CASE 
 =8= 
 
tlje H>ame Sltttfjor 
 
 THE SACRED FOUNT. 
 
 $1.50. 
 
 THE WINGS OF THE 
 DOVE. 2 vols. $2.50. 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS 
 1903 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS 
 
 Published, February, 1903 
 
-> *C II 
 
 48- 
 :63 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 BROKEN WINGS i 
 
 THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 24 
 
 THE Two FACES 50 
 
 THE TONE OF TIME 68 
 
 THE SPECIAL TYPE . 93 
 
 MRS. MEDWIN . 116 
 
 FLICKERBRIDGE ......... 143 
 
 THE STORY IN IT . . . . . . . .168 
 
 THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE . ... 189 
 
 THE BIRTHPLACE 245 
 
 THE PAPERS 312 
 
 A rr 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 BROKEN WINGS 
 
 /CONSCIOUS as he was of what was between 
 V^ them, though 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 recognising it as one 
 of the sharp " notes " of Mundham that, should the 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 rep 
 resentatives 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 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 some 
 body 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 particular 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 
 
 2 
 
BROKEN WINGS 
 
 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 understood 
 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 proces 
 sion of the hours, the one dearest to our friend, whQ 
 on such occasions interposed it, whenever 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 all seated aloft in 
 strength, robed with summer and crowned with suc 
 cess, 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 
 
 3 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 for dinner it would be a shame to him not to have ad 
 dressed 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 were ladies in the lower gar 
 den, from which the sound of voices, faint, but, as al 
 ways 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 ab 
 surd. 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 an 
 other 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 Excel 
 lency 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 meas 
 ure 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 communicated 
 
 4 
 
BROKEN WINGS 
 
 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. 
 
 II 
 
 SHE, on her side, had her private consciousness, and 
 quite as full a one, doubtless, as he, but with the ad 
 vantage 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 bewilder 
 ing, and however interesting she might, through cer 
 tain 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 al 
 ready expressed to Mrs. Harvey a really informed en 
 thusiasm. She not only delighted in her numerous 
 books, which was a tribute the author had not infre 
 quently 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 sit 
 uation 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 effect 
 ually kept awake ; and at the end of half an hour they 
 
 5 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 vol 
 umes 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 incredu 
 lously 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 vol 
 umes 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, in that 
 case, is the use of success and celebrity and genius? 
 You have no success ? " She had looked almost awe 
 struck at this further confession of her friend. They 
 were face to face in a poor human crudity, which trans 
 formed 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. Har 
 vey 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 
 
 6 
 
BROKEN WINGS 
 
 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." 
 
 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 
 
 7 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 can you say that when you ve only to see how every 
 one likes and admires you? Just look at the Ambas 
 sador," 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 mo 
 tion the name of Stuart Straith, as to whom Lady 
 Claude confessed to an interest good-looking, dis 
 tinguished, " sympathetic," as he was that she could 
 really almost hate him for having done nothing what 
 ever 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?ttWhe?" 
 
 " 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 be 
 cause Lady Claude was naturally vague, but because 
 what was still visibly most vivid to her was her inde 
 pendent 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." 
 
 8 
 
BROKEN WINGS 
 
 Lady Claude earnestly followed. " His present po 
 sition? " 
 
 " 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 keep 
 ing himself ? " 
 
 " Oh, it s not for me," said Mrs. Harvey. 
 
 " 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 greatness, 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 
 remembers, three years ago, and the play is running 
 yet, a fact that may render strange the failure to be 
 
 9 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 widely conscious of which two persons in the audience 
 were guilty. It was not till afterward present either 
 to Mrs. Harvey or to Stuart Straith that The New Girl 
 was one of the greatest successes of modern times. In 
 deed 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 pre 
 dicament. 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 sub 
 sidence. " 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. 7 
 
 He looked about at the serried rows, the loaded gal 
 leries and the stuffed boxes, with recognitions and 
 nods ; and this made between them another pause, dur 
 ing which, while the music seemed perfunctory and the 
 bustle that, in a London audience, represents concen 
 tration increased, they felt how effectually, in the thick, 
 preoccupied medium, how extraordinarily, they were 
 together. 
 
 " Well, that second afternoon at Mundham, just be 
 fore 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 without interrupting, for our 
 friends, the sense of an evening of talk. They said 
 
 10 
 
BROKEN WINGS 
 
 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 some 
 how 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 
 thing even coherent 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 sur 
 prise, quite at one as to the special oddity of their hav 
 ing 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 judg 
 ment 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 with abruptness, taking no 
 
 ii 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 Mund- 
 ham in particular won t, for me, have survived that 
 visit for which it s to be pitied, isn t it ? It was a glit 
 tering 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 mid 
 dle-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 ex 
 plained 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 
 
 12 
 
BROKEN WINGS 
 
 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 min 
 utes 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. " Are you unhappy really? Haven t you 
 everything ? " 
 
 " 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 an 
 swered: " Mayn t I rather come there? " 
 
 " I shall be but too delighted." 
 
 It was said with promptness, even precipitation ; yet 
 the understanding, shortly after, appeared to have left 
 between them a certain awkwardness, and it was al 
 most 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 
 
 13 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 traceably what inspired something she said in the 
 draughty porch, after the performance, while the 
 footman of the friend, a fat, rich, immensely 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. Write 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 Lady 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. 
 
 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." 
 
BROKEN WINGS 
 
 " 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 something. " 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, hand 
 some, neat, with two or three pale tapestries and sev 
 eral 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 every 
 thing?" 
 
 " Oh no ; you mayn t by any means use everything. 
 You mayn t use half. Did I spoil your London Let 
 ter ? " he continued 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. 
 
 15 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 I do them wrong, and the people want such trash. Of 
 course they ll sack me." 
 
 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 indif 
 ferent 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. Noth 
 ing 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 for 
 got ; 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 enlightenment. 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. 
 
 16 
 
BROKEN WINGS 
 
 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 be 
 lieved 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 any 
 thing 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 ar 
 rived with a tea-tray, in arranging a place for which, 
 with the sequel of serving Mrs. Harvey, seating her 
 and seeing the youth again out of the room, some min 
 utes 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 per 
 fectly 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 ? " 
 
 17 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 His voice was so blank that at the sound of it, and 
 at something 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 mem 
 ories 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 " mov 
 ing " she had but just changed quarters ; and mean 
 while, as he came and went, mainly in the cold chamber 
 of his own past endeavour, which looked even to him 
 self 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 re 
 lief 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 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 comparatively small. Each had blun 
 dered, as sensitive souls of the " artistic temperament " 
 blunder, into a conception not only of the other s atti 
 tude, but of the other s material situation at the mo 
 ment, that had thrown them back on stupid secrecy, 
 where their estrangement had grown like an evil plant 
 
 18 
 
BROKEN WINGS 
 
 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 absurd- 
 est theory of the sort of career that, thanks to big 
 dealers and intelligent buyers, his gains would have 
 built up for him. It looked vulgar enough now, but 
 it had been grave enough then. His long, detached de 
 lusion about her " prices," at any rate, appeared to have 
 been more than matched by the strange stories occasion 
 ally 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 
 everything 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 under 
 mine 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 al 
 ways 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 under 
 stood 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 could 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 show- 
 
 19 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 ing her how he followed, 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 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 con 
 sidering 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 al 
 most 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 to 
 gether these two worn and baffled workers a won 
 derful 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 be 
 side 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 sim 
 plified rooms had its perfect image in the hollow show 
 of his ordered studio and his accumulated work. He 
 
 20 
 
BROKEN WINGS 
 
 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 knowl 
 edge 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. Disappointment 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 
 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 sur 
 renders and extinctions. 
 
 They went over the whole thing, remounted the 
 dwindling stream, reconstructed, explained, under 
 stood 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 backward, 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 explana- 
 
 21 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 tions 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 ap 
 peared 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 huge 
 ness .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? " 
 
 < Yes to keep up." 
 
 " And go again, for instance, do you mean, to Mund- 
 ham? We shall, thank heaven, never go again to 
 Mundham. The Mundhams are over." 
 
 " Nous n irons plus au bois ; 
 Les lauriers sont coup6s," 
 
 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 cer 
 tainly to use 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." 
 
 22 
 
BROKEN WINGS 
 
 " 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 ? " Standing there at her little high-perched win 
 dow, which overhung grey housetops, they let the con 
 sideration of this pass between them in a deep look, 
 as well as in a hush of which the intensity had some 
 thing commensurate. "If we re beaten!" she then 
 continued. 
 
 " 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 re 
 covered themselves enough to handle their agreement 
 more responsibly, the words in which they confirmed 
 it broke in sweetness as well as sadness from both to 
 gether : " 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. Mun- 
 den, who would really, by-the-way, be a story in her 
 self. She has a manner of her own of putting things, 
 and some of those she has put to me ! Her im 
 plication 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." 
 
 24 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 
 
 " 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 beauti 
 ful ?" 
 
 " 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 dif 
 ficult to express, " she hasn t done with it " 
 
 " I see," I laughed; " what she oughtn t! " 
 
 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 be 
 cause 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." 
 
 25 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 kins 
 woman 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 lady 
 ship 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? And she is oh, amazingly! Preservation 
 is scarce the word for the rare condition of her sur 
 face. 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; ren 
 der 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 
 
 26 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 
 
 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 absolutely favour 
 able. 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 particular 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 understand 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 admiration? " 
 
 " 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 com- 
 
 27 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 pletely now. " No ; I shouldn t indeed think it would 
 be easy to get another. But why is a succession of them 
 necessary to Lady Beldonald s existence ? " 
 
 " Can t you guess ? " Mrs. Munden looked deep, 
 yet impatient. " 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 contrast that must 
 be familiar to you artists; it s what a woman does 
 when she puts a band of black velvet under a pearl orna 
 ment 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? " 
 
 " 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 
 
 28 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 
 
 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. 
 
 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 
 
 29 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 me one day with the news that we were all right again 
 her sister-in-law was once more " suited." A cer 
 tain 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 unlimitedly good. 
 The position offered her by Lady Beldonald was, more 
 over, 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 al 
 ways 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 re 
 signedly to perform it. 
 
 The point of the communication had, however, been 
 that my sitter was again looking up and would doubt 
 less, 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 
 
 30 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 
 
 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 admira 
 tion in Outreau s expressive face as, at the end of 
 half an hour, he came up to me in his enthusiasm. 
 
 " Bonte divine, tnon 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. 
 Ou 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 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 from which more 
 of the room and of the scene was presented to her. 
 She appeared unnoticed and unknown, and I imme 
 diately 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, simulta 
 neously 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 " Ameri 
 can " having helped me I was in just such full pos 
 session 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 unpre- 
 sented. " All the same," Outreau went on, equally 
 held, " c est une tete a faire. 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 succes fou" 
 
 " Ah, thanks, my dear fellow," I was now quite in 
 a position to say; " she s the handsomest thing in Lon 
 don, 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, 
 
 32 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 
 
 for Lady Beldonald, 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, apolo 
 gising first for not having been more on the spot at 
 her arrival, but saying in the next breath uncontrolla 
 bly, " Why, my dear lady, it s a Holbein ! " 
 
 "A Holbein? What?" 
 
 " Why, the wonderful sharp old face so extraor 
 dinarily, consummately 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 distance im 
 measurably 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, is to * go for her. She also must sit for 
 me." 
 
 "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 expression. 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 con 
 fused. "Have you told her so?" she then quickly 
 asked, as if to soften the sound of her surprise. 
 
 33 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " Dear no, I ve but just noticed her Outreau a mo 
 ment 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 con 
 siders 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 something 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 sound 
 ing 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 ex 
 actly 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 yourself, my lady, if I may say so; 
 that s the way, with a long pin straight through your 
 body, I ve got you. And just so I ve got her." 
 
 34 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 
 
 All this, for reasons, had brought my guest to tier 
 feet ; but her eyes, while we talked, had never once fol 
 lowed the direction of mine. " You call her a Hol 
 bein?" 
 
 " Outreau did, and I of course immediately recog 
 nised 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 sup 
 posed ? " It had the ring of impatience ; never 
 theless, 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 per 
 fectly, 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 com 
 munities impenetrably 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 
 
 35 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 catas 
 trophe. The small case for so small a case had 
 made a great stride even before my little party sep 
 arated, 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 hav 
 ing 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 under 
 stood. 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 
 
 36 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 
 
 given her quickly " Why, she s a Holbein, you know," 
 she took it up, after a first fine vacancy, with an imme 
 diate abysmal " 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 had turned up, if I remember, early in the new 
 year, and her little wonderful career was in our par 
 ticular circle one of the features of the following sea 
 son. It was at all events for myself the most attach 
 ing ; it is not my fault if I am so put together as often 
 to find more life in situations obscure and subject to 
 interpretation than in the gross rattle of the fore 
 ground. 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 
 
 37 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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, jus 
 tice; 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, revelation 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 something 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 
 
 38 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 
 
 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 " on an understanding, and she was 
 not playing fair. She had broken the law of her ugli 
 ness and had turned beautiful on the hands of her em 
 ployer. 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 guaran 
 tee 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 Bel- 
 donald 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 feel it which I abundantly did; 
 and then not to conceal 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 
 
 39 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 w r as on the 
 prior theory, literally, that she had developed her ad 
 mirable dress, instinctively felicitous, always either 
 black or white, and a matter of rather severe squareness 
 and studied line. She was magnificently neat; every 
 thing she showed had a way of looking both old and 
 fresh ; and there was on every occasion the same pict 
 ure in her draped head draped in low-falling black 
 and the fine white plaits (of a painter s white, some 
 how) disposed on her chest. What had happened was 
 that these arrangements, determined by certain consid 
 erations, lent themselves in effect much better to cer 
 tain others. Adopted as a kind of refuge, they had 
 really only deepened her accent. It was singular, more 
 over, 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 meet 
 ing after the incident at my studio; with the effect, 
 however, only of leaving my friend at first to take me 
 
 40 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 
 
 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 Bel- 
 donald 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 al 
 ready 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 un 
 derstands without making Nina commit herself to any 
 thing vulgar. Women are never without ways for 
 doing such things both for communicating and re 
 ceiving 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 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 conscien- 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 tious. 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 anything. " 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 responsibility. 
 If we can t do for her positively more than Nina 
 does " 
 
 " We must let her alone? " My companion contin 
 ued 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 di 
 rectly 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 inter 
 locutress said, " that Nina will have made her a scene, 
 
 42 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 
 
 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, " wheth 
 er we want it or not, it s exactly what we shall see; 
 which is a reason the 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 doesn t 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 hither 
 to practically disinherited and give with an unex 
 pectedness 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 sud 
 den eloquence. " Oh, it will be beautiful! " 
 
 43 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 pan 
 orama 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 pressing 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. Noth 
 ing 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 
 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 precipi 
 tation 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 
 
 44 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 
 
 Beldonald, and did much, for the time, I divined, tow 
 ard 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 cer 
 tainly would have done so if Lady Beldonald hadn t; 
 and she never could mention the subject at all before 
 that personage. I can only describe the affair, natur 
 ally, from the outside, and heaven forbid indeed that 
 I should try too closely to reconstruct 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 convic 
 tion that, as a climax, her life at last was the price. 
 But while she lived, at least and it was with an in 
 tensity, 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 bitterness. There was, I think, scarce 
 a special success of her companion s at which she was 
 not personally present. Mrs. Munden s theory of 
 
 45 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 the silence in which all this would be muffled for 
 them was, none the less, and in abundance, confirmed 
 by our observations. 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 stu 
 pidity 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 mo 
 mentary 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 every 
 thing what was to happen a little later was so much 
 more than I could swallow. This was the disappear 
 ance 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 
 
 46 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 
 
 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 recognised 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, approached 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, 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, pro 
 digiously, her prettiness was distinct. Lady Beldon 
 ald had been magnificent had been almost intelligent. 
 
 47 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 re 
 corded Nina s proposal; and the turn of events since 
 then has not quickened my eagerness. Mrs. Munden 
 remained in correspondence Xvith Mrs. Brash to the 
 extent, that is, of three letters, each of which she 
 showed me. They so told, to our imagination, her ter 
 rible 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 mar 
 ket for Holbeins, and what had occurred was that the 
 poor old picture, banished from its museum and re 
 freshed 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, 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 
 
 48 
 
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 
 
 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 inten 
 tion ! 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 con 
 tent 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 an 
 nouncing 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 companion, 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 sprang to his feet and moved to the chim 
 ney-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 leav 
 ing the room, might still have caught the achieved 
 irony of her appeal to the gentleman into whose com 
 munion with her he had broken. " Why in the world 
 
 not ? What a way ! " she exclaimed, as Sut- 
 
 ton 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." 
 
 50 
 
THE TWO FACES 
 
 That s just it ; and sometimes you don t see them." 
 
 " Do you mean ever because of you? " she asked as 
 she touched into place a tendril of hair. " That s just 
 his impertinence, as to which I shall speak to him." 
 
 " Don t," said Shirley Sutton. " Never notice any 
 thing." 
 
 That s nice advice from you," she laughed, " who 
 notice everything ! " 
 
 " Ah, but I speak of nothing." 
 
 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 glanc 
 ing about, while she changed her place, partly for an 
 other 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 land 
 ing. 
 
 Sutton had to think an instant, and produced a 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " No " just as Lord Gwyther was again announced, 
 which gave an unexpectedness to the greeting offered 
 him a moment later by this personage 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 confirming a perception that his 
 lordship would be no, not at all, in general, em- 
 ,barrassed, only was now exceptionally and especially 
 agitated. As it is, for that matter, with Button s total 
 impression that we are particularly and almost exclu 
 sively 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 some 
 thing the least bit queer in her wonderful eyes; an 
 other was that if he had been recognised without the 
 least ground it was through a tension of nerves on the 
 part of his 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 
 
 52 
 
THE TWO FACES 
 
 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 man 
 aged 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 Wurtemberg from her mother, 
 Countess Kremnitz, on which, with the awful condi 
 tion 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 prac 
 tically spent her life over there." 
 
 " Oh, "I see." Then, after a slight pause, " Is Valda 
 her pretty name? " Mrs. Grantham asked. 
 
 53 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 use." 
 
 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 Lon 
 don 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 audi 
 tors 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 Lon 
 don " 
 
 " You thought, naturally, of me? " Mrs. Grantham 
 had listened with no sign but the faint flash just noted ; 
 now, however, she gave him the full light of her ex- 
 
 54 
 
THE TWO FACES 
 
 pressive face which immediately brought Shirley Sut- 
 ton, 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. 
 
 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 chal 
 lenged him on his " treatment " of her in the after 
 noon, 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 ad 
 vantage 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 ex 
 cuse. If in short he had in defiance of her particular 
 request left her alone with Lord Gwyther, it was sim 
 ply because the situation had suddenly turned so ex 
 citing that he had fairly feared the contagion of it 
 the temptation of its making him, most improperly, 
 put in his word. 
 
 55 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 They could now talk of these things at their ease. 
 Other couples, ensconced and scattered, enjoyed the 
 same privilege, and Sutton 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, en 
 gaged. 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 ab 
 solute 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 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 extraordinary 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? " 
 
 56 
 
THE TWO FACES 
 
 " 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 unex 
 pected?" 
 
 Her companion thought. " Prepared in some de 
 gree, but confirmed by the sight of us, there together, 
 so awfully jolly and sociable over your fire." 
 
 Mrs. Grantham turned this round. " If he kne\* 7 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 question, 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 
 
 57. 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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? " 
 
 " 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 
 impudence ! " 
 
 " 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, 
 j 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 
 J 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 
 
 58 
 
THE TWO FACES 
 
 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/ 
 
 Mi;s. Grantham showed not only that she had list 
 ened, 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 understood too much 
 
 "I may still be depended on to do what I can? 
 Quite certainly. You ll see what I may still be depend 
 ed 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 
 wa& 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 ad 
 vance 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 cer- 
 
 59 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 titude 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 w r ere 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, alphabetical, wonderful, indexed, that opened 
 of itself at the right place. She opened for Sutton 
 instinctively at G , which happened to be remark 
 ably 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!) she, of all people, has so wonderfully taken 
 up. It will be quite here as if she were i 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 ? " 
 
 " You really haven t heard ? " 
 
 " Really," he replied without winking. 
 
 " It happened, indeed, but the other day," said Miss 
 
 60 
 
THE TWO FACES 
 
 Banker, " yet everyone is already wondering. Gwyther 
 has thrown his wife on her mercy but I won t believe 
 you if yu 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 pre 
 liminary 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 cer 
 tainly 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 
 
 61 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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." 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." 
 
 62 
 
THE TWO FACES 
 
 " 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 con 
 stituted immediately, with multiplied tables and glit 
 tering 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, 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 some 
 thing 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 im- 
 
 63 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 pression was not wholly new to him that she felt 
 herself a figure for the forefront of the stage and in 
 deed would have been recognised by anyone at a glance 
 as the prima donna assoluta. She caused, in fact, dur 
 ing the few minutes he stood talking to her, an extraor 
 dinary 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 resplen 
 dent, 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 recognitions, 
 one of which was the husband of the person missing, 
 that Lady Gwyther was not there. Nothing in the 
 whole business was more singular than his conscious 
 ness that, as he came back to his interlocutress after 
 the nods and smiles and handwaves 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 unprece- 
 dentedly magnificent? 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 
 
THE TWO FACES 
 
 final view. It was revealed 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. 
 
 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 ex 
 pression in Mrs. Grantham s eyes was that of the 
 artist confronted with her work and interested, even to 
 impatience, in the judgment of others. The little per 
 son drew nearer, and though Sutton s companion, with 
 out 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 strug 
 gling 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 be 
 tween 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 par 
 agraph. 
 
 " You were right that was it. She did the only 
 thing that, at such short notice, she could do. She 
 took her to her dressmaker." 
 
 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. 
 
 65 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 some 
 thing Miss Banker failed of words to express. " Every 
 body 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 prettiness was 
 enough a mere little feverish, frightened freshness; 
 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 gin 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 inno 
 cence, 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. 
 
 66 
 
THE TWO FACES 
 
 " No ; she wouldn t in that case have been so beauti 
 ful." 
 
 " 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, appear 
 ing 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, arriv 
 ing, amiably took up her question. " The rest of 
 what?" 
 
 Miss Banker looked him well in the eyes. " Of Mrs. 
 Granthanrs clothes." 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 
 
 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 afternoon 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." 
 
 68 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 
 
 " 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 my 
 self 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 than forty, clean-shaven, thoroughly well- 
 dressed, and a perfect gentleman." 
 
 She continued to stare. " And I m to find him my 
 self?" 
 
 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 rum- 
 mest 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 in 
 stantly saw I mean I saw it as soon as she named 
 her affair that she hadn t understood 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 ve 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?" 
 
 69 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 per 
 haps 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. 
 Bridgenorth." 
 
 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 down 
 right price. It s clear to me that you can ask what 
 you like; and it s therefore a chance that I can t con 
 sent to your missing." My friend gave no sign either 
 way, and I told my story. " She s a woman of fifty, 
 perhaps of more, who has been pretty, and who still 
 presents herself, with her grey hair a good deal pow 
 dered, 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 
 
 70 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 
 
 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 
 respectable? " 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 ex 
 traordinary," 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 every 
 thing 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 
 carriage 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 
 
 71 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 presently added, " to 
 please her at all. It s your idea that she s not mar 
 ried?" 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 im 
 mediately, 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 opportunity, the 
 transfiguration will occur. Who is that awfully hand 
 some man ? l 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 deter 
 mined 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 orna 
 ments 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-mor 
 row ! " 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 
 
 72 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 
 
 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 extraor 
 dinary 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 un 
 der her tense veil, while she drew over her firm, narrow 
 hands 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 con- 
 
 73 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 ference. " 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 extraor 
 dinary 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 understand 
 everything, and I rejoined that this was also what 7 
 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 no difficulty whatever. The portrait, taste 
 fully 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 
 
 74 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 
 
 seemed quite as prodigious and London quite as amaz 
 ing 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 ten 
 acity 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 res 
 cued 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 sur 
 prised it wasn t occupied. She was waiting for some 
 thing 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 ques 
 tions 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 mo 
 ments. 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 
 
 n 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 in 
 sisted on being, after all, a * likeness, " she added. 
 But nobody will ever know." 
 
 "Nobody?" 
 
 " Nobody she sees." 
 
 " 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 condition 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 sud 
 denly, 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 remem 
 bered 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, how 
 ever, 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." 
 
 76 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 
 
 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 relega 
 tion to that lady s " own room " whatever charm it 
 was to work there might only mean for it cruel ob 
 scurity. 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 fash 
 ion now almost antique and which was far from con 
 temporaneous 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 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 expecta 
 tion of a great fortune, which he takes for granted 
 with unconscious insolence. Nothing has ever hap 
 pened 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 fem 
 inine rendering, light, delicate, vague, imperfectly syn 
 thetic insistent and evasive, above all, in the wrong 
 places ; but the composition, none the less, is beautiful 
 
 77 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 of 
 fered 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 knowl 
 edge, but what I felt at the moment was that he man 
 aged to be at once a triumphant trick and a plaus 
 ible 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 incoher 
 ences of wonder at my friend s practised skill, was: 
 " And you ve arrived at this truth without docu 
 ments ? " 
 
 " 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 than 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 them. She left me alone for 
 some time with her wonderful subject, and I again, in 
 her absence, made things out. He was dead he had 
 
 78 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 
 
 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 w r hat 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 im 
 mediately embraced her proposal, deferring to her rea 
 sons, whatever they were was what was speedily ar 
 ranged. 
 
 79 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 extraor 
 dinary moment, all the more that it found me quite 
 unprepared so extraordinary that I scarce knew at 
 first what had happened. By the time I really per 
 ceived, 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 irrepres- 
 sibly 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 in 
 tensely 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, assuredly, for me also to profit. I gained 
 more time than she, and the greatest oddity doubtless 
 was my own private manoeuvre the quickest calcula 
 tion that, acting from a mere confused instinct, I had 
 
 80 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 
 
 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 acquisi 
 tion. 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 wo? 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, drop 
 ping into the nearest seat, gave herself up so com 
 pletely 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, al 
 most like an accent unlearned but freshly breaking out 
 at a touch, in the very sound of the words. These per 
 ceptions 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 mat 
 ter." 
 
 She sat a minute turning things round, staring at 
 the picture. " The likeness, the likeness ! " It was 
 almost too much. 
 
 81 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 "It s so true?" 
 
 " Beyond everything." 
 
 I considered. " But a resemblance to a known in 
 dividual 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 hozv 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 surprised 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 be 
 half of Miss Tredick s interests. I knew exactly, more 
 over, before my companion had recovered herself, what 
 she w r ould 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 
 
 82 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 
 
 sitter, to which she had given me no clue. I had noth 
 ing but my impression that she had known him known 
 him well; and, from whatever 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 any 
 thing 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 frustrat 
 ed by death to have married you ? " 
 
 She met it bravely. " Certainly, if he had lived." 
 I was only amused at an artlessness in her " certain 
 ly." " Very good. But why do you wish the coin 
 cidence 
 
 " Kept from her? " She knew exactly why. " Be 
 cause 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?" 
 
 83 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 apprehen 
 sion. " 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 I " 
 
 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 dc 
 that of him." 
 
 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 is 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 excite 
 ment of our concurrence, " that s exactly what to do 
 a still better stroke for her it had just come to me 
 to propose ! " 
 
 84 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 
 
 " It s understood then, on your oath, as a gentle 
 man? " 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 pre 
 scribed. 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 de 
 lighted 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." 
 
 " 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 
 
 85 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 dusty studio, was to 
 make light for another look at Mary s subject. I felt 
 the impulse to bid him good night, but, to my aston 
 ishment, 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 
 
 86 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 
 
 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 in 
 structed 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 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 would 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, 1 met her 
 creation ; but I saw it would be a different thing meet 
 ing her. She immediately put down on a table, as if 
 she had expected me, the cheque I had sent her over 
 night. " 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?" 
 
 87 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " I don t understand," she repeated, " what has hap 
 pened." 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 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 
 
 88 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 
 
 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 in 
 stant 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 my 
 self surprised at her mere pacific head-shake. " No." 
 
 " Then why mayn t he have been ? " 
 
 " Another woman s ? Because he died, to my abso 
 lute knowledge, unmarried." She spoke as quietly. 
 " He had known many women, and there was one in 
 particular with whom he became and too long re 
 mained 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 suc 
 cessful detachment somehow 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." 
 
 89 
 
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 beauti 
 ful, 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 coinci 
 dence ?" 
 
 " Of my finding myself, after years, in so extraor 
 dinary a relation 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 coinci 
 dence, 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 ex 
 claimed : " I m glad I didn t meet her! " 
 
 90 
 
THE TONE OF TIME 
 
 " I don t yet see why you wouldn t." 
 
 " Neither do I. It was an instinct." 
 
 " Your instincts " I tried to be ironic " are mi 
 raculous." 
 
 " 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 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 bitter 
 ness, 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 
 
 91 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 her 
 self 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, rueful 
 ly 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 noth 
 ing 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. 
 
 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, 
 
 93 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 every 
 thing, 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 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 funda 
 mentally for Brivet. 
 
 I was often at that time, as I had often been before, 
 occupied for various " subjects " with Mrs. Dun- 
 dene, 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 pres 
 ence one morning of that lady. My door, by some 
 chance, had been unguarded, and she was upon us with 
 out 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 re 
 call 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 un 
 aware that they made an extraordinary use for mutual 
 
 94 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 
 
 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 protested. " 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 anec 
 dote becomes wondrous indeed. Meanwhile, at any 
 rate, I had Mrs. Cavenham again with me for her reg 
 ular sitting, and quite as curious 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." 
 
 95 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 \vas 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 ex 
 traordinary 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 
 
 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 dif 
 ficult to tell that he s not everyone 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 tempo 
 rarily 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 en 
 abled 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 confi 
 dence. 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 in 
 clinations are strange, and strange, too, perhaps, his 
 indifferences. Still, I can enter into some of his aver 
 sions, and I agreed with him that his wife was 
 odious. 
 
 " She has hitherto, since we began practically to live 
 
 97 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 apart," he said, " mortally hated the idea of doing any 
 thing 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." I thought of Mrs. Cavenham, 
 and, though I said nothing, he went on after an instant 
 as if he knew it. l They can t put a finger. I ve been 
 so d d particular." 
 
 I hesitated. " And your idea is now not to be par 
 ticular 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 ! " 
 
 98 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 
 
 " She doesn t ! " he interrupted me, with some curt- 
 ness. " 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 
 somebody 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 pro 
 duce 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? " 
 
 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 un 
 derstand." 
 
 I was sorry for him, but he struck me as artless. 
 
 99 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " Understand, in that interest, the spattering of an 
 other 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, " remu 
 nerated. 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 ex 
 posure. " 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." 
 
 It 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 lo keep her down, 
 
 100 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 
 
 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 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 thinking 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 my 
 self. " Than Mrs. Dundene! " 
 
 III 
 
 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 oc 
 casion, 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 ex 
 tent right that nobody could in those days in par 
 ticular 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 rec- 
 
 101 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 ognised, 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 im 
 agination and observation 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 7 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 declare im 
 possible ; 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 
 1 02 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 
 
 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 per 
 son 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 charming 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 con 
 venience 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." 
 
 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! " 
 
 103 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 pre 
 liminaries, 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 particular inter 
 mitted, 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, per 
 haps, for this very reason that their undertaking an 
 nounced itself as likely not to fall short of its aim. I 
 gathered from the voices of the air that nothing what- 
 
 104 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 
 
 ever 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 marked 
 ly developed I supposed the heroism had likewise done 
 so, and that the march of the matter was logical I in 
 ferred 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 sit 
 uation 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 immediately, 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 assur 
 ance 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 extraor- 
 
 105 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 dinarily pretty and elegant more completely hand 
 some 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 themselves 
 with particular brightness. She wanted, for all her 
 confidence, to omit no precaution, to close up every 
 issue, and she had acutely conceived that the posses 
 sion of Brivet s picture full-length, above all! 
 would constitute for her the strongest possible appear 
 ance 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 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 
 
 1 06 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 
 
 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 whatever 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 appear 
 ing 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 
 107 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 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 hap 
 pened has been the sort of thing that she couldn t pos 
 sibly fail to act upon." 
 
 " Too great a scandal, eh ? " 
 
 She but just paused at it. " Nothing neglected, cer 
 tainly, or omitted. He was not the man to undertake 
 
 " 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." 
 
 108 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 
 
 " 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 ar 
 rivals 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 pondered, " they like, for the most part, we suppose, 
 a studied, outrageous affichage, and they must have 
 thoroughly enjoyed it." 
 
 " Ah, but it was only that." 
 
 I wondered. " Only what ? " 
 
 " 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 
 answering 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 sc smugly selfish; 
 she put it to me with so small a consciousness of any 
 thing but her personal triumph that, while she had kept 
 her skirts clear, her name unuttered and her reputation 
 
 109 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 w r as only after waiting a w r hile 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 gal 
 lows ! " 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 confirmed 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 rem 
 iniscence of what he had seen and enjoyed and disliked 
 during a recent period of rather far-reaching advent 
 ure; but he stopped just as short as Mrs. Cavenham 
 had done and. indeed, much shorter than she of in- 
 
 no 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 
 
 troducing 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 be 
 cause his mind was troubled, but just because, on the 
 contrary, it was so much at ease. It was perhaps even 
 more singular still, meanwhile, that, though I had 
 scarce been able to bear Mrs. Cavenham 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 aggressively ap 
 proving, 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 be 
 smirched, 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 de 
 termined, 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 remains as yet my high-water mark. 
 
 in 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 de 
 fended 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 aug 
 mented 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 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 lin 
 gered, however, on the contingency of privation, which 
 was promptly swept away in the rush of Mrs. Caven- 
 ham s vision of how straight also, above and beyond, 
 I had, as she called it, attacked. I couldn t quite my 
 self, I fear, tell how straight, but Mrs. Cavenham per 
 fectly 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 im 
 mediately 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 
 
 112 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 
 
 the reach of her lingering look. I had greatly, almost 
 inconveniently 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 re 
 peated as with amused interest : " Whatever in the 
 world ?" 
 
 " 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 
 remembrance, 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 won- 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 derful. 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 do 
 it?" 
 
 It showed me that she had not heard from him of 
 my having painted him, and this, further, was an in 
 dication 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 sit 
 ting 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." 
 
 114 
 
THE SPECIAL TYPE 
 
 "To make up?" 
 
 " I never saw him alone," said Mrs. Dundene. 
 
 I am still keeping the thing to send to her, punctual 
 ly, on the day he s married ; but I had of course, on my 
 understanding with her, a tremendous bout with Mrs. 
 Cavenham, who protested with indignation against my 
 " base treachery " and made to Brivet an appeal for 
 redress which, enlightened, face to face with the mag 
 nificent 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 awk 
 wardness 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. 
 
 1 To live with," I explained" to make up." 
 
 To make up for what ? " 
 
 " Why, you know, they never saw him alone." 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 
 
 " \\7 ELL, we are a pair ! " the poor lady s visitor 
 VV broke out to her, at the end of her explana 
 tion, in a manner disconcerting 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 admir 
 ably controlled, had not a tendency to stoutness just 
 affirmed its independence. Her present, no doubt, in 
 sisted too much on her past, but with the excuse, suf 
 ficiently 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 ob 
 jects that nobody buys, as had more than once been 
 remarked by spectators of her own sex, for herself, and 
 would have been luxurious if luxury consisted main 
 ly in photographic portraits slashed across with sig- 
 
 116 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 
 
 natures, 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 draw 
 ing-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 loung 
 ing 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 threw off ; and the 
 words were evidently connected with the impression 
 thus absorbed. His comparative youth spoke of waste 
 even as her positive her too positive spoke of econ 
 omy. There was only one thing, that is, to make up 
 in him for everything he had lost, though it was dis 
 tinct 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 conse 
 quences 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 mo 
 ments all his impudence as that he looked all his sha b- 
 biness, all his cleverness, all his history. These differ 
 ent things were written in him in his premature bald 
 ness, 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 so 
 ciable 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 
 
 117 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 asso 
 ciated with Miss Cutter in a harmony worthy of won 
 der. She had been telling him not only that she 
 couldn t possibly give him ten pounds, but that his un 
 expected arrival, should he insist on being much in 
 view, might seriously interfere with arrangements nec 
 essary 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 for? " 
 
 " Well, one reason is precisely that no particular in 
 convenience has hitherto been supposed to attach to 
 me. I m just what I am," said Mamie Cutter ; " noth 
 ing 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." 
 
 " Ah, my dear," said the odd young man, " I ve 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 mar 
 ried?" 
 
 " 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 
 
 118 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 
 
 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 respectability 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 himself 
 afresh as she looked him up and down " you can im 
 agine 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 beau 
 tifully. 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 wonder 
 ing irrelevance. 
 
 The manner of the question made her for some rea 
 son, in spite of her preoccupations, break into a laugh, 
 
 119 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 intel 
 ligence. 
 
 " I m just dying of it ! " said Mamie Cutter. 
 
 " Why, so am I ! " Her visitor had a sweetness of 
 concurrence. 
 
 " We re the only decent people," Miss Cutter de 
 clared. " 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 com 
 munity of fatigue and failure and, after all, of intelli 
 gence. 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 photo 
 graphs, 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 
 
 120 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 
 
 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 success 
 fully you mustn t ruin me. I must have some remote 
 resemblance to a lady." 
 
 " Yes ? But why must If " 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 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 pleas 
 ant for you. I like you, Mamie, because I like pluck ; 
 
 121 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 
 doit?" 
 
 " 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 
 appearance the scattered remains of beauty manip 
 ulated 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 im 
 mediate 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, A She immediately 
 
 122 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 
 
 took up the business that had brought her, with the 
 air, however, of drawing from the omens then discern 
 ible less confidence than she had hoped. The complica 
 tion lay in the fact that if it was Mamie s part to pre 
 sent 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 impossi 
 ble?" 
 
 "Oh no," said Mamie, with a qualified emphasis. 
 " It s possible: 
 
 11 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 noth 
 ing 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 in- 
 
 123 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 stant 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 com 
 panion 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 let 
 ter?" 
 
 " No." She spoke with decision. " But I shall 
 square her." 
 
 "Then how?" 
 
 " Well " and Miss Cutter, as if looking upward 
 for inspiration, 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 Bell- 
 house 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. Medw r in 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 ef 
 fect 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 
 
 124 
 
MRS, MEDWIN 
 
 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, sev 
 eral 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-brother Scott Homer. A 
 wretch." 
 
 ; What kind of a wretch?" 
 
 " Every kind. I lose sight of him at times he dis 
 appears 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." 
 
 " 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? " 
 
 125 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 won 
 derful, 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 to me? " 
 
 " Oh, I like you! " Mrs. Medwin made out. 
 
 " Then that s it. There are no Americans. It s al 
 ways 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 bal 
 ance," 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. 
 
 126 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 
 
 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 a weak pretence 
 of holding it firm, ventured to announce to him, as a les 
 son 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, dread 
 ful depressing London, and the need to curl up some 
 where. 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 min 
 utes 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 ad 
 missions. 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?" 
 
 127 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 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 cu 
 riosity. 
 
 " What could she have made of you ? " Mamie de 
 manded. 
 
 " My dear girl, she s not a woman who s eager to 
 make too much of anything anything, I mean, that 
 
 128 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 
 
 will prevent her from doing as she likes, what she 
 takes into her head. Of course," he continued to ex 
 plain, " 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 description of Lady Wantridge, and 
 she was conscious of tucking it away for future use in 
 a corner of her miscellaneous little mind. She with 
 held, however, all present acknowledgment, only ad 
 dressing 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 you." 
 
 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 min 
 utes 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. 
 
 " Because she always goes up." Then, as, in the 
 129 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 in 
 stincts; 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 curios 
 ity 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 some 
 thing 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, some 
 thing 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 
 
 130 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 
 
 foretold, his new acquaintance did reappear, explain 
 ing 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. Med- 
 win? 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, as alw r ays 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, according 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 fine 
 ness, 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 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 Bell- 
 house 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 J 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?" 
 
 " 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." 
 132 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 
 
 " 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 re 
 marked 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 con 
 cession. 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, accordingly, to be done with 
 Mrs. Medwin but to put her off." And Lady Want- 
 ridge 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, 
 
 133 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 in 
 terest the inspiration and excitement, don t you 
 know? go, as rather too easy. You all, as I con 
 stantly have occasion to say, like us so ! " 
 
 Her companion frankly weighed it. " Yes ; it takes 
 that to account for your position. I ve always thought 
 of you, nevertheless, 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 won 
 der " 
 
 " 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 cer 
 tainly 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 grav 
 ity of the matter, she supremely fixed her friend. She 
 felt how little she minded betraying at last the extrem 
 ity 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!" 
 
 134 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 
 
 "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." 
 
 " 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 greet 
 ing. 
 
 " How d ye do, Mamie? How d ye do, Lady Want 
 ridge? 
 
 135 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 in 
 deed as if she had seen him before. Had she ever so 
 seen him before the previous day? While Miss Cut 
 ter put to herself this question her visitor, at all events, 
 met the one she had previously uttered. 
 
 " Ever l forgive ? " this personage echoed in a tone 
 that made as little account as possible of the interrup 
 tion. " 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 broth 
 er. " 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 inspiration, which she 
 couldn t have explained, but which had come, prompted 
 by something she had caught the extent of the recog 
 nition expressed in Lady Wantridge s face. It had 
 come absolutely of a sudden, straight out of the oppo 
 sition of the two figures before her quite as if a con 
 cussion 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 con 
 sciousness. She looked surprised. " Do you know my 
 brother?" 
 
 " 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 of 
 fered her a hand. " But I ll go down with you. Not 
 
 136 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 
 
 you! " she launched at her brother, who immediately 
 effaced himself. His way of doing so and he had al 
 ready done so, as for Lady Wantridge, in respect to 
 their previous encounter struck her even at the mo 
 ment 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 over 
 looked 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 cer 
 tainly," 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 youll 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 ! " 
 
 137 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 treat 
 ing 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 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 consist 
 ently 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 pleasant 
 ness. 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 impos 
 sible." 
 
 It was so portentously produced that her ladyship 
 had somehow to meet it. " What s the matter with 
 him?" 
 
 " I don t know." 
 
 " Then what s the matter with you? " Lady Want 
 ridge inquired. 
 
 " It s because I won t know," Mamie not without 
 dignity explained. 
 
 Then/ won t either!" 
 
 " Precisely. Don t. It s something," Mamie pur 
 sued, 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?" 
 
 138 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 
 
 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 sadness, 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 ?" 
 
 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, how 
 ever, 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 col 
 loquy 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. 
 
 139 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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. " AVait 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?" 
 
 " 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. 
 
 140 
 
MRS. MEDWIN 
 
 "" He sha n t go unless she comes. She must meet you 
 first you re my condition." 
 
 " 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 for 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 Aud- 
 ley 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 masterstroke for Miss Cut 
 ter 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 un 
 derstanding indeed, on the spot rebounded from it, 
 the conception of which, in Mamie s mind, had prompt 
 ly 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 
 
 141 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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." 
 
 The knowledge that it was to be the same had per 
 haps something 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 con 
 form neither too little nor too much to the other con 
 ditions after a brief whirlwind of wires and counter- 
 wires, and an iterated waiting of hansons at various 
 doors to include Mrs. Medwin. It was from Catch- 
 more 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 transpontine world of art-study professed 
 to know that the pair had been " several limes " 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 per 
 haps 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 Lon 
 don by her husband, occupied there with pressing busi 
 ness, but had yet desired that her displacement should 
 not interrupt her sittings. The young man, at her re 
 quest, 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. 
 
 143 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 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 par 
 ticularly present to him till now that he had in the least 
 got on, but the way in which Addie had and evident 
 ly, 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 trans- 
 
 144 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 
 
 pontine world, that, as the phrase was, America had 
 grown more interesting since they left. Addie was at 
 tentive 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 strick 
 en 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 ear 
 rings, 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; it tired him to paint he felt as 
 if he had been ill for a month. He strolled in Kensing 
 ton 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 breaking 
 ground on a greater business still, the circumvallation 
 of Mrs. Dunn. Mrs. Dunn duly waited on him, and 
 
 145 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 gentle 
 woman, the sole survival of " the English branch of 
 the family," still resident, at Flickerbridge, 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, set 
 tled 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 compartment, as he 
 proceeded, he had time to take the size. But the sur 
 prise, 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 com 
 plex 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 uncon 
 scious 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, repre 
 sented a loss of opportunity under which, as he saw 
 
 146 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 
 
 her, she was peculiarly formed to wince. She was at 
 any rate, it was clear, doing something with 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 comfort 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, domi 
 ciled at that period with her parents and a sister, who 
 was also attractive, in the Saxon capital. He had mar 
 ried 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 defined itself as a sentiment that 
 was not to be resisted. The bereaved husband, yield 
 ing to a new attachment and a new response, and find 
 ing a new union thus prescribed, had yet been forced 
 to reckon with the unaccommodating law of the land. 
 Encompassed with frowns in his own country, how 
 ever, marriages of this particular type were wreathed 
 in smiles in his sister s-in-law, so that his remedy was 
 not forbidden. 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 prospered. 
 Children came, and one of the daughters, growing up 
 and marrying in her turn, was, if Frank rightly fol- 
 
 147 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 lowed, the mother of his own Addie, who had been 
 deprived of the knowledge of her indeed, in childhood, 
 by death, and been brought up, though without undue 
 tension, by a stepmother a character thus, in the con 
 nection, 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 in 
 difference. Darkness, therefore, had fortunately su 
 pervened, 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 or symptom of climate 
 and environment. The graft in New York had taken, 
 and Addie was a vivid, an unmistakable flower. At 
 Flickerbridge, or wherever, on the other hand, strange 
 to say, the parent stem had had a fortune comparatively 
 meagre. Fortune, it was true, in the vulgarest sense, 
 had attended neither party. Addie s immediate belong 
 ings were as poor as they were numerous, and he gath 
 ered 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 should 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, ex 
 ceptionally copious, in his lap; he conned them at in 
 tervals; he held the threads. 
 
 He looked out between whiles at the pleasant Eng 
 lish land, an April aquarelle washed in with wondrous 
 breadth. He knew the French thing, he knew the 
 
 148 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 
 
 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 be 
 come 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 pro 
 tected her from babyhood, that that lady s own name 
 of Adelaide was, as well as the surname conjoined 
 with it, borne, to her knowledge, in Paris, by an ex 
 traordinary American specimen. She had then re- 
 crossed 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 Wen- 
 ham know exactly who she was. Miss Wenham, in 
 whose personal tradition the flame of resentment ap 
 peared 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 re 
 sponded by a letter fragrant with the hope that 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 possi 
 ble 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 dep 
 uty. Frank asked himself by what name she had 
 
 149 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 Wen- 
 ham 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 impression 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, how 
 ever 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 
 doubtless 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 
 
 150 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 
 
 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 present 
 ed, he had held his breath for fear of breaking the spell ; 
 had almost, from the quick impulse to respect, to pro 
 long, lowered his voice and moved on tiptoe. Supreme 
 beauty suddenly revealed is apt to strike us as a pos 
 sible 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 
 impayable, 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 diffi 
 cult 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 every 
 thing, including, 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. Vague 
 ly to have supposed there were such nooks in the world 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 unap- 
 peasably timid, unaccountably strange, had, on her re 
 duced scale, an almost Gothic grotesqueness ; but the 
 final effect of one s sense of it was an amenity that ac 
 companied one s steps like wafted gratitude. More 
 flurried, more spasmodic, more apologetic, more com 
 pletely 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 conceived a private 
 enthusiasm. Her eyes protruded, her chin receded and 
 her nose carried on in conversation a queer little in 
 dependent 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 a law of their own ; she was 
 embarrassed at nothing and at everything, frightened 
 at everything and at nothing, and she approached ob 
 jects, subjects, the simplest questions and answers and 
 the whole material of intercourse, either with the in 
 directness 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 charm 
 ing. He didn t know what to call it; she was a fruit 
 of time. She had a queer distinction. She had been 
 expensively produced, and there would be a good deal 
 more of her to come. 
 
 152 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 
 
 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 illus 
 trated. 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 un 
 touched, 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 con 
 jectured, reappeared to him ; he knew now what anx 
 ious 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 con 
 science 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 
 
 153 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 conscious was positively to wake it up. Its only safety, 
 of a truth, was to be left still to sleep to sleep in its 
 large, fair chambers, and under its high, clean can 
 opies. 
 
 He added thus restlessly a line to his letter, maun 
 dered round the room again, noted and fingered some 
 thing 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 su 
 premely 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 vin 
 dictively nurse. Well, what had happened was that 
 the acquaintance had been kept for her, like a packet 
 enveloped and sealed for delivery, till her attention 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 slight 
 est 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 sup 
 posed 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 
 
 154 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 
 
 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 con 
 cerned, 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 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 breath 
 ing 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, pre 
 senting 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 indis 
 posed 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 
 
 155 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 had introduced him. It took time to arrive with her 
 at that point, but after the Rubicon was crossed they 
 went far afield. 
 
 IV 
 
 " OH 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 aren t 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 be 
 cause 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 ? " 
 
 " Oh, I so want to ! " Miss Wenham murmured, in 
 her unpractical, impersonal way. " You re so differ 
 ent !" 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 
 
 156 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 
 
 not sure that anything so terrible really ought to hap 
 pen to you as to know us." 
 
 " Well," said Miss Wenhani, " I do know you a 
 little, by this time, don t I ? And I don t find it terri 
 ble. It s a delightful change for me." 
 
 "Oh, I m not sure you ought to have a delightful 
 change!" 
 
 "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 ex 
 ploitation : 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 
 Wenham," Granger went on, happy himself in his ex 
 travagance, which was yet all sincere, and happier still 
 in her deep, but altogether 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 be- 
 wilderedly 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 shame, 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." 
 
 157 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 some 
 times 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 won 
 derful," 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 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 explana 
 tions addressed gallantly and patiently to her under 
 standing, 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 
 
 158 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 
 
 fine grain of its conservatism, the innocence of its ig 
 norance, 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 distinct 
 ly 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 in 
 tensified 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 ! " 
 
 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 
 
 159 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 wonderful 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 7 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 of 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 
 
 160 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 
 
 didn t keep you down, as we say, enough. The won 
 der 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 sha n 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 under 
 stand 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 contrib 
 utors and readers will cross the Atlantic and flock to 
 Flickerbridge, so, unanimously, universally, vocifer 
 ously, 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 un 
 derstand 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 
 
 161 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 completely 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 misrepre 
 sentation, 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 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 in 
 sisted. " I ve undermined you at least. I ve left, after 
 all, terribly little for Addie to do." 
 
 She laughed in queer tones. " Well, then, we ll ad 
 mit 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 
 
 162 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 
 
 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 in 
 timacies and quick oblivions were a stranger to its air. 
 It had known, in all its days, no rude, no loud in 
 vasion. Serenely unconscious of most contempo 
 rary 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 meas 
 urable way he didn t sacrifice, to the utmost, to still 
 ness. 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 
 
 163 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 with lurking complications. He added then day to day, 
 yet only hereby, as he reminded her, giving other com 
 plications a larger chance to multiply. He kept it be 
 fore 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 sacri 
 fice. 
 
 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 attrac 
 tion 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 re 
 mained because he was too weak to move was only to 
 throw themselves back on the other horn of their di 
 lemma. 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 morn 
 ing he broke out at breakfast with an intimate convic 
 tion. 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 
 
 164 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 
 
 expressing this to Miss Wenham with the conversa 
 tional 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 knowl 
 edge, 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 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 
 her 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 dif 
 ferent. 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 there 
 fore is not to have any illusions fondly to flatter your 
 self, 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 character blown about the world for all 
 you are and proclaimed for all you are on the housetops. 
 
 165 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 jour 
 ney ; 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." 
 
 " 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 
 I 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. 
 166 
 
FLICKERBRIDGE 
 
 " 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 Ox 
 ford. 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 
 
 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 repeated 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 expressed, 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 
 
 168 
 
THE STORY IN IT 
 
 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 mod 
 ern 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 absorption 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." 
 
 169 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 re 
 member. " 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 af 
 fixed 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, hold 
 ing them as a neat, achieved handful, and came over 
 to the fire, while Mrs. Blessingbourne 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? " 
 
 Mrs. Dyott just waited, and it had the effect, in 
 describably, 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." 
 
 170 
 
THE STORY IN IT 
 
 " 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. Ex 
 cept 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, 
 considered 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, however, 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, 
 
 171 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 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 un- 
 removed mud and an unusual quantity of easy expres 
 sion. 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 dif 
 ference \vas great between the two encounters, though 
 we must add in justice to the second that its marks 
 were at first mainly negative. This communion con 
 sisted 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." 
 
 172 
 
THE STORY IN IT 
 
 " 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 w r hen 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 con 
 tinued 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 ? " 
 
 It was her gravity that continued to answer. " Yes 
 it would probably kill her." 
 
 " She believes so in you? " 
 
 " She believes so in yon. 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 hand 
 kerchief, 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, 
 
 173 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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?" 
 
 " 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 
 
 174 
 
THE STORY IN IT 
 
 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, mentioned to Maud that her fellow-guest 
 wished to scold her for the books she read a state 
 ment 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 imprisonment might have involved. 
 Mrs. Blessingbourne did feel, it then appeared, the 
 force of the fellow, but she had her reserves and re- 
 
 T75 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 actions, 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 life for my money. Only I m not so in 
 fatuated 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 keep 
 ing 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 manu 
 facture, 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 ? " 
 
 176 
 
THE STORY IN IT 
 
 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. " Peo 
 ple 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 sug 
 gestive 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 doubt 
 less tell me, however," he went on, " that as all such 
 relations arc for us, at the most, much simpler, we can 
 only have all round less to say about them." 
 
 She met this imputation with the quickest amuse 
 ment. " 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 sur 
 prised. " You think we make them larger ? or subt 
 ler?" 
 
 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 re 
 marked. " 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 
 
 177 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 you, you know, that you ve yourself written something. 
 Haven t you and published? I ve a notion I could 
 read you" 
 
 11 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 something 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 
 
 178 
 
THE STORY IN IT 
 
 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? 
 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 con 
 trary, friends to it." 
 
 Her interlocutor thought. " Doesn t it depend per 
 haps 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 ex 
 plained. 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 con 
 ceivable " and Voyt addressed himself to Maud. 
 " But doesn t it prove that life is, against your conten- 
 
 179 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 tion, more interesting than art? Life you embellish 
 and elevate; but art would find itself able to do noth 
 ing 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." 
 
 " Oh, they pay for it ! " said Mrs. Dyott. 
 
 "Do 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 with 
 out 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 
 
 180 
 
THE STORY IN IT 
 
 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 advent 
 ures." 
 
 Mrs. Blessingbourne only met his eyes at first, smil 
 ing with a certain intensity. " Doesn t it depend a 
 little on what you call adventures? " 
 
 " My poor Maud," said Mrs. Dyott, as if in compas 
 sion for sophistry so simple, " adventures are just ad 
 ventures. 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 at 
 tention. " 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 ? Be 
 hind 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 formation, the develop 
 ment, 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 ? " 
 
 181 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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? " 
 
 1 You mean that the adventures of innocence have 
 so often been the material of fiction? Yes," Voyt re 
 plied ; " 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 flounderings 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 
 
 182 
 
THE STORY IN IT 
 
 already with your relation. It s the end of your good 
 ness."* 
 
 " 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, 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 sud 
 den 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 be 
 fore 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 ex 
 plained to Maud with his indulgent manner, " his ap 
 pearance 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 handsomely 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 can 
 didly 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. 
 
 183 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 ob 
 stinacy 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 aw 
 fully 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 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? " 
 
 184 
 
THE STORY IN IT 
 
 " A passion." 
 
 "Shared?" 
 
 " Ah, thank goodness, no ! " 
 
 Mrs. Dyott continued to gaze. " The object s un 
 aware ? " 
 
 " 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 
 touchingly worked it out " where would be my hon 
 esty?" 
 
 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 ro 
 mance ? " 
 
 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? " 
 
 " 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 
 
 185 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 consist 
 ency or her idea of a graceful close of the discussion. 
 " You deserve that one should speak for 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 without 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 dow r n for a few hours in anticipation of the 
 usual collective move for the week s end. He was 
 to go up again by the late train, and had to count a 
 
 186 
 
THE STORY IN IT 
 
 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 ? 
 
 " 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 calculation 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, ex 
 pire 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?" 
 
 187 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 there 
 was just enough in it in the theory for them to allo\v 
 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 w r ho 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 
 
 WHAT determined the speech that startled him 
 in the course of their encounter scarcely mat 
 ters, being probably but some words spoken by himself 
 quite without intention spoken as they lingered and 
 slowly moved together after their renewal of acquaint 
 ance. He had been conveyed by friends, an hour or 
 two before, to the house at which she was staying ; the 
 party 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 dis 
 persal, all in the interest of the original motive, a view 
 of Weatherend itself and the fine things, intrinsic feat 
 ures, 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 principal group, and, in 
 cases where they took such matters with the last seri 
 ousness, give themselves up to mysterious apprecia 
 tions 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 empha 
 sis 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 
 
 189 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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, 
 disconcerted 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 move 
 ments of a 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 after 
 noon, 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 with 
 out a direct sign from her that the young woman her 
 self 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 acci 
 dent 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 impor 
 tance. 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 
 
 190 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 in such a life as theyall appeared^tgj^e leaflinp^Foj__thg 
 ff\^^^^n^r^r^^T ^\<:p tTMngsas thev__came. He 
 was satisfied, without "nTIhe" least bemg^Lbie^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 remun 
 erated 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 questions about the dates of the build 
 ings, 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 be 
 fore 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 inter 
 val 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 one of the rooms remarkable for a fine por 
 trait over the chimney-place out 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 
 
 191 
 
I 
 
 THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 Pem 
 bles, 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 
 
 192 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 the Palace of the Caesars, but at Pompeii, on an occa 
 sion when they had been present there at an important 
 find. 
 
 He accepted her amendments, he enjoyed her cor 
 rections, though the moral of them was, she pointed 
 out, that he really didn t remember the least thing 
 aboutTier ; and he^only felt it as 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, sim 
 plicities of freshness, 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 
 
 T93 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 sorp^thin^ ftr 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 min 
 ute to join the others was a kind of confession that 
 they didn t quite want it to be a failure. Their at 
 tempted 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 communities 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 sur 
 rounded with them, for instance, at that hour at the 
 other house ; as a new one he probably wouldn t have 
 so much as 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 reaching out in im 
 agination 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 suc 
 ceeded. 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 
 
 194 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 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 ancj 
 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 * 
 forgotten 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, enjoy 
 ing 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 mak 
 ing no claim on him of a compliment 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 for 
 gotten, 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," March 
 er 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." 
 
 Still, however, she hesitated. " But if you ve com 
 pletely ceased to be that sort ? " 
 
 195 
 
THE BETTER 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 re 
 mained 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 nat 
 ural 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 mis 
 take. 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 con 
 trary 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 won 
 der 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 con 
 sciousness of having taken you so far into my confi 
 dence." 
 
 196 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 " 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 be 
 lieved 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 ex 
 cessive, put him at ease about her possible derision. 
 Somehow the whole 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 hacjjjapught of himself so Ipng 
 as abominably alone^ and, lo, he wasn t alone a b 1 1 "- He 
 hadn t beenT it appeared, for an hour since those mo 
 ments 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 remem 
 brance, by a return of the spirit, failing another en 
 counter, 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 
 
 197 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 sim 
 ple. 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 con 
 viction 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 r to nnrlrntnnd 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." 
 
 " 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 destroy 
 ing 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, 
 
 198 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 the sense of danger, familiar to so many people of 
 ** falling in love? " 
 
 John Marcher thought. " Did you ask me that be 
 fore?" 
 
 " 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 overwhelm- 
 ing." 
 
 * 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 de 
 lightful, 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 ap 
 prehension 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 necessar 
 ily violent. I only think of it as natural and as of 
 course, above all, unmistakable. I think of it simply 
 as "the thing. The thing will of itself appear natural." 
 
 199 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 r>( 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." 
 
 " Oh then, I m to be present? " 
 
 l( 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 pur 
 sued instead of answering. " Do I merely strike you 
 as a harmless lunatic ? " 
 
 =-y " No," said May Bartram. " 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 ques 
 tion. " 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 un 
 derstanding. "I ll watch with you," said May Bar- 
 tram. 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 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^x 
 which became more marked when, within the year that 
 followed their afternoon at Weatherend, the oppor 
 tunities for meeting multiplied. The event that thus 
 promoted these occasions was fh^ c|eath of the ancient 
 lady. Jher_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 deposition 
 of this personage arrived but with her death, which, 
 followed by many changes, made in particular a differ 
 ence 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. Noth 
 ing 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 in 
 deed 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 an 
 other 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 per- 
 
 20 1 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 suading 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 gentle 
 man this ^wasmarked, quite as marked as that the fort 
 unate cause oTTTwaS just the buried treasure_of heF 
 knowledge] He had with his own hands" dug upThTs 
 little hoard, brought to light that is to within reach of 
 the dim day constituted by their discretions and priva 
 cies 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 in 
 different 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 im 
 possible, since nothing but the amusement of a cold 
 world would have waited on it. Since, however, a 
 mysterious fate had 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, be- 
 
 202 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 cause 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 con 
 fidant, 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 con 
 stant 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 ac 
 count of. Something fairly remarkable came to pass 
 with him, for that matter, in this connection some 
 thing represented by a certain passage of his conscious 
 ness, 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 tempta 
 tion 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 trie same, for him to 
 make them, and he listened to them civilly enough. 
 This was why he had such good though possibly such 
 father colourless manners ; this was why, .above all, 
 hejruvki rp.garjhirnsHf, in a greedy_world t as decently 
 as, in factTperhaps even a littlel^ihljmely unselfish. 
 
 that he valued this character 
 203 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 quite sufficiently to measure his present danger of let 
 ting 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 charm 
 ing 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 
 highest ought to proceed. He would thoroughly es 
 tablish the heads under which her affairs, her require^ 
 ments, her peculiarities he went so far as to give them 
 the latitude of that name would come into their inter 
 course. 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 ques 
 tion 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 marry 
 ing out of the question. (His conviction, his apprehen 
 sion, 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 hirnT} 
 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. CThe 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 ac 
 companied by a lady on a tiger-hunt. Such was the 
 image under which he had ended by figuring his lifeTJ 
 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 
 
 204 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 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 independently of discussion. One discussed, of 
 course, like a hunchback, for there was always, if noth 
 ing else, the hunchback face. That remained, and she 
 was watching him ; but people watched best, as a gen 
 eral thing, in silence, so that such would be predom 
 inantly 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 seem 
 ing 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 Bar tram 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 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 Jrifle, as thejcljmaxtoso^speciar a suspense,jshe_af- 
 most set him woricIerTng it she hadnTeven a larger con 
 ception "bt singularity tor 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 look 
 ing 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 ow r n form of reference to it, but she 
 adopted the form so quietly that, looking back at the 
 
 205 
 
THE* BETTER SORT 
 
 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 exchanged the attitude of beau 
 tifully indulging for that of still more beautifully be 
 lieving 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 oc 
 cupied. 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 ex 
 cept as " the real truth abouLyou," and she hadin fact 
 a wonderful way ot making it seem, as such, the secret 
 of her own life too. That was in fine how he so con 
 stantly 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 insidiously kept from doing, but she could add up 
 the amount they made, understand how much, with 
 a lighter w r eight on his spirit, he might have done, and 
 thereby establish how, clever as he was, he fell short. 
 
 206 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 Above all she was in the secret of the difference between 
 the forms he went through those of his little office 
 under Government, those of caring for his modest pat 
 rimony, 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 dissimula 
 tion. 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. 
 
 A 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. Jjeneathfoy ^ forms as well 
 detachment had learned to sit, and jbeT^viouTTiacPbe- 
 come for herT^^e^^aTTenseTa false account of her 
 self. Theje was "But *one"acC5 ufit of "lief that would 
 have been true all the while, and that she could give. 
 directly, to nobody, least of all_tojohn Marcher, Her 
 wfiole attituHe~was a "virtual statement, but the percep 
 tion 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 him 
 self, 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 
 
 207 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 common 
 places. Yet there were still moments when the situa 
 tion 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^J^jthat 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 indispen 
 sable." That, for instance, was a remark she had fre 
 quently enough had occasion to make, 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 an 
 niversary 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 cus 
 toms. 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 
 
 208 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 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 con 
 cerned 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, 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 
 
 209 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 w^ere to have been well, 
 something so exceptional and, as one may say, so par 
 ticularly your own." 
 
 Something in this made him look at her with suspi 
 cion. " 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 re 
 paid. " A 
 
 They were frankly grave now ; he had got up from 
 his seat, had turned once more about the little draw 
 ing-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 
 jhis whole middle life. Under the impression of what 
 this friend had just said he knew himself, for some 
 Reason, more aware of these things, which made him, 
 
 210 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 after a moment, stop again before her. " Is it, possibly, 
 that you ve grown afraid ? " 
 
 l " 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 ex 
 plained very kindly. " You remember that that was 
 what you asked me long ago that first day at Weath- 
 erend." 
 
 " 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 
 
 rwere 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 im 
 agination 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 reduced to mere barren 
 speculation. This in fact was what the place had just 
 struck him as so full of the simplification of every 
 thing 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." 
 
 211 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " What I see is, as I make it out, that you ve achieved 
 something 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 sur 
 passed." 
 
 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 intimately. That s surely enough." 
 
 " 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 impres 
 sion 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 something 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, unex 
 pectedly to her, he had crossed some mystic line that 
 
 212 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 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 be 
 tween 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 permit 
 ting, 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 hap 
 pened that, seeing her home at such times, he occa 
 sionally 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 await 
 ed his pleasure. His point was made, he thought, by 
 his not eternally insisting with her 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 
 
 213 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 he reminded her of her not having answered a certain 
 question 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." 
 jt" 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 showing 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 or 
 dinary 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." 
 
 214 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 He was careful to acknowledge the remark hand 
 somely. " 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 re 
 lapsed, and really for so long a time that the day in 
 evitably 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 some 
 what vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the in 
 terest 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 
 gxcept of course that she might have finernerves. 
 That was what Worherfftad \vlieie" they wei ^Interested; 
 they made out things, where people were concerned, 
 that the people often couldn t have made out for them 
 selves. Their nerves, their sensibility, their imagina 
 tion, were conductors and revealers, and the beauty of 
 
 215 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 be 
 cause 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 cultivated 
 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 im 
 mediate jurisdiction of the thing that waited. 
 
 When the day came, as come it had to, that his 
 friend confessed 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, 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 see 
 ing - ? " Tj; wnnlrl h^ve been brutal, in the e.arly 
 stages pf hpr trnnhlp, fr> put that question + 
 
 it had immediately sn^r^H for him fn hi* own 
 rprn ; and {tig possibility was what most m?,rJ frim 
 sorry fnr )ipr If she did " know," moreover, in the 
 sense of her having had some what should he think ? 
 mystical, irresistible light, this would make the mat 
 ter not better, but worse, inasmuch as her original 
 adoption of his own curiosity had quite become the 
 
 216 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 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 gen 
 erosity; yet, make them as he might, he saw himself, 
 with the lapse of the period, more and more discon 
 certed. It lapsed for him with a strange, steady sweep, 
 and the oddest oddity was that it gave him, independ 
 ently 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 look 
 ing 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 him 
 self for he had so done really wondering if the great 
 accident would take form now as nothing more than 
 
 217 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 efTacement 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 suc 
 cess. 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 sur 
 prises. 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 con 
 sciousness, 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 
 
 218 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 hadn t it, to speak of, or had it but in the scantiest meas 
 ure such, soon enough, as things went with him, be 
 came 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 an 
 other matter beside. It all hung together; they were 
 subject, he and the great vagueness, to an equal and 
 indivisible law. When the possibilities 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 asso 
 ciated 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 wan- 
 
 219 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 ing 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 ul 
 timate 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 nu 
 merous 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 con 
 secrated by the years, she was the picture of a serene, 
 exquisite, but impenetrable sphinx, whose head, or in 
 deed 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; 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 
 
 220 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 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 dif 
 ference, 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 inten 
 sities 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 any 
 thing else. I appear to myself to have spent my life 
 in thinking of nothing but dreadful things. A great 
 
 221 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 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 men 
 tioned." 
 
 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 meas 
 ure 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, speaking as if it 
 all were over. Well, he wished it were; and the con 
 summation 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 con 
 tinued 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 imagina- 
 
 222 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 tions, 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 showed me that before." 
 
 These last words affected her, he could see in a mo 
 ment, 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 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 ig 
 norance 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 
 
 223 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 with a small, fine, inner stiffness, an imperfect sur 
 render. " 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, something 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. There 
 fore 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 gener 
 ous assurance, 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 in- 
 tensity the three or four things he wanted most to 
 know; but the question that came of itself to his lips 
 really covered the others. " Then tell me if I shall 
 consciously suffer." 
 
 224 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 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 correc 
 tion might be wrong. " It isn t that I am a donkey? " 
 he asked between faintness and grimness. " It isn t 
 that it s all a mistake?" 
 
 ELA. mistake ? " she pityingly echoed. That possibil 
 ity, for her, he saw T would be monstrous:, and if she* 
 guaranteed him theimmunity from pain it would ac- 
 cordingly 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 
 
 225 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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, 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 encourage 
 ment. She only kept him waiting, however; that is 
 he only waited. It had become suddenly, from her 
 movement and attitude, beautiful and vivid to him 
 that she had something 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, 
 
 226 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 but all expectant. The end, none the less, was that 
 what he had expected 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 chim 
 ney 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 nowjj" 
 
 Now - ^-f" 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. 
 
 " 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 appeal- 
 ingly contradicted her ; in spite of which, however, he 
 showed once more his mystification. " What then has 
 happened? " 
 
 She was once more, with her companion s help, on 
 227 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 feel 
 ing 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 
 ihat was what he had figured as the beast in the 
 jungle, that was what had been in the lap of the gods. 
 HeTiad 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 distin 
 guished; 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 
 
 228 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 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 in 
 deed 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 sngp^nftf , and as giving 
 herself all, giving her life, to bring it to an end, .she 
 had Come WJth>im every step nf flip A*ray Hf hpfl IJvH 
 by her ?H, anH tn IP^IVP li^r hahinH wnnlH hr rmpTly, 
 damnably to miss her. ^Qiat^could be more_over- 
 \vhplmincr than tha? 
 
 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 want 
 ed; 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, zvas to ? " 
 
 " The thing that we began in our youth to watch 
 for." 
 
 Face to face with her once more he believed her; 
 229 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 it was a claim to which he had so abjectly little to op 
 pose. " You mean that it has come as a positive, def 
 inite 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 
 sybil. She visibly knew that she knew, and the effect 
 on him was of something co-ordinate, in its high char 
 acter, with the law that had ruled him. It was the 
 true voice of the law; so on her lips would 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 
 
 230 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 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 weakness 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 correction : " 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 
 231 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 combat his 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 pres 
 ent, 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 dread 
 ful sense of standing there before her for so far as 
 anything but this proved, this bottomless drop was con 
 cerned 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 
 unperturbed. " 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 that? " 
 
 " Don t! " May Bartram repeated. 
 232 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 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 mystifica 
 tion 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 face 
 as meaning all, and the sense of what knowledge 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 some 
 thing, or feared something, that moved her sympathy. 
 " I_wquld_live for you stillif 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 cham 
 ber of pain, rigidly guarded, was almost wholly forbid 
 den 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 
 
 233 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 indispensa 
 ble? Strange beyond saying were the ways of ex 
 istence, 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 ap 
 peared 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 ex 
 pected this approach to a double privation. Not only 
 had her interest failed him, but he seemed to feel him 
 self unattended and for a reason he couldn t sound 
 by the distinction, the dignity, the propriety, if noth 
 ing else, of the man markedly bereaved. It was as if, 
 in the view of society, he had not been markedly be 
 reaved, 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, 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 irritation more 
 helpless followed fast on these, the moments during 
 which, turning things over with a good conscience but 
 
 234 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 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 watching 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 accus 
 tomed to sonoriety 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 yearningly, 
 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 
 
 235 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 his old sense to his new was absolute 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 ques 
 tion of anything 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 muf 
 fled and masked. 
 
 The torment of this vision became then his occupa 
 tion ; he 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 consciousness. 
 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, 
 
 236 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 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, be 
 guiled 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 in 
 scribed 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, how 
 ever, 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. 
 
 VI 
 
 HE stayed away, after this, for a year ; he visited the 
 depths of Asia, spending himself on scenes of romantic 
 interest, of superlative sanctity; but what was present 
 to him every where 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 \vas that he had lost with everything else a 
 
 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 differ 
 ence; and there were hours when, before the temples 
 of gods and the sepulchres of kings, his spirit turned, 
 for nobleness of association, to the barely discriminated 
 slab in the London suburb. That had become for him, 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 Pha 
 raohs 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 ir 
 resistibly 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 him 
 self, 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 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 
 
 238 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 reviewing a piece of property. Whatever had hap 
 pened 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 amount 
 ed 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 back 
 ward 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 extraor 
 dinary manner, his other, his younger self; and to 
 wander, which was more extraordinary yet, round and 
 round a third presence not wandering she, but sta 
 tionary, 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 
 
 239 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 par 
 ticular 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, struggling up for him at the end, that, 
 whatever might have happened or not happened, he 
 would have come round of himself 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. AndL the 
 touch, in the event, was the face of a fellow-mortak 
 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 vis 
 itor 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. March 
 er s theory that these were elements in contact with 
 which he himself revived, had suffered, on this occa 
 sion, 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 
 
 240 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 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 shoived them that was 
 the point; he was moved, as he passed, by some im 
 pulse that 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 presented to him was con 
 scious 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 
 
 241 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 to him though he had given that name to other mat 
 ters as well took place, after his immediate vague 
 stare, as a consequence of this impression. The stran 
 ger 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 
 knowledge, 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 il 
 lumination 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 
 
 242 
 
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 
 
 all the past, the vision at the dread clearness of which 
 he turned as cold as the stone beneath him. Every 
 thing fell together, confessed, explained, overwhelmed ; 
 leaving him most of all stupefied at the 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 per 
 ceived, 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. Sfy> had hVrf wh n rnnlH <^y 
 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 per 
 haps even then recoverable, she had risen from her 
 chair to stand before him and let him imaginably 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 
 
 243 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 a moan now rose/lo his lips as he remembered she had 
 prayed he mightn t knowjH_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 some 
 thing 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, per 
 ceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, 
 for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes dark 
 ened 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 in 
 clinations 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, un 
 expected, if not perverse, in attitude, and almost equal 
 ly 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 ex 
 tremely mature, an opportunity of marriage that in 
 volved retirement, and the question of the new in 
 cumbents 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 ad 
 vantages if other qualifications were marked. Appli 
 cants, 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 
 
 245 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 his way diplomatic and whose voice, though not per 
 haps 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 remem 
 brance 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 great man, who was not 
 at that time so great. The little boy, during an ab 
 sence of his parents from England, had been danger 
 ously 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 per 
 fect judgment of Mrs. Gedge. Without children of her 
 own, she had particularly attached herself to this tini 
 est 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 an 
 other managed to assert itself as their permanent por 
 tion. The little boy s death would, as they said, have 
 done for them, yet his recovery hadn t saved them; 
 
 246 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 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 es 
 caped 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 capac 
 ity 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 Black- 
 port-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 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 su 
 preme poet, the Mecca of the English-speaking race. 
 The tears came into his eyes sooner still than into his 
 
 247 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 in 
 tolerable 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 sha n 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 
 remembers 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 collec 
 tion 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 
 
 248 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 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 housekeep 
 er : she was well above that, and the wave of her hand 
 wouldn t fail to be such as to show it. This, and much 
 else, she summed up as she answered her mate. " Our 
 special advantages are that you re a gentleman." 
 
 " 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 the vulgar 
 they find they don t do. We re poor and we re mod 
 est, 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 pretentious 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 surrounded him; the association 
 alone gave a nobler arch to the sky. " Allow that we 
 
 249 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 descrip 
 tion, she had been known, with a freedom felt by Black- 
 port to be slightly invidious, to declare. The Birth 
 place and that itself, after such a life, was exaltation 
 wouldn t be lodgings, since a house close 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 himself, 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 
 250 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 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 
 knozv 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 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 ex- 
 
 251 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 eluding 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 dif 
 ferent glow. It was just for that kind of poorness that 
 their new situation was, by its intrinsic charm, to con 
 sole 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 ex 
 hilaration most frequently took with him being a bitter 
 ness on the subject of the literary taste of Blackport. 
 No one w r as 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 com 
 menting and collating. Mrs. Gedge, who had sug 
 gested 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 de 
 claimed, they almost performed, their beneficent author. 
 
 252 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 He became speedily more than their author their per 
 sonal 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 
 a sudden and bathed his mind, all possession and com 
 prehension and sympathy, all the truth and the life 
 and the story, had come to him, and come, as the news 
 papers 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, doesn t 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 senten 
 tious 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 for 
 give them. You mustn t mention them there. We 
 sha n t, you know, be there for that." 
 
 " Dear no ! " he laughed : " we ll chuck out anyone 
 who hints at them." 
 
 253 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 pre 
 figured, 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 ad 
 dition 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 num 
 ber, and in some particulars by the nature, of which 
 they found themselves slightly depressed, various little 
 guides, handbooks, travellers tributes, literary memo 
 rials and other catch-penny publications, which, how 
 ever, were to be for the moment swallowed up in the 
 interesting episode of the induction or initiation ap 
 pointed for them in advance at the hands of several 
 persons whose connection 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 instructions from 
 above, about the shilling books and the well-known 
 
 254 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 facts and the full-blown legend, the supervision, the 
 subjection, the submission, the view as of a cage in 
 which he should circulate 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 competent 
 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 re 
 spectable 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 em 
 brace 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 per 
 ception 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 himself 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 
 
 255 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 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 acknowledging smile. That, 
 again, she took for a symptom of some pleading weak 
 ness in him he could never be as brave as she; so 
 that she wound up w r ith 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, con 
 tinued 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 every 
 thing to mother and me." " They," Gedge had al 
 ready noticed, referred constantly and hugely, in the 
 good woman s talk, to the millions who shuffled 
 through the house; the pronoun in question was for- 
 
 256 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 ever 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 perhaps 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 unobjectionable and, so far as was 
 possible, American. 
 
 " What I mean is," he explained, " is there any per 
 ceptible proportion that take an interest in Him ? " 
 
 His wife stepped on his toe; 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 pow 
 ers 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 neces 
 sity of having her anywhere, and he said, good-hu- 
 
 257 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 mouredly, " 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 experience." 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 ques 
 tions," 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 quickened his sense of all the ele 
 ments that were to reckon with, yet he felt at the same 
 time that the powers above were not what he should 
 
 258 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 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 in 
 quiring. " 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 gra 
 cious 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, put 
 ting 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. 
 
 259 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 ! " 
 
 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 sup 
 posed 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, sounding 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 
 resentfully 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 pos 
 sibility that was doubtless but part of his fine ecstasy, 
 
 260 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 "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 to 
 gether, with the general vividness and the new and 
 complete immersion, made rest for him almost impos 
 sible, 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, listening, 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 him 
 self, 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, predominant, 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 dis 
 quieting 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, contiguous 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 fore 
 saw 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 hus 
 band, he replied with a queer "But will he though?" 
 And she vaguely imaged the development of a domestic 
 antidote after a while, precisely, in the shape of cur 
 tains more markedly drawn and everything most mod 
 ern and lively, tea, "patterns," the newspapers, the fe- 
 
 261 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 male 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 con 
 tent 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 inter 
 val 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, al 
 together, 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 charac 
 ter ; he scarce knew what he might best have looked for, 
 but the three or four rooms bristled overmuch, 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 autographs 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 emo 
 tion, these things too recovered their advantage, min 
 istered 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 unchallenge- 
 ably so, but they had somehow, through long associa 
 tion, got, as Gedge always phrased it, into the secret, 
 and it was about the secret he asked them while he rest 
 lessly 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 
 
 262 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 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 immensely feel. And still, too, it 
 was not they who had done that most, since his senti 
 ment had gradually cleared itself to deep, to deeper re 
 finements. 
 
 The Holy of Holies of the Birthplace was the low, the 
 sublime 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 sen 
 tient 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 prob 
 ably 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 con 
 nected themselves, however feebly, with the positive 
 appearance. 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 pos 
 sibly 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 man- 
 
 263 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 ner, 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 tireless study of every 
 thing 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 pro 
 claim 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?" 
 
 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 if 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." 
 
 264 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 "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!" 
 
 "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 prac 
 tically confessed. "Well, it kept her up. I mean," he 
 amended, laughing, "it kept her down." 
 
 265 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 re 
 ply, though with his look a little sad for her, might 
 have denoted that, allowing for extravagance of state 
 ment, he saw there was something 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 fas 
 cinating." 
 
 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 
 
 266 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 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 ex 
 posed. 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 in 
 genuity 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 be 
 haviour, 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, 
 
 267 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 also represented, as a gain, a like seasoning of the 
 spirit by which he meant a certain command of im 
 penetrable patience. 
 
 The patience was needed for the particular feature 
 of the ordeal that, by the time the lively season was with 
 them again, had disengaged itself as the sharpest the 
 immense assumption of veracities and sanctities, of the 
 general soundness of the legend 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 individual, enter 
 tained 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 gentle 
 man, not one of the herd; a graceful woman, vague, 
 accidental, unconscious of him, but making him won 
 der, 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 ex 
 traordinary 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 
 
 268 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 dozen or so, that they expected. If he had thus ar 
 rived 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 be 
 come two quite different persons, the public and the pri 
 vate, and yet that it would somehow have to be man 
 aged that these persons should live together. He was 
 splitting into halves, unmistakeably 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 were moments when he recognized this pri 
 mary character as he had never done before; when he 
 in fact quite shook in his shoes at the idea that it per 
 haps had in reserve some supreme assertion of its 
 identity. It was honest, verily, just by reason of the pos 
 sibility. It was poor and unsuccessful because here it 
 was just on the verge of quarrelling with its bread and 
 butter. Salvation would be of course the salvation 
 of the showman rigidly 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 thou 
 sands 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 
 
 269 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 in 
 tensity. 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 
 listening: 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 appreciation 
 that she either didn t feel them or pretended not to 
 understand. 
 
 This was the greater complication that, with the re 
 turn 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 be 
 lieve 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, name 
 ly, 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 en 
 rich the legend. It was already, the legend, very tak 
 ing, but what was she there for but to make it more so ? 
 She certainly wasn t there to chill any natural piety. 
 
 270 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 If it was all in the air all in their "eye," as the vulgar 
 might say that He had been born in the Birthroom, 
 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 wonder 
 ful." He didn t want to hear her, and yet he didn t 
 want to give her her head ; he didn t want to make dif 
 ficulties 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 connec 
 tion, 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, 
 271 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 we don t know. There s very little to know. He cov 
 ered 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 be 
 gun 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 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? 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." 
 
 272 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 "Then why do you haul me up ?" 
 
 "Because it has seemed to me that we might, like true 
 companions, 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- 
 Ja-ckson. 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 mo 
 ment 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 evi 
 dence in particular 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, tell Them," 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 " 
 
 273 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 She stopped, however, changing it. " I ll tell 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 odd 
 ity, 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 with 
 out 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. 
 
 V 
 
 HE kept it up through the summer, but with the queer 
 est consciousness, 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 gregari 
 ously 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 
 breath from the line traced for him. That was the col 
 lective 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 
 
 274 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 the sack without mercy, it was absurd, he reflected, to 
 speak of his discomfort as light. He was gagged, he 
 was goaded, as in omnivorous companies he doubtless 
 sometimes showed by a strange 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 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 more ; everything else was out of order, to the relief of 
 a palm not formed by nature for a scoop. Yet in spite 
 of everything, 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 w r ish 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 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 inordinate 
 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 cult 
 ure, a tradition, a facility of some sort and all pro- 
 
 276 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 ducing 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 Birth- 
 room, 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 tran 
 scendent freedom; 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 impres 
 sion, 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 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, 
 
 277 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 as it were, no opening. He had let them look about be 
 low, 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 extraordi 
 nary 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 ut 
 tered 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 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 looking at him harder. Detached as he was he was in 
 terested 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" 
 
 The young man laughed. "It really I assure you 
 if I may wouldn t do any good. I m too awfully in 
 terested." 
 
 "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 complete 
 ly ceased to look about him that there seemed nothing 
 left for him but to talk avowedly with the caretaker. 
 "I m interested," he explained, "in what, I think, is the 
 interesting thing or at all events the eternally tor 
 menting one. The fact of the abysmally 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 ; it s 
 immense. He escapes us like a thief at night, carrying 
 off well, carrying off everything. And people pre 
 tend 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, 
 
 279 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 continued 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 com 
 panion. "I ll be hanged if He s here!" 
 
 It was almost as if he were taken that is, struck 
 and rather 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 ab 
 surdity of a quaver. And the young woman charm 
 ing creature ! still had another word. It was for the 
 guardian of the spot, and she made it, in her way, de 
 lightful. They had remained in the Holy of Holies, 
 and she had been looking for a minute, with a rueful 
 ness 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 ?" 
 
 280 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 "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." 
 
 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." 
 
 "Oh, we sha n t hurt you ! " the young man reassur 
 ingly laughed. 
 
 The twilight meanwhile had sensibly thickened ; the 
 281 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 pro 
 ducing an awkwardness which the young woman grace 
 fully 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 
 opening the door, as he would fain have kept the pair 
 on, and conscious 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?" 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 con 
 fusion 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 embarrass 
 ment ; producing 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 
 
 282 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 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 orig 
 inal 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 sum 
 mer eventide, stretched to right and left, with a gabled 
 and timbered house or two, and fairly seemed to have 
 cleared itself to congruity with 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 re 
 mark, 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 
 
 283 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 stillness, while the wife s little cry rang out. "But 
 wasn t 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 ki 
 Him every day." 
 
 He was aware of saying this so grimly more grim 
 ly than he wished that his companions exchanged a 
 glance and even perhaps looked as if they felt him ex 
 travagant. 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 pro 
 nounced incapable through deterioration of the brain. 
 "Then if there s no author, if there s nothing to be said 
 but that there isn t anybody," the young woman smil 
 ingly 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 inquired. 
 
 "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. 
 
 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 !" 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 VI 
 
 IT had made for him, all the same, an immense differ 
 ence; 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 pro 
 duce 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, af 
 firmed; 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 situa 
 tion unmistakeably marked by a visit from Grant- Jack 
 son, 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, occu 
 pied 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 successful in guarding 
 itself from indirect betrayals. There were two persons 
 in the world, at least, who felt as he did ; they were per 
 sons, 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 
 
 285 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 wash 
 ing his hands of the legend. He had crossed the line 
 he knew it ; he had struck wild They drove him to it ; 
 he had substituted, by a succession of uncontrollable pro 
 fanities, 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 dis 
 posed of by it, hurled by his fate against the bedizened 
 walls of the temple, quite in the way of a priest pos 
 sessed 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 predica 
 ment, nothing at all to do with frankness a luxury re 
 served 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 "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 mean 
 ing 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 
 
 286 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 beatific, and when once it had fairly been missed by 
 those who took it for granted, who, indeed, paid six 
 pence 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 expect 
 ing 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 him 
 self 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 war 
 ranted : 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; 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 
 
 287 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 re 
 ceived 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 pos 
 sible 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 consti 
 tuted 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-Jack 
 son 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 suf- 
 
 288 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 fice. Not to insist too much moreover on the question 
 of gratitude, he would let his 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 fol 
 low that up. Poor Gedge indeed would have been sorry 
 to oblige him, for he saw it was precisely to the atro 
 cious 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 rep 
 utably name, had happened since then. From the mo 
 ment 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 pos 
 session. 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 amf" 
 
 "Are those the words he used?" she asked with a 
 scruple. 
 
 289 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 is." 
 
 "Then it s something," Gedge went on, "to have 
 given that away. But," he added, "I ve taken it back." 
 
 "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. "If, that 
 is, you can only keep it there. If it doesn t struggle 
 up again." 
 
 290 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 "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 sac 
 rifice, 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 
 cheer ingly : "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 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, in 
 trinsically dull, was sitting down to supper. 
 
 He stiffened himself as he warmed his back ; he held 
 291 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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. 
 
 "I ll do my best," he said. 
 
 VII 
 
 "Do you remember us?" the gentleman asked and 
 smiled with the lady beside him smiling too; speak 
 ing so much less as an earnest pilgrim or as a tiresome 
 tourist than as an old acquaintance. It was history re 
 peating itself as Gedge had somehow 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 differ 
 ently, for a little older ; except, above all, that oh, see 
 ing 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 second spring ; the Birthplace, 
 
 292 
 
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 pre 
 sumption than the terms on which they had last parted 
 with him seemed to warrant; so that if he did inconse- 
 quently stare it was just in fact because he was so su 
 premely 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 recognising 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, with 
 in 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-be 
 trayal, 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 
 
 293 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 things went, exquisite a tribute to that queerness 
 which entitled 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 equiv 
 ocation; 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 bewilder 
 ment, and this compunctious 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 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 noth 
 ing "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 re 
 markable 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 pre 
 sumptions 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 dan 
 ger, 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, down- 
 
 294 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 stairs, 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 se 
 renity 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, hap 
 pily 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 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 
 insignificant of aspect unique on all the earth. 
 There is nothing like it" Morris Gedge went on, insist 
 ing as solemnly and softly, for his bewildered hearers, 
 as over a pulpit-edge ; "there is nothing at all like it any- 
 
 295 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 where 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 abso 
 lutely fewer changes, but where shall you find a pres 
 ence equally diffused, uncontested and undisturbed? 
 Where in particular shall you find, on the part of the 
 abiding spirit, an equally towering eminence? You 
 may find elsewhere eminence of a considerable 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, al 
 most 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 hearthstone scraped with 
 His little feet that we see the inconceivable child gaz 
 ing 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, wonder 
 fully done ; no auditors, for all his thousands, had ever 
 yet so inspired him. The odd, slightly alarmed shy 
 ness in the two faces, as if in a drawing-room, in their 
 " good society," exactly, some act incongruous, some 
 thing grazing the indecent, had abruptly been perpe 
 trated, the painful reality of which faltered before com- 
 
 296 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 ing 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 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 remarkable counte 
 nance 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 ap 
 pealed to in vain. "Charming, charming, Mr. Gedge !" 
 Mr. Hayes broke out ; "we feel that we ve caught you 
 in the rnood." 
 
 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 re really a genius!" 
 
 Gedge looked at her hard, but yielding no inch, even 
 though she touched him there at a point of conscious 
 ness 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 in 
 spiration so rich and free, that his poor wife now, liter 
 ally, 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 read 
 justed suspicion in which she wondered if he had not 
 simply embraced another, a different perversity. There 
 \vould 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 ro 
 mance as well as by too little ; she had not hitherto fairly 
 apprehended that there might be too much. It was a 
 
 297 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 depended, 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 conse 
 quence 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 revolu 
 tions. 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 winds were 
 now at rest. How could they be more so? he ap 
 pealed 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 plausibility rendered by his flushed 
 friends, this was because he felt in it the real ground of 
 his optimism. The charming woman before him ac 
 knowledged 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 
 
 298 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 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 hu 
 mour, 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 art 
 less cue with which, from moment to moment, clus 
 tered 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 atention 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, breath 
 lessly 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 pro 
 duced, he again looked round. "Consider it well : the 
 spot of earth !" "Oh, but it isn t earth!" the bold 
 est spirit there was always a boldest would gener 
 ally pipe out. Then the guardian of the Birthplace 
 would be truly superior as if the unfortunate had fig 
 ured 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 uncom 
 promising dig of his heel. "There ought to be a brass, 
 with an inscription, let in." "Into the floor?" it al 
 ways came. "Birth and burial : seedtime, summer, 
 
 299 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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? youVe 
 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 zvould 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 appeared. 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 remain 
 ing just uncertain enough to invoke Mr. Hayes s opin 
 ion. "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 slight 
 ly 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 
 
 300 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 of this charming creature and this keen, cautious gen 
 tleman, an interest resisting oblivion and surviving sep 
 aration, that had governed their return. Their other 
 visit had been the brightest thing that had ever hap 
 pened to him, but this was the gravest ; so that at the end 
 of a minute something broke in him and his mask, of it 
 self, fell off. He chucked, as he would have said, con 
 sistency; 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, 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 advent 
 ure 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 
 301 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 wasn t anyone 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 won 
 dered 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 Eng 
 land, 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 im 
 portant 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 ? " 
 
 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 
 
 302 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 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 dan- 
 ger?" 
 
 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 beast 
 ly 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 remem 
 ber," he smiled, " you created an anxiety for the op 
 posite 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 un 
 easy 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?" 
 
 303 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " Heavy. They brought ine down. That s why- 
 
 " Why you are down ? " Mrs. Hayes sweetly de 
 manded. 
 
 "Ah, but my dear man," her husband interposed, 
 " you re not down ; you re up! You re only up a differ 
 ent 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 every one? " 
 
 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 threat 
 en to make me, a bit nervous ; though I don t quite un 
 derstand 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-Jackson then my orig 
 inal backer, though I admit, for that reason, perhaps 
 my most formidable critic. It s with him, practically, 
 
 34 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 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." 
 
 " 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 proof 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 
 
 305 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 "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 ter 
 rible ! " smoothed it over, and their visit would have 
 failed of further excuse had not, at this instant, a move 
 ment 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 live 
 lier sign for him that this didn t matter than the pos 
 sibility 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?" 
 
 " God knows ! There it is. It s his horrid hour 
 it was 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 
 
 306 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 was the bare-headed good wife 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 announcement 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 
 brooding 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 sha n 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, doubtless, that instantly held Mrs. Gedge. " It 
 is to turn us out." 
 
 "Has he told you that, madam?" Mr. Hayes in 
 quired 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 aw 
 ful 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." 
 
 307 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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, zve must set you up." 
 
 Mrs. Hayes quickly abounded. "Oh, do come to 
 us !" 
 
 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 judgment. 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 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 of interest, for it seemed somehow to come from 
 tlmn 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 at 
 titude 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 
 some picture, a sentimental print, seen and admired in 
 his youth, a " Waiting for the Verdict," a " Counting 
 the Hours," or something of that sort; humble respect 
 ability 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," 
 
 309 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 dis 
 cussed 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 hand 
 some 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 intelli 
 gence 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." 
 310 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE 
 
 "Of income?" 
 
 " Of our sweet little stipend by a vote of the Com 
 mittee. That s what, as Chairman, he came to an 
 nounce." 
 
 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 in 
 articulate; partly beacuse 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 
 
 THERE was a longish period the dense duration 
 of a London winter, cheered, if cheered it could 
 be called, with lurid electric, with fierce " incandes 
 cent " flares and glares when they repeatedly met, at 
 feeding-time, in a small and not quite savoury pot 
 house a stone s throw from the Strand. They talked 
 always of pot-houses, 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 great 
 est, 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 gen 
 eral 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 invulner 
 able, 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 
 
 312 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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 free 
 dom 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 professional, far 
 afield from the Strand, but the curiosity with which 
 they came back was mostly greater than any other, the 
 Strand being for them, with its ampler alternative Fleet 
 Street, overwhelmingly the Papers, and the Papers be 
 ing, at a rough guess, all the furniture of their con 
 sciousness. 
 
 The Daily Press played for them the part played by 
 the embowered nest on the swaying bough for the par 
 ent 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 journalistic, than that even 
 of the most highly organised animal, into which, regu 
 larly, breathlessly, contributions had to be dropped 
 odds and ends, all grist to the mill, all somehow digest 
 ible and convertible, all conveyed with the promptest 
 possible beak and the flutter, often, of dreadfully fa 
 tigued 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 her 
 self she knew how to draw it, journalistically, where 
 
 313 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 other delicacies were concerned. She was fairly a prod 
 uct of the day so fairly that she might have been 
 born afresh each morning, to serve, after the fashion 
 of certain agitated ephemeral insects, only till the mor 
 row. 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 tem 
 per of Fleet Street, to the nerves of the nation. Maud 
 was a shocker, in short, in petticoats, and alike for the 
 thoroughfare, 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 in 
 tense actuality, as well as, positively, of a good fortune 
 to which, however impersonal she might have ap 
 peared, she was not herself in a position to do full jus 
 tice; the felicity of her having about her naturally so 
 much of the young bachelor that she was saved the dis 
 figurement 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 be her superiority to sex. 
 Nature, constitution, accident, whatever 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 
 
 314 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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 comparatively girlish. She fell naturally into gest 
 ures, tones, expressions, resemblances, that he either 
 suppressed, from sensibility to her personal predomi 
 nance, 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 con 
 cerned 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 he 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 
 
 315 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 her, he was so passive that it almost made him grace 
 ful and so attentive that it almost made him dis 
 tinguished. 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 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, inas 
 much 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 appar 
 ently 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 moreover only Howard s 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 recog 
 nised, she believed, in keen moments, a vocation; she 
 had recognised that there had been eleven of them at 
 home, with herself as youngest, and distinctions 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 comparatively had the luck. When he wrote 
 to people they consented, or at least they answered ; al 
 most always, for that matter, they answered with greed, 
 
 316 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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 established ; 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 recognition. 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, un 
 der 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 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 in 
 deed, as he had inevitably thus become a subject of falla 
 cious report, one half of his chronicle appeared to con 
 sist of official contradiction of the other half. His ac 
 tivity 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 inter- 
 mittences. 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 cru 
 cible. 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 consid 
 ered, many secrets, but they liked to think that they 
 
 317 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 inter 
 ested for what was it, in the last resort, but the inter 
 est of their bread and butter? in shrouding the ap 
 proaches 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 superficially multi 
 fold, fundamentally one, so that any revelation of their 
 being procured or procurable to float an object not in 
 trinsically buoyant would very logically convey dis 
 credit 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 nat 
 ure 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 in 
 dividually 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 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., 
 
 318 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 M.P., was to start on his visit to the Sultan of Samar- 
 cand 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 meaning, 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 press 
 ing 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 para 
 graph 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 some 
 thing 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 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 jab 
 bered about at all : whenever you try them whenever, 
 at least, I do I m confirmed 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 dcs yeux 
 de carpe? It suggests the eyes that a young newspaper 
 man seems to see all round him, and I declare I some 
 times feel that, if one has the courage not to blink at 
 the show, the gilt is a good deal rubbed off the ginger 
 bread of one s early illusions. They all do it, as the 
 song is at the music-halls, and it s some of one s sur 
 prises 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 fa 
 miliarity. We face the music. We see, we under 
 stand; we know we ve got to live, and how we do it. 
 But at least, like this, alone together, we take our in 
 tellectual revenge, we escape the indignity of being 
 fools dealing with fools. I don t say we shouldn t en 
 joy 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 work- 
 
 320 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 ing 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 con 
 sciousness 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 shil 
 lingsthere 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, destitute of skill or art, but with ear enough to 
 be performed to, sometimes strangely touched, at mo 
 ments completely ravished, by a fine violinist. He was 
 her fiddler and genius; she was 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 keep 
 ing it afloat not only were what the situation safely 
 
 321 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 uni 
 forms, with inexorable braided " buns " in the nape of 
 weak necks, these sessions, sometimes prolonged, in 
 halls of oilcloth, among penal-looking tariffs and pyra 
 mids 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, man 
 nerless 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 any 
 one, 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 mother 
 ly, have been romantic ? She nevertheless at this mo 
 ment 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 
 
 322 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 everything, at everything, over everything, under 
 everything, that has taken place for the last twenty 
 years. He s always present, and, though he never 
 makes a speech, he never fails to get alluded to in the 
 speeches of others. That s doing it cheaper than any 
 one 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 any 
 thing, 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 advertise 
 ments, 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 pict 
 ure, had become more present. " He can t get him 
 self 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. " Something perhaps could be done with it 
 only it would take imagination." 
 
 323 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 ques 
 tion not of what you or I might be able to do with it, 
 but of what the poor man himself may. That s what 
 I meant just now," she explained, " by my having a 
 creepy sense of what may happen for him. It has al 
 ready more than once occurred to me. Then," she 
 wound up, " we shall have real life, the case itself." 
 
 "Do you know youve got imagination?" Her 
 friend, rather interested, appeared by this time to have 
 seized her thought. 
 
 " 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 Frankenstein, 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 ele 
 ments which his eyes had for a minute earnestly fixed. 
 " But it will take a lot of doing." 
 
 " Oh," said Maud, " we sha n t have to do it. He ll 
 do it himself." 
 
 " I wonder." Howard Bight really wondered. " The 
 fun would be for him to do it for 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 per 
 sonally? 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 
 
 324 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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 ad 
 dress, 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 recon 
 sidered his opinion on the subject of the blankets sup 
 plied to the Upper Tooting Workhouse Infirmary. 
 He has reconsidered his opinion on no subject what 
 ever 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 al 
 leged 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 it in your 
 bones does come into play the thought s too beauti 
 ful! he 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 con 
 sciousness so cherished that he never could write ten 
 lines without use of the words. 
 
 325 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 rea 
 son 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 see 
 ing enough to see to have had so luridly revealed to 
 you the doom of Beadel-MufYet ? " 
 
 " Oh, he s not my business, he s yours. You re his 
 man, or one of his men he ll come back to you. Be 
 sides, he s a special case, and, as I say, I m too sorry 
 for him." 
 
 326 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 "That s a proof then of what you do see." 
 Her silence for a moment admitted it, though evi 
 dently 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? " 
 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 your 
 self. But I sha n 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 Sat 
 urdays, 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 
 
 327 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 the group, but standing a little off, had his eyes on her 
 for some extravagant, though apparently quite respect 
 able, purpose. He had been waiting for her to recog 
 nise 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 rec 
 ognition was accompanied with a pang that his ami 
 able 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 Chippendale, the photograph 
 ic, 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 shy confession 
 that he preferred after all the novel of adventure to 
 the novel of subtlety. Her embarrassment was there 
 fore now the greater as, touching to behold, he so 
 clearly had approached her with no intention of asper 
 ity, 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 goodnatured about the interview, had begot 
 ten in her a sharper envy, a hungrier sense of the in 
 vidious distinctions of fate, than any her literary con 
 science, 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 
 
 328 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 nothing nothing but the vulgar need of offering him 
 to brag, on his behalf, 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 repre 
 sented 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 exuber 
 ance 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, 
 
 329 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 that 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 photo 
 graphs, 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 ap 
 parently waiting to speak to her, would be a pretext for 
 
 330 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 a break before the poor gentleman should begin to ac 
 cuse 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 inter 
 val 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 
 business; 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 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 he. 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 sha n 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 re 
 member 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 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 will. He s hopeless^ or rather / am. I m no good. 
 And he knows it." 
 
 "O oh ! " the young man kindly but vaguely pro 
 tested. " 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-MufTet is." 
 
 "Oh, I hope not ! " said Bight with grim amuse 
 ment. 
 
 His friend was struck with his tone. " Do you 
 mean it s coming on for Beadel-MufTet what we talked 
 about ? " And then as he looked at her so queerly that 
 her curiosity took a jump : " It really and truly is? 
 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 liter 
 ally 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." 
 
 " 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 d un plus petit que soi. Keep quiet, 
 and we shall see something." 
 
 This was very well ; only his manner visibly had for 
 
 332 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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 
 sha n t deceive him, certainly, but I might as well en 
 joy 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 situa 
 tion 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 hap 
 pened to him?*" 
 
 333 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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." 
 
 " 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 un- 
 stand that Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., par 
 ticularly 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 misapprehension 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 re 
 mark, 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 ris 
 ing 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 more than cynical? " 
 
 " It makes you sardonic. Wicked," she continued; 
 " devilish." 
 
 334 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 " 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 be 
 reaved 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. 
 
 1 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 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 it 
 self enough for me. You, on your side, however, I 
 think, make it out what you call something worse, be 
 cause of the romantic bias of your mind. You see 
 
 335 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 inter 
 est 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." 
 
 " You 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 consciously 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 female humbug," Bight pursued, " how much 
 you d like him yourself." 
 
 336 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 " I want, while I m about it, to pity him in sufficient 
 quantity." 
 
 " Precisely. Which means, for a woman, with ex 
 travagance 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 wo 
 man?" 
 
 " 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 
 sha n 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 Beau 
 mont 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 her- 
 self down to the mothers and grandmothers of the six- 
 
 337 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 penny young women, the young women of the pro 
 grammes, 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 discus 
 sion?" 
 
 " Why, the one he thinks there ought to have been. 
 There hasn t been any, of course, but he wants it, dread 
 fully 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? 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 w r ork 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 noth 
 ing 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 Cori- 
 sanda, 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, 
 
 338 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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 prominence, 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 Mar 
 shal 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 pri 
 vate 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, nat 
 urally, 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 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." 
 
 339 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 guar 
 antee, 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 man 
 age to smash a pane of glass somewhere ! " 
 
 " That s what he thought / 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-con 
 ductor." 
 
 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 pos 
 sible for her not to make him acquainted with Mr. Mor 
 timer Marshal. This gentleman had clearly waylaid 
 her and had also clearly divined that her companion 
 was of the Papers papery all through; which doubt 
 less 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 ad 
 venture, all in their line, like another ; and he had car 
 ried them, in a four-wheeler, to a small and refined 
 
 340 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 club in a region which was as the fringe of the Picca 
 dilly region, where even their own presence scarce 
 availed to contradict the implication of the exclusive. 
 The whole occasion, they were further to feel, was es 
 sentially a tribute to their professional connection, espe 
 cially that side of it which flushed and quavered, which 
 panted and pined in their host s personal nervousness. 
 Maud Blandy now saw it vain to contend with his de 
 lusion that she, underfed and imprinted, 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 w r as 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, 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 re 
 wards, this fact by itself but scantily eased her, con 
 vinced as she was that no luck but her own was as hope 
 less 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, and 
 wouldn t if it hadn t been for her companion. Her 
 companion 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 mis 
 lead and to mystify. He was, as she wasn t, on the 
 Papers and of them, and their baffled entertainer 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, muf 
 fins, afternoon performances, 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 
 
 342 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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 inspiration plumped against 
 her fate even as an imprisoned insect against the win 
 dow-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 com 
 fort was that, for the half-hour it had made the sit 
 uation 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 him that she hadn t brought him, com- 
 punctiously as to the past, a master of the proper art. 
 
 343 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 conscious 
 ness. The air was full, as from afar, of the grand in 
 difference 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 spin 
 ning in many different directions. Superficially, at 
 Richmond, our young couple rested found a quiet cor 
 ner 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 scorching, 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 gen 
 eral 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 pre 
 vented, and because in the second she had thus the 
 
 344 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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 disappointments. She did it to show why she 
 couldn t go with him when he was so awfully sweep 
 ing. 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 but one person I ve ever written to who has 
 so much as noticed my letter." 
 
 He wondered, painfully affected it rather over 
 whelmed 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 feroc 
 ity, 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 prom 
 inent for to be interviewed, so as to keep me going; 
 
 345 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 important ; and I hint it just enough to 
 see that the importance fetches them no more than any 
 thing 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 instinct 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 your 
 self as the distinction you make seems to imply. It 
 isn t luxury to be nine-tenths of the time sick of every 
 thing. People moreover are worth to me but tup 
 pence 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 some 
 times been of the funniest. Besides, I m getting out of 
 it," the young man wound 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 com- 
 346 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 ing. 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 
 experience 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 com 
 panion laughed, " that he will, after to-morrow di 
 rectly or indirectly do me." 
 
 " Will you take it from him then only to get him in 
 
 347 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 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 touch 
 ing 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 
 
 348 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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 sud 
 denly 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 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 
 
 349 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 noth 
 ing 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 
 introduction of matter irrelevant, have seemed intended 
 to dissipate whatever was left of his proposal of mar 
 riage. That proposal, however, had been somehow 
 both too much in the tone of 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 something to be done. He doesn t half 
 hate me." 
 
 350 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 "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, shaking 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 illustration 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 con 
 tinued 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 to 
 gether, and during these days many things had hap 
 pened. 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 bit 
 terness 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 
 
 351 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 got itself taken before 
 she went to bed ; which indeed was what had happened 
 to the extent of her writing, on the spot, a meditated 
 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 had 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 constantly 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 
 
 352 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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 ab 
 sence. 
 
 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 Mid 
 dlesex Incurables. These familiar announcements, 
 however, far from appeasing her curiosity, had an ef 
 fect upon her nerves ; she read into them mystic mean 
 ings that she had never read before. Her freedom of 
 mind in this direction was indeed at the same time lim 
 ited, for her own horizon was already, by the Monday 
 night, bristling with new possibilities, and 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 con 
 sciousness further, felt it for the moment quite im 
 pressively, enriched. " Personal Peeps Number 
 Ninety-Three : a Chat with the New Dramatist " need- 
 
 353 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 ed 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 in 
 telligence, 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 Chip 
 pendale Club into the air with such a turn that it had 
 fluttered down again, like a blown feather, miles from 
 
 354 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 its site. 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 ac 
 quaintance, 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 won 
 drous 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 hav 
 ing as much to tell him as to hear from him. It ap 
 peared 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 him 
 self 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 produc 
 ing 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 
 
 355 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 disavowal 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 Mor 
 timer Marshal? It isn t that he s not in the seventh 
 heaven !" 
 
 "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? " 
 
 356 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 " 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 appre 
 ciates." 
 
 "Me?" 
 
 " Me first of all, I think. All the more that I ve 
 had fancy ! a proof of my stuff, the despised and re 
 jected, 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 ex 
 pect. 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." 
 
 " You feel," he presently asked, " quite differently 
 so differently 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 
 
 357 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 as pleased as Punch. Or, rather, you re not quite en 
 tirely 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 bathroom, 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 trou 
 sers." 
 
 "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 amus 
 ing- " 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 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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 cliez soiJ The interviewer at 
 home." 
 
 Her companion took it in. " Your place is on my 
 sideboard 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 some 
 thing 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 con 
 sequently asked. " What is it, in the name of good 
 ness, 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 everything off, and that s 
 exactly the job that makes the biggest noise. It ap 
 pears 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 
 
 359 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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, r he wearily smiled, " you have it. Be 
 sides," 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 will ring with it. He van 
 ished on Tuesday night was then last seen at his club. 
 Since then he has given no sign. How can a man dis 
 appear 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 ?" 
 
 360 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 " 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 themselves. 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 ? " 
 
 " 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 discour 
 aged. "Mayn t he be, honestly, mad?" 
 
 361 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 grav 
 ity, 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 sha n t pity you." 
 
 " You make it, then, everyone except me ? " 
 
 " I mean," she continued, " if you do have to loathe 
 yourself." 
 
 " Oh, I sha n t miss it." And then as if to show how 
 little, " I did mean it, you know, at Richmond," he de 
 clared. 
 
 " I won t have you if you ve killed him," she present 
 ly returned. 
 
 362 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 " 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, ap 
 peals to you as the number of the muses ? " 
 
 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 hap 
 pened. 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. 
 
 363 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 engaged." 
 
 " 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 bet 
 ter." 
 
 Well, Bight easily guessed. " For my job? " 
 " To see what can be done. She loathes his pub 
 licity." 
 
 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 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 talk 
 ing about. She wants him straight out of them 
 straight-" 
 
 She too ? " Bight wondered. " Then she s in ter 
 
 ror? 
 
 364 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 " 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 sup 
 posed, to understand from her. My relation with her 
 is now that I do understand and that if an improvement 
 takes place I sha n t have been the worse for it. There 
 fore 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 men 
 tion, distinctly, that he himself hates, or pretends to 
 hate, the exhibition daily made of him." 
 
 " She speaks of it," Bight asked, " as pretend 
 ing- -? r 
 
 Maud straightened it out. " She feels him that 
 she practically 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, meanwhile when 
 he comes to you is how you forward the muzzling." 
 
 " The Press, my child," Bight said, " is the watch 
 dog of civilization, and the watchdog happens to be it 
 can t be helped 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." 
 
 365 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 in 
 spiration." 
 
 " 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 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 up, as at the end of their story, but they stood a mo 
 ment while he waited for change. " If it comes out," 
 the girl dropped, " that will save him. If he s dishon 
 oured as I see her she ll have him, because then he 
 won t be ridiculous. And I can understand it." 
 
 Bight looked at her in such appreciation that he for 
 got, 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." 
 
 " 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 ad 
 vantage. " 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 roar 
 ing Strand : " With worship." It made her, after a 
 minute, meet his eyes, but something just then occurred 
 
 367 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 that stayed any word on the lips of either. A sound 
 reached their ears, as yet unheeded, the sound of news 
 boys in the great thoroughfare shouting " extra-spe 
 cials " 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. " Bea- 
 del-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 pavements, 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 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. 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 " 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 : " Mys 
 terious Disappearance of Prominent Public Man ! " It 
 seemed to swell as they listened ; Maud started with im 
 patience. " 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 pro 
 portionately 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 an 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. 
 
 VI 
 
 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 
 
 369 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 topics. The question of his whereabouts, of his ante 
 cedents, 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 compan 
 ion. The rumours and remarks were mostly very 
 wonderful, and all of a nature to sharpen the excite 
 ment 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 unsup 
 ported 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 " some 
 thing 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 
 
 370 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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 ap 
 proached, been besieged; yet Bight, in all the prompt 
 ness, had markedly withdrawn from the game had 
 had, one could easily judge, already too much to do 
 with it. Who but he, otherwise, would have been so 
 naturally let loose upon the forsaken home, the bewil 
 dered circle, the agitated club, the friend who had last 
 conversed with the eminent absentee, the waiter, in ex 
 clusive 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 unspoken. 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 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 affected her. Mrs. Chorner was a person she liked 
 a connection more to her taste than any she had pro 
 fessionally 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 " pro 
 duce " 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, de 
 pended 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 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 mys 
 tery lasted. It grew of course daily richer, adding to 
 its mass as it went and multiplying its features, loom 
 ing especially larger through the cloud of correspond 
 ence, communication, suggestion, supposition, specula 
 tion, 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 for 
 est. 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 engagement to luncheon a step of which 
 
 372 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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 agitation 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 conven 
 iences of first-class flats, the memory of Chippendale 
 teas, ceased to be actual or ceased at any rate to be im 
 portunate. Her old interview, furbished into fresh 
 ness, 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 be 
 fell 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 herself, 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 appoint 
 ments, which she had desired at the moment, and in 
 deed more each time, not to take up ; to the extent even 
 that, catching sight of him, unperceived, on one of these 
 occasions, in her inveterate Strand, she checked on the 
 
 373 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 convinced 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-MufTet, 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 en 
 joyed being perfectly aware of the place occupied, in 
 her present attitude to that young man, by the simple 
 impossibility of not seeing 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 prob 
 ably " 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, indubitably, but she 
 had not it was equally unmistakeable done with let 
 ting 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 communicated to her friend. He 
 was her friend, after all whatever should happen ; and 
 
 374 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 there were things that, even in that hampered charac 
 ter, 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 gro 
 tesque reflector, a full-length looking-glass of the in 
 ferior quality that deforms and discolours. It made 
 her, as a flirt, a figure for frank derision, and she en 
 tertained, honest girl, none of the self-pity that would 
 have spared her a shade of this sharpened conscious 
 ness, 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 of her head, for 
 any wish she could have achieved to remain vague 
 about them, just as she might have rehearsed, disheart 
 ened, postures of grace, for any dream she could com 
 pass 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 con 
 nection 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 
 
 375 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 him " Do you suppose I suppose that if it came to the 
 point ? " her reasons for such avoidance being eas 
 ily 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, rec 
 tifications 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 be 
 cause in the second it would have seemed a sort of chal 
 lenge 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 suspended state, made her uncomfortable; 
 she was haunted by the after-sense of having perhaps 
 been fatuous. A spice of conviction, 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 her 
 self, 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 un 
 conscious of how the change had worked. Such work 
 ings were queer but there they were ; the foolish man 
 had become odious to her precisely because she was 
 hardening her face for Bight. The latter was no fool 
 ish man, but this it was that made it the more a pity he 
 should have placed the impassable 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 
 
 376 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 wrong, it was a wrong she couldn t somehow get out 
 of that; which was a proof, no doubt, that she con 
 fusedly 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 straight- 
 ness 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 inconsistent 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 un- 
 uttered 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 pre 
 sume ? died, in the hole, as the only way not to see, to 
 hear, to know, let alone be known, heard, seen. Final 
 ly, while he lay there relieved by the only relief, here 
 
 377 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 was poor Mortimer Marshal, undeterred, undismayed, 
 unperceiving, so hungry to be paragraphed in some 
 thing 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. Just that, beyond every 
 thing, was the incoherence that made for rather dismal 
 farce, and on which Bight had put his ringer in naming 
 the author of Corisanda as a candidate, in turn, for the 
 comic, the tragic vacancy. It was a wonderful mo 
 ment for such an ideal, and the sight was not really to 
 pass from her till she had seen the whole of the won 
 der. A fortnight had elapsed since the night of Bead- 
 el s disappearance, and the conditions attending the af 
 ternoon 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 in 
 volved; the audience, for reasons traceable, being dif 
 ferently composed. A lady of " high social position," 
 desirous still further to elevate that character by the ob 
 vious aid of the theatre, had engaged a playhouse for a 
 series of occasions on which she was to affront in per 
 son 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 con 
 sciousness 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 com 
 municated with Bight, who could be sure of a ticket, 
 proposing to him that they should go together and of 
 fering 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, look 
 ing kind enough ; but it didn t make him, she felt, more 
 natural. " My dear, it s all beyond me." 
 
 378 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 " 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 amazement 
 against which one hasn t, for all one s experience, been 
 proof. That sense of having been sold again pro 
 duces emotions that may well, on occasion, be reflected 
 in the countenance. There you are." 
 
 Well, he might say that, " There you are," as often 
 as he liked without, at the pass they had come to, mak 
 ing her in the least see where she was. She was only 
 just where she stood, a little apart in the lobby, listen 
 ing to his words, which she found eminently character 
 istic of him, struck with an odd impression of his talk 
 ing against time, and, most of all, tormented to recog 
 nise 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 appropriate 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 
 
 379 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 move 
 ment 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 incandes 
 cent, 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, however, 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 approached. The Papers had come 
 into sight in the form of a small boy bawling the 
 " Winner " of something, and at the same moment they 
 recognised their reprieve they recognised also the pres 
 ence of Mortimer Marshal. 
 
 He had no shame about it. " I fully believed I should 
 find you." 
 
 " But you haven t been," Bight asked, " inside? " 
 380 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 " Not at to-day s performance I only just thought 
 I d pass. But at each of the others," Mortimer Mar 
 shal 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 charac 
 ter 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 ex 
 press. 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 do 
 mestic ceiling. Truly she was, as by the education of 
 the strain undergone, 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 con 
 tinued rather mystified by the actual pitch of her com 
 rade 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 gentleman, 
 she by that time saw, was to make her friend nervous 
 and vicious, and the form taken by his irritation was 
 
 381 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 just this dangerous candour, which encouraged the 
 candour of the victim. She had for the latter a resid 
 uum 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 her 
 self helpless before his smug insistence. She had taken 
 his measure; he was made incorrigibly to try, irre 
 deemably to fail to be, in short, eternally defeated and 
 eternally unaware. He wouldn t rage he couldn t, 
 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 inordinately ex 
 cited, met this suggestion with an amendment that fair 
 ly 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 pot 
 house that we poor journalists haunt." 
 
 " They re just the places I delight in it would be 
 of an extraordinary 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 apprecia 
 tion that she knew him as lost indeed. 
 
 382 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 VII 
 
 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, ad 
 vised 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 ap 
 petising 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 appetising, 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 re 
 doubled, and he led his lamb to the shambles. The talk 
 had jumped to poor Beadel 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 what- 
 
 383 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 ever queer box or tight place Beadel might have found 
 himself, it was something, after all, to have so power 
 fully 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 in 
 terested." They had that phenomenon the present 
 consummate interest well before them while they sat 
 at their homely meal, served with accessories so differ 
 ent 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 table 
 cloth, 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 author 
 ity 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 in 
 tention worked. What was it, all the same since it 
 couldn t be anything so simple as to expose their hap 
 less 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 mean 
 while in the phase of bluffing it off, precisely because it 
 was to overwhelm him. 
 
 "And do you mean you too would pay with your 
 
 384 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 life? " He put the question, agreeably, across the 
 table to his guest; agreeably of course in spite of his 
 eye s dry glitter. 
 
 His guest s expression, at this, fairly became beauti 
 ful. "Well, 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 pleas 
 ure; 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 men 
 tioned. 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 goodnaturedly 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 
 willing?" 
 
 "Mr. Marshall wonders," Maud said to Bight, "if 
 you are, as a person interested in his reputation, defi 
 nitely 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 com 
 panion. "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 
 
 385 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 if you can think of the impression so made as worth 
 the purchase. Naturally, naturally, there s but the im 
 pression 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 be 
 wildered 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 admira 
 tion 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 jibe. He might conceivably 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 " mur 
 mur " if Mr. Marshal was ready to pay the price. And 
 the price wouldn t of course be only Mr. Marshal s ex 
 istence. 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 vol 
 umes. " It would depend a good deal upon who one 
 ." 
 
 He turned, Mr. Marshal, again to Maud Blandy, 
 and his eyes seemed to suggest to her that she should 
 
 386 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 put his question for him. They forgave her, she 
 judged, for having so oddly forsaken him, but they ap 
 pealed 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 re 
 vert to their friend. " Oh," he said, with a rich wistful- 
 ness 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 catas 
 trophe 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 w," he threw out, " absent ! " 
 
 " Why, he s absent, of course," said Bight, " if he s 
 dead." 
 
 " And really dead is what you believe him to be? " 
 
 He breathed it with a strange break, as from a mind 
 
 387 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 some 
 how 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 some 
 thing. " He ought then to come back. I mean," he 
 explained, " to see for himself to have the impres 
 sion." 
 
 "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 can t! " 
 
 " 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 in 
 stant 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? " 
 388 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 " Before "Marshal met it" the interest has sub 
 sided. It naturally then wouldn t would it? sub 
 side ! " 
 
 " No," Bight granted; " not if it hadn t, through 
 wearing out I mean your being lost too long al 
 ready 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." 
 
 The poor gentleman stared. " But if he can t help 
 himself ? " 
 
 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 con 
 sider 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 be 
 fore." 
 
 " 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 some one to take it ! For the light it would throw, 
 I mean, on the laws so mysterious, so curious, so in 
 teresting that govern the great currents of public at 
 tention. They re not wholly whimsical wayward and 
 wild; they have their strange logic, their obscure rea 
 son if one could only get at it ! The man who does, 
 
 389 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 preoccupa 
 tion, 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 supplanting for the time every other 
 topic must have someone on the spot for him, to 
 keep the pot boiling, someone acting, with real intelli 
 gence, 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 Hat, 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 waistcoat 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. 
 
 " 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 reappearance? I see. But the man of the reap 
 pearance would have, wouldn t he? or perhaps I don t 
 follow? to be the same as the man of the cfoyappear- 
 ance. It wouldn t do as well would it? for some 
 body else to turn up? " 
 
 390 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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, of the disap 
 pearance." 
 
 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. Mar 
 shal 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 re 
 sponsive 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 col 
 lapse 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, inspired ones? " 
 
 "If I should undertake such a case as we re sup 
 posing, I would of course by that circumstance under 
 take 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 ? " 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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. " I don t know what you re making me say; I 
 
 1 don t know what you re making me feel. 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 re 
 sponse. " 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, as 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 sha n 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 pro 
 duce you, of course," Bight went on, " till I ve pre- 
 
 392 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 pared 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 ver 
 tiginous 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 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? " 
 
 393 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 some one 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 tri 
 umphed at her "I m not 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 answ r ered. " It s true." 
 
 VIII 
 
 THE first thing, on the part of our friends after each 
 interlocutor, producing a penny, had plunged into 
 the unfolded " Latest " was this very evidence of 
 their dispensing with their companion s further attend 
 ance 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 in 
 sufflation 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 ar 
 ranged, 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 be 
 fore he gave himself to the breeze. The essentials in 
 deed he was, by their understanding, to receive in full 
 
 394 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 from Bight at their earliest 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, more 
 over, 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 com 
 munion, 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 re 
 markable at least as poor Beadel s suicide, which we re 
 call her having so considerably discounted. 
 
 Present as they thus were at the tragedy, present in 
 far Frankfort 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 re 
 sponsibility, given the facts, might, if pried into, be 
 held and not only at the judgment-seat of mere mor 
 als to reach. The dismay was to that degree il 
 luminating 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 
 
 395 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 oc 
 curred, 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 mo 
 ments, 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 with con 
 stables, 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 Gar 
 den, 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 question 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 pre 
 dicament, 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 tq 
 
 396 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 redeem. At present he had one, indeed, and Maud 
 could ask herself if the redemption of it, with the lead 
 ing of their wretched friend a further fantastic dance, 
 would be what he depended on to drug the pain of re 
 morse. 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, dis 
 owned or evaded the news. Howard Bight, help-less 
 and passive, putting 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 Embank 
 ment. 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 wondering, in 
 sensible group, the English gentleman, in the dis 
 ordered room, driven to bay among the scattered per 
 sonal objects that only too floridly announced and em 
 blazoned him, and several of which the Papers were al 
 ready naming the poor English gentleman, 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 
 
 397 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 connec 
 tions 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 unfathomed 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 reproba 
 tion 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 say 
 ing : " 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 un 
 der provocation of the most positive order, was the 
 
 398 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 chance thus failing him, or the train, the boat, the ad 
 vantage, 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 con 
 tents of his pockets, in order to lay them on the para 
 pet before jumping into the river. Wonderful was 
 the difference that this transformation, marked by no 
 word and supported by no sign, made in the man she 
 had hitherto known. Nothing, again, could have so 
 expressed 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 win 
 dows." 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 
 
 399 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 ex 
 actly what she doesn t; she never has. And that he, 
 poor wretch, was always wanting to " 
 
 " 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." 
 
 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 m-e" 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. " Thai 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 ? " 
 
 400 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 " 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, my 
 self, 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 your 
 self? " 
 
 " 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 under 
 standing 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 decided that 
 he still did matter. She presently moved again, and 
 
 401 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 re 
 ceived; and it began accordingly, on the instant, to 
 affect her as almost inconceivably romantic, absolutely, 
 in a manner, and quite out of the blue, dramatic; im 
 measurably 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 him 
 self had renounced pushing. A part of the whole sub 
 limity 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 be 
 fore you rush back to them. Take it even oh, you 
 
 402 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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 pa 
 tience. You ought by this time, you know, to un 
 derstand." 
 
 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 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 proba 
 bility 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 her, 
 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 
 
 403 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 with 
 out 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 be 
 yond 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. 
 
 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 of 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 
 
 404 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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 an 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 bet 
 ter have stopped short. I mean short of this." 
 
 " You may say it," Bight answered. " I had bet- 
 ten" 
 
 She had 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 i 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 some 
 thing 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 ? " 
 
 405 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 ex 
 plains." 
 
 " Explains what?" 
 
 " Why, his act." 
 
 He gave a sign of impatience. " Isn t the explana 
 tion 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. 
 
 IX 
 
 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, How- 
 
 406 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 ard 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 fugi 
 tive, 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 inextinguish 
 able flame, in fine, of the ironic passion? The ironic 
 passion, in such a world as surrounded one, might as 
 sert itself as 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 vul 
 gar) 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 con- 
 
 407 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 tinuance, 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 BeadeFs course loomed, each hour, so 
 much larger and darker that the plan would have to 
 be consummate, or the private knowledge alike be 
 yond cavil and beyond calculation, which should at 
 tempt 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 in 
 fernal, and would of course be especially so were his 
 knowledge as real as she supposed it. He would in 
 flate 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 ap 
 prehension, 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 con 
 ceit of the chill air of the upper and increasing soli 
 tudes to which he had soared, he would become such a 
 diminishing speck, though traceably a prey to wild hu- 
 
 408 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 man 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 haunt 
 ing light of the inevitably unlimited 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 hy 
 potheses, most of them lurid enough, but a certain 
 ease of mind as to what these might lead to was per 
 haps 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, 
 proceeding from link to link, would arrive vindictively 
 at Bight s connection with his late client. The enjoy 
 ment of that consummation 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, complicated and ar- 
 rangeable, between Frankfort and London, only on 
 some system unknown to her more in tune with pos 
 sibilities of exposure. It was not, as need scarce be 
 said, from the exposure of Beadel that she averted her 
 self; 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 reflec 
 tions, 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; 
 
 409 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 pres 
 ently 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 extra 
 ordinary 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 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 in 
 dustry 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 de 
 cided. It was as if from her hilltop, from her very 
 house-top, 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 in 
 dication, in Covent Garden, she walked across south 
 ward and to the top of the street in which she and her 
 friend had last parted with Mortimer Marshal. She 
 
 410 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 came down to their favoured pothouse, the scene of 
 Bight s high compact with that worthy, and here, 
 hesitating, she paused, uncertain 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, how 
 ever, 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 bring 
 ing him succour as to a Russian anarchist, to some 
 victim of society or subject of extradition, was all her 
 own, and was of this special moment. She saw him 
 with his hat over his eyes; she saw him with his over 
 coat 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 ro 
 mantic sense, and everything vanished but the richness 
 of her thrill. She knew little enough what she might 
 have to do for him, but her 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 
 
 411 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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 for 
 getfully, 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 con 
 sider 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. Be 
 sides, besides ! " He had, in short, another certi 
 tude. 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," 
 
 412 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 " Have you been then yourself? " 
 
 " For what do you take me?" He seemed to won 
 der. " 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 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 deter 
 mined 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 in 
 duce me to take her out." 
 
 " Then you potted her, permit me to say," he an 
 swered, " on absolutely false pretences." 
 
 413 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 "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 overflowing, 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, 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." 
 
 " I see." Howard Bight saw all. " And that s why 
 you re ashamed? " 
 
 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 ex 
 plain. I can t I can t to lier. So that," the girl went 
 on, " I shall have done, so far as her attitude to me 
 was to be concerned, something more indelicate, some 
 thing more indecent, than if I had passed her on. I 
 shall have wormed it all out of her, and then, by not 
 
 414 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 having carried it to market, disappointed and cheated 
 her. She was to have heard it cried like fresh her- 
 ring." 
 
 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 dishonoured, 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, be 
 tween 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 de 
 veloped, " was that you couldn t get in. Then sud 
 denly, with a splendid jump, you are in. Only, how 
 ever, 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 morn 
 ing (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, 
 
 415 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 but that I ve felt her, since parting with her, simply to 
 be too good." 
 
 " 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 con 
 tinued, " 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. " k 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 open 
 ness ! I don t know what s the matter. Except, 
 
 that is, that you re great." 
 
 She looked at him, not drawing back. " You know 
 416 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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 don t 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, 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 
 
 i t p " 
 
 " 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 expect his situation won t be traced to you? 
 Don t you suppose you ll be forced to speak? " 
 
 " To speak ? " 
 
 417 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " Why, if it is traced. What do you make, other 
 wise, 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 astounding disclosures are expected that s 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 unmercifully baited him? 
 Yes," he conceded with a straightness that now sur 
 prised 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." 
 
 " And are they all dunderheads? " 
 
 " Every mother s son of them where anything so 
 beautiful is concerned." 
 
 " 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." 
 
 418 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 " Well, I m not sure." Which clearly meant, how 
 ever, that he almost was, from the way in which, the 
 next moment, he had exchanged the question for an 
 other. 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 
 perceptibly pale; and he continued. " Of what was 
 behind. Behind any game of mine. Behind every 
 thing." 
 
 " 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 explanation therefore doesn t bear 
 upon that. It bears upon something 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, 
 unbridled, 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 noth 
 ing. 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 posi 
 tively objected to learning. You ve grown," Bight 
 smiled, " more interested since." 
 
 419 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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. I don t know till I do know " and she ex 
 pressed this even with difficulty " what it has been, 
 all the while, that it was a question of, and what, conse 
 quently, 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 plum 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 smooth 
 ing 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 our 
 selves are concerned the spectators." And he also 
 got up. " The spectators must look out for them 
 selves." 
 
 " 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 
 
 420 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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 con 
 dition 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 wont come out." 
 
 He considered. " Why not, since the rush at her is 
 probably even now being made? Why not, if she re 
 ceives others? " 
 
 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 re 
 plied, overtaking 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 Morti 
 mer Marshal. 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 X 
 
 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 mo 
 ment, 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 per 
 ceived how interesting they had just become to them 
 selves. 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 somehow amused himself. This placed her, for 
 the brief instant, in a strange fellowship with their vis 
 itor s plea, under the impulse of which, without more 
 thought, she had turned to Bight. "Your eager claim 
 ant," 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 emp- 
 ty -I" 
 
 Maud made herself again his voice. " Mr Marshal 
 sees it empty itself perhaps too fast." 
 
 He acknowledged, in his large, bright way, the help 
 422 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 afforded 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 extraordi 
 nary tone, in connection with their number, might 
 have marked them, for some passer catching it, as per 
 sons 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 mo 
 ment, 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 recognized 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, multi 
 plied 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. 
 
 423 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 "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 amaze 
 ment and then the sense of the comic to triumph over 
 both. Howard Bight uncontrollably 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 you 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 !" 
 
 " Someone undoubtedly was, but Beadel somehow 
 has survived 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 in 
 stant, but that she then saw to mean, half with amuse 
 ment, 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 no 
 tion this evening? " 
 
 " Only from the state of my nerves." 
 
 " Yes^jour nerves must be in a state ! " And some 
 how 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 ob 
 served to her, " you would have saved me an awkward 
 ness." 
 
 424 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 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 
 understand." 
 
 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 w r eak even for their fond aid. He still 
 therefore appealed. " Will this be a boom for him? " 
 
 " His return? Colossal. For fancy! it was ex 
 actly 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 " 
 
 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? " 
 
 425 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 " 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 roar 
 ing. 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 busi 
 ness." 
 
 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 
 themselves in the comparative solitude of Covent Gar 
 den, encumbered with the traces of its traffic, but now 
 given over to peace. The howl of the Strand had 
 ceased, their client had vanished forever, 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 
 
 426 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 them, he ruled, immortal, the night; they were far 
 beneath, and he now transcended their world; but a 
 sense of relief, of escape, of the light, 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 sus 
 tained 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 7 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." 
 427 
 
THE BETTER SORT 
 
 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. " Go 
 to 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. 
 
 " 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 
 embarrassing? " 
 
 " I ve wondered," the young man repeated. 
 
 " But I thought you knew ! " 
 
 " So did I. But I thought also I knew he was 
 dead. However," Bight added, " he ll 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 mo 
 ment at his sudden weariness. " There s always, re 
 member, Mrs. Chorner." 
 
 428 
 
THE PAPERS 
 
 " Oh, yes, Mrs. Chorner; we luckily invented her. 9 
 
 " 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 tender 
 ness in which she felt so transformed, so won to some 
 thing 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 
 
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