 me." 
 
 "But you thought," she said, " it would be so. You thought," 
 she declared, " something." 
 
 Bight hesitated. " I thought it would be great if he could. 
 And as he could why, it is great. But all the same I too was 
 sold. I am sold. That's why I give up." 
 
 "Then it's why /do. We must do something," she smiled at 
 him, " that requires less cleverness." 
 
 " We must love each other," said Howard Bight. 
 
 " But can we live by that ? " 
 
 He thought again ; then he decided. " Yes." 
 
 "Ah," Maud amended, "we must be 'littery.' We've now got 
 stuff." 
 
 " For the dear old ply, for the rattling good tile ? Ah, they 
 take better stuff than this though this too is good." 
 
 " Yes," she granted on reflection, " this is good, but it has bad 
 holes. Who was the dead man in the locked hotel room ? " 
 
 " Oh, I don't mean that. That," said Bight, " he'll splendidly 
 explain." 
 
 "But how?" 
 
 " Why, in the Papers. To-morrow." 
 
 Maud wondered. " So soon ? " 
 
 " If he returned to-night, and it's not yet ten o'clock, there's 
 plenty of time. It will be in all of them while the universe 
 waits. He'll hold us in the hollow of his hand. His chance is 
 just there. And there," said the young man, " will be his 
 greatness." 
 
 " Greater than ever then ? " 
 
 "Quadrupled." 
 
 She followed ; then it made her seize his arm. "Goto him ! " 
 
 Bight frowned. " ' Go ' ? " 
 
 " This instant. You explain ! " 
 
 He understood, but only to shake his head. "Never again. 
 I bow to him." 
 
 Well, she after a little understood; but she thought again. 
 
312 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " You mean that the great hole is that he really had no reason, 
 no funk ?" 
 
 " I've wondered," said Howard Bight. 
 
 "Whether he had done anything to make publicity em- 
 barrassing ? " 
 
 " I've wondered," the young man repeated. 
 
 " But I thought you knew ! " 
 
 " So did I. But I thought also I knew he was dead. How- 
 ever," Bight added, " hell explain that too." 
 
 "To-morrow?" 
 
 " No as a different branch. Say day after." 
 
 " Ah, then," said Maud, " if he explains ! " 
 
 " There's no hole ? I don't know ! " and it forced from him 
 at last a sigh. He was impatient of it, for he had done with it ; 
 it would soon bore him. So fast they lived. " It will take," he 
 only dropped, " much explaining." 
 
 His detachment was logical, but she looked a moment at his 
 sudden weariness. "There's always, remember, Mrs. Chorner." 
 
 " Oh yes, Mrs. Chorner ; we luckily invented her" 
 
 "Well, if she drove him to his death ?" 
 
 Bight, with a laugh, caught at it. " Is that it ? Did she drive 
 him?" 
 
 It pulled her up, and, though she smiled, they stood again, a 
 little, as on their guard. " Now, at any rate," Maud simply said 
 at last, " she'll marry him. So you see how right I was." 
 
 With a preoccupation that had grown in him, however, he had 
 already lost the thread. " How right ? " 
 
 " Not to sell my Talk." 
 
 " Oh yes," he remembered. " Quite right." But it all came 
 to something else. " Whom will you marry ? " 
 
 She only, at first, for answer, kept her eyes on him. Then she 
 turned them about the place and saw no hindrance, and then, 
 further, bending with a tenderness in which she felt so trans- 
 formed, so won to something she had never been before, that she 
 might even, to other eyes, well have looked so, she gravely kissed 
 him. After which, as he took her arm, they walked on together. 
 " That, at least," she said, "we'll put in the Papers." 
 
 THE END 
 
 Plymouth : W. Brcndon and Son, Printers. 
 
A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS 
 
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 FEBRUARY 1903 
 
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 THE CORONATION OF EDWARD VII. By J. E. C. 
 
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FICTION 
 
 33 
 
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34 
 
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FICTION 
 
 37 
 
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FICTION 
 
 39 
 
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 MESSRS. METHUEN are now publishing a cheaper issue of some of their popular 
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 Andrew Balfour. 
 
 TO ARMS! 
 
 Jane Barlow. 
 
 A CREEL OF IRISH STORIES. 
 
 E. F. Benson. 
 
 THE VINTAGE. 
 
 J. Bloundelle-Burton. 
 IN THE DAY OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 Mrs. Caffyn (Iota). 
 
 ANN-E MAULEVERER. 
 
 Mrs. W. K Cliftord. 
 A FLASH OF SUMMER. 
 
 L. Cope Cornford. 
 SONS OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 Menie Muriel Dowie. 
 THE CROOK OF THE BOUGH. 
 
 Mrs. Dudeney. 
 THE THIRD FLOOR. 
 
 Sara Jeannette Duncan. 
 
 A VOYAGE OF CONSOLATION. 
 
 G. ManviUe Fenn. 
 
 THE STAR GAZERS. 
 
 Jane H. Findlater. 
 
 RACHEL. 
 
 Jane H. and Mary Findlater. 
 
 TALES THAT ARE TOLD. 
 
 J. S. Fletcher. 
 
 THE PATHS OF THE PRUDENT. 
 
 Mary Gaunt. 
 
 KIRKHAM'S FIND. 
 
 Robert Hichens. 
 
 BYEWAYS. 
 
MESSRS. METHUEN'S CATALOGUE 
 
 Emily Lawless. 
 HURRISH. 
 MAELCHO. 
 
 W. E. Norris. 
 
 MATTHEW AUSTIN. 
 
 Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 SIR ROBERT'S FORTUNE. 
 
 Mary A. Owen. 
 
 THE DAUGHTER OF ALOUETTE. 
 
 Mary L. Tendered. 
 
 AN ENGLISHMAN. 
 
 Morley Roberts. 
 THE PLUNDERERS. 
 
 R. N. Stephens. 
 AN ENEMY TO THE KING. 
 
 Mrs. Walford. 
 SUCCESSORS TO THE TITLE. 
 
 Percy White. 
 A PASSIONATE PILGRIM. 
 
 tor 
 
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 ONLY A GUARD-ROOM DOG. By Edith E. Cuthell. 
 THE DOCTOR OF THE JULIET. By Harry Colling- 
 
 wood. 
 MASTER ROCKAFELLAR'S VOYAGE. By W. Clark 
 
 Russell. 
 
 be 
 
 SYD BELTON : Or, the Boy who would not go to Sea 
 
 By G. Manville Perm. 
 
 THE RED GRANGE. By Mrs. Molesworth. 
 THE SECRET OF MADAME DE MONLUC. By the 
 
 Author of Mdle. Mori.' 
 DUMPS. By Mrs. Parr. 
 A GIRL OF THE PEOPLE. By L. T. Meade. 
 HEPSY GIPSY. By L. T. Meade. 2s. f>d. 
 
 THE HONOURABLE Miss. By L. T. Meade. 
 
 MESSRS. METHUEN are issuing under the above general title a Monthly Series 
 of Novels by popular authors at thejDrice of Sixpence. Each number is as long as 
 the average Six Shilling Novel, 
 follows : 
 
 The first numbers of ' THE NOVELIST ' are as 
 
 I. DEAD MEN TELL NO; TALES. By E. w. 
 
 Hornung. 
 
 II. JENNIE BAXTER, JOURNALIST. By Robert 
 Barr. 
 
 III. THE INCA'S TREASURE. By Ernest Glanville. 
 
 IV. A SON OF THE STATE. By W. Pett Ridge. 
 V. FURZE BLOOM. By S. Baring-Gould. 
 
 VI. BUNTER'S CRUISE. By C. Gleig. 
 
 VII. THE GAY DECEIVERS. By Arthur Moore. 
 VIII. PRISONERS OF WAR. By A. Boyson Weekes. 
 IX. Out of print. 
 X. VELDT AND LAAGER: Tales of the Transvaal. 
 
 By E. S. Valentine. 
 XL THE NIGGER KNIGHTS. By F. Norreys 
 
 Connel. 
 XII. A MARRIAGE AT SEA. By w. Clark Russell. 
 
 XIII. THE POMP OF THE LAVILETTES. By 
 
 Gilbert Parker. 
 
 XIV. A MAN OF MARK. By Anthony Hope. 
 XV. THE CARISSIMA. By Lucas Malet. 
 
 XVI. THE LADY'S WALK. By Mrs. Oliphant. 
 XVII. DERRICK VAUGHAN. By Edna Lyall. 
 XVIII. IN THE MIDST OF ALARMS. By Robert 
 Barr. 
 
 .flfcetbuen's 
 
 THE MATABELE CAMPAIGN. By Major-General 
 
 Baden-Powell. 
 
 THE DOWNFALL OF PREMPEH. By Major-General 
 Baden-Powell. 
 
 MY DANISH SWEETHEART. By w. Clark Russell. 
 
 IN THE ROAR OF THE SEA. By S. Baring- 
 Gould. 
 
 PEGGY OF THE BARTONS. By B. M. Croker. 
 
 THE GREEN GRAVES OF BALGOWRIE. By Jane 
 H. Findlater. 
 
 THE STOLEN BACILLUS. By H. G. Wells. 
 
 MATTHEW AUSTIN. By W. E. Norris. 
 
 THE CONQUEST OF LONDON. By Dorothea 
 Gerard. 
 
 A VOYAGE OF CONSOLATION. By Sara J. Duncan. 
 
 THE MUTABLE MANY. By Robert Barr. 
 
 BEN HUR. By General Lew Wallace. 
 
 SIR ROBERT'S FORTUNE. By Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 XIX. HIS GRACE. By W. E. Norris. 
 XX. DODO. By E. F. Benson. 
 XXI. CHEAP JACK ZITA. By S. Baring-Gould. 
 XXII. WHEN VALMOND CAME 7-0 PONTIAC. By 
 Gilbert Parker. 
 
 XXIII. THE HUMAN BOY. By Eden Phillpotts. 
 
 XXIV. THE CHRONICLES OF COUNT ANTONIO. 
 
 By Anthony Hope. 
 XXV. BY STROKE OF SWORD. By Andrew 
 
 Balfour. 
 
 XXVI. KITTY ALONE. By S. Baring-Gould. 
 XXVII. GILES INGILBY. By W. E. Norris. 
 XXVIII. URITH. By S. Baring-Gould. 
 XXIX. THE TOWN TRAVELLER. By George 
 
 Gissing. 
 
 XXX. MR. SMITH. By Mrs. Walford. 
 XXXI. A CHANGE OF AIR. By Anthony Hope. 
 XXXII. THE KLOOF BRIDE. By Ernest Glanville 
 
 XXXIII. ANGEL. By B. M. Croker. 
 
 XXXIV. A COUNSEL OF PERFECTION. By Lucas 
 
 Malet. 
 XXXV. THE BABY'S GRANDMOTHER. By Mrs. 
 
 L. B. Walford. 
 XXXVI. THE COUNTESS TEKLA. By Robert Barr 
 
 OLibrarg 
 
 THE FAIR GOD. By General Lew Wallace. 
 
 CLARISSA FURIOSA. By W. E. Norris. 
 
 CRANFORD. By Mrs. Gaskell. 
 
 NOEMI. By S. Baring-Gould. 
 
 THE THRONE OF DAVID. By J. H. Ingr.iham. 
 
 ACROSS THE SALT SEAS. By J. Bloundelle 
 
 Burton. 
 
 THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. By George Eliot. 
 PETER SIMPLE. By Captain Marryat. 
 MARY BARTON. By Mrs. Gaskell. 
 PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. By Jane Austen. 
 NORTH AND SOUTH. By Mrs. Gaskell. 
 JACOB FAITHFUL. By Captain Marryat. 
 SHIRLEY. By Charlotte Bronte. 
 FAIRY TALES RE- TOLD. By S. Baring Gould. 
 THE TRUE HISTORY OF JOSHUA DAVIDSON. By 
 
 Mrs. Lynn Linton. 
 
9 O 
 
it if