The better sort

?

d

THE BETTER SORT

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE OTHER HOUSE
THE SPOILS OF POYNTON
WHAT MAISIE KNEW
THE Two MAGICS
THE AWKWARD AGE
TERMINATIONS
EMBARRASSMENTS
THE PRIVATE LIFE
IN THE CAGE
THE SOFT SIDE
THE SACRED FOUNT

THE BETTER SORT

BY

HENRY JAMES

METHUEN & CO.

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.

LONDON

1903

CONTENTS

PAGE

BROKEN WINGS . . . • . i

THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN . . . . 18

THE Two FACES . . ... 37

THE TONE OF TIME . . ... 50

THE SPECIAL TYPE . . ... 68

MRS. MEDWIN . . . ... 85

FLICKERBRIDGE . . . ... 105

THE STORY IN IT . . . . . 123

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE . . . 139

THE BIRTHPLACE . . ... 179

THE PAPERS . . 228

THE BETTEE SOKT

BROKEN WINGS

i

/"CONSCIOUS as he was of what was between them, though
V^/ perhaps less conscious than ever of why there should at
that time of day be anything, he would yet scarce have supposed
they could be so long in a house together without some word or
some look. It had been since the Saturday afternoon, and that
made twenty-four hours. The party — five-and-thirty people, and
some of them great — was one in which words and looks might
more or less have gone astray. The effect, none the less, he
judged, would have been, for her quite as for himself, that no
sound and no sign from the other had been picked up by either.
They had happened, both at dinner and at luncheon, to be so
placed as not to have to glare — or to grin — across ; and for the
rest they could each, in such a crowd, as freely help the general
ease to keep them apart as assist it to bring them together. One
chance there was, of course, that might be beyond their control.
He had been the night before half surprised at not finding her
his " fate " when the long procession to the dining-room solemnly
hooked itself together. He would have said in advance — recog-
nising it as one of the sharp " notes " of Mundham — that, should
the gathering contain a literary lady, the literary lady would, for
congruity, be apportioned to the arm, when there was a question
of arms, of the gentleman present who represented the nearest
thing to literature. Poor Straith represented " art," and that, no
doubt, would have been near enough had not the party offered
for choice a slight excess of men. The representative of art had
been of the two or three who went in alone, whereas Mrs. Harvey
had gone in with one of the representatives of banking.

It was certain, however, that she would not again be consigned
to Lord Belgrove, and it was just possible that he himself should

2 THE BETTER SORT

not be again alone. She would be, on the whole, the most
probable remedy to that state, on his part, of disgrace ; and this
precisely was the great interest of their situation — they were the
only persons present without some advantage over somebody
else. They hadn't a single advantage ; they could be named for
nothing but their cleverness; they were at the bottom of the
social ladder. The social ladder, even at Mundham, had — as
they might properly have been told, as indeed practically they were
told — to end somewhere ; which is no more than to say that, as
he strolled about and thought of many things, Stuart Straith had,
after all, a good deal the sense of helping to hold it up. Another
of the things he thought of was the special oddity — for it was
nothing else — of his being there at all, and being there in par-
ticular so out of his order and his turn. He couldn't answer for
Mrs. Harvey's turn. It might well be that she was in hers ; but
these Saturday-to-Monday occasions had hitherto mostly struck
him as great gilded cages as to which care was taken that the
birds should be birds of a feather.

There had been a wonderful walk in the afternoon, within the
limits of the place, to a far-away tea-house ; and, in spite of the
combinations and changes of this episode, he had still escaped
the necessity of putting either his old friend or himself to the
test. Also it had been all, he flattered himself, without the
pusillanimity of his avoiding her. Life was, indeed, well under-
stood in these great conditions; the conditions constituted in
their greatness a kind of fundamental facility, provided a general
exemption, bathed the hour, whatever it was, in a universal
blandness, that were all a happy solvent for awkward relations.
It was beautiful, for instance, that if their failure to meet amid so
much meeting had been of Mrs. Harvey's own contrivance he
couldn't be in the least vulgarly sure of it. There were places in
which he would have had no doubt, places different enough from
Mundham. He felt all the same and without anguish that these
were much more his places — even if she didn't feel that they
were much more hers. The day had been warm and splendid,
and this moment of its wane — with dinner in sight, but as across
a field of polished pink marble which seemed to say that wherever
in such a house there was space there was also, benignantly,
time — formed, of the whole procession of the hours, the one
dearest to our friend, who on such occasions interposed it, when-
ever he could, between the set of impressions that ended and the
set that began with "dressing." The great terraces and gardens
were almost void; people had scattered, though not altogether
even yet to dress. The air of the place, with the immense house

BROKEN WINGS 3

all seated aloft in strength, robed with summer and crowned with
success, was such as to contribute something of its own to the
poetry of early evening. This visitor, at any rate, saw and felt it
all through one of those fine hazes of August that remind you — at
least, they reminded him — of the artful gauze stretched across
the stage of a theatre when an effect of mystery or some particular
pantomimic ravishment is desired.

Should he, in fact, have to pair with Mrs. Harvey for dinner it
would be a shame to him not to have addressed her sooner ; and
should she, on the contrary, be put with someone else the loss
of so much of the time would have but the greater ugliness.
Didn't he meanwhile make out that there were ladies in the lower
garden, from which the sound of voices, faint, but, as always in
the upper air of Mundham, exceedingly sweet, was just now borne
to him ? She might be among them, and if he should find her
he would let her know he had sought her. He would treat it
frankly as an occasion for declaring that what had happened
between them — or rather what had not happened — was too
absurd. What at present occurred, however, was that in his
quest of her he suddenly, at the turn of an alley, perceived her,
not far off, seated in a sort of bower with the Ambassador. With
this he pulled up, going another way and pretending not to see
them. Three times already that afternoon he had observed her
in different situations with the Ambassador. He was the more
struck accordingly when, upward of an hour later, again alone
and with his state unremedied, he saw her placed for dinner next
his Excellency. It was not at all what would have been at
Mundham her right seat, so that it could only be explained by
his Excellency's direct request. She was a success ! This time
Straith was well in her view and could see that in the candle-
light of the wonderful room, where the lustres were, like the table,
all crystal and silver, she was as handsome as anyone, taking the
women of her age, and also as " smart " as the evening before,
and as true as any of the others to the law of a marked difference
in her smartness. If the beautiful way she held herself— for
decidedly it was beautiful — came in a great measure from the
good thing she professionally made of it all, our observer could
reflect that the poor thing he professionally made of it probably
affected his attitude in just the opposite way ; but they communi-
cated neither in the glare nor in the grin that he had dreaded.
Still, their eyes did now meet, and then it seemed to him that her
own were strange.

4 THE BETTER SORT

II

SHE, on her side, had her private consciousness, and quite as full
a one, doubtless, as he, but with the advantage that, when the
company separated for the night, she was not, like her friend,
reduced to a vigil unalloyed. Lady Claude, at the top of the
stairs, had said, " May I look in — in five minutes — if you don't
mind ? " and then had arrived in due course and in a wonderful
new beribboned gown, the thing just launched for such occasions.
Lady Claude was young and earnest and delightfully bewildered
and bewildering, and however interesting she might, through
certain elements in her situation, have seemed to a literary lady,
her own admirations and curiosities were such as from the first
promised to rule the hour. She had already expressed to Mrs.
Harvey a really informed enthusiasm. She not only delighted in
her numerous books, which was a tribute the author had not
infrequently met, but she even appeared to have read them — an
appearance with which her interlocutress was much less acquainted.
The great thing was that she also yearned to write, and that she
had turned up in her fresh furbelows not only to reveal this
secret and to ask for direction and comfort, but literally to make
a stranger confidence, for which the mystery of midnight seemed
propitious. Midnight was, indeed, as the situation developed,
well over before her confidence was spent, for it had ended by
gathering such a current as floated forth, with everything in
Lady Claude's own life, many things more in that of her adviser.
Mrs. Harvey was, at all events, amused, touched, and effectually
kept awake ; and at the end of half an hour they had quite got
what might have been called their second wind of frankness and
were using it for a discussion of the people in the house. Their
primary communion had been simply on the question of the
pecuniary profits of literature as the producer of so many admired
volumes was prepared to present them to an aspirant. Lady
Claude was in financial difficulties and desired the literary issue.
This was the breathless revelation she had rustled over a mile of
crimson velvet corridor to make.

" Nothing ? " she had three minutes later incredulously gasped.
" I can make nothing at all ? " But the gasp was slight compared
with the stupefaction produced in her by a brief further parley,
in the course of which Mrs. Harvey had, after a hesitation, taken
her own plunge. " You make so little — wonderful you /" And
then, as the producer of the admired volumes simply sat there in
her dressing-gown, with the saddest of slow head-shakes, looking
suddenly too wan even to care that it was at last all out : " What,

BROKEN WINGS 5

in that case, is the use of success and celebrity and genius ? You
have no success ? " She had looked almost awestruck at this
further confession of her friend. They were face to face in a
poor human crudity, which transformed itself quickly into an
effusive embrace. " You've had it and lost it ? Then when it
has been as great as yours one can lose it ? "

" More easily than one can get it."

Lady Claude continued to marvel. " But you do so much —
and it's so beautiful ! " On which Mrs. Harvey simply smiled
again in her handsome despair, and after a moment found herself
again in the arms of her visitor. The younger woman had
remained for a little a good deal arrested and hushed, and had,
at any rate, sensitive and charming, immediately dropped, in the
presence of this almost august unveiling, the question of her own
thin troubles. But there are short cuts at that hour of night that
morning scarce knows, and it took but little more of the breath
of the real to suggest to Lady Claude more questions in such a
connection than she could answer for herself. " How, then, if
you haven't private means, do you get on ? "

" Ah ! I don't get on." '

Lady Claude looked about. There were objects scattered in
the fine old French room. " You have lovely things."

" Two."

"Two?"

" Two frocks. I couldn't stay another day."

"Ah, what is that? I couldn't either," said Lady Claude
soothingly. " And you have," she continued, in the same spirit,
" your nice maid "

" Who's indeed a charming woman, but my cook in disguise ! "
Mrs. Harvey dropped.

" Ah, you are clever ! " her friend cried, with a laugh that was
as a climax of reassurance.

" Extraordinarily. But don't think," Mrs. Harvey hastened to
add, " that I mean that that's why I'm here."

Her companion candidly thought. " Then why are you ? "

" I haven't the least idea. I've been wondering all the while,
as I've wondered so often before on such occasions, and without
arriving at any other reason than that London is so wild."

Lady Claude wondered. " Wild ? "

" Wild ! " said her friend, with some impatience. " That's the
way London strikes."

" But do you call such an invitation a blow ? "

"Yes — crushing. No one else, at all events, either," Mrs.
Harvey added, "could tell you why I'm here."

6 THE BETTER SORT

Lady Claude's power to receive — and it was perhaps her most
attaching quality — was greater still, when she felt strongly, than
her power to protest. " Why, how can you say that when you've
only to see how everyone likes and admires you ? Just look at
the Ambassador," she had earnestly insisted. And this was what
had precisely, as I have mentioned, carried the stream of their
talk a good deal away from its source. It had therefore not
much further to go before setting in motion the name of Stuart
Straith, as to whom Lady Claude confessed to an interest— good-
looking, distinguished, " sympathetic," as he was — that she could
really almost hate him for having done nothing whatever to
encourage. He had not spoken to her once.

"But, my dear, if he hasn't spoken to me/"

Lady Claude appeared to regret this not too much for a hint
that, after all, there might be a difference. " Oh, but could he ? "

"Without my having spoken to him first?" Mrs. Harvey
turned it over. " Perhaps not ; but I couldn't have done that."
Then, to explain, and not only because Lady Claude was naturally
vague, but because what was still visibly most vivid to her was
her independent right to have been "made up" to: "And yet
not because we're not acquainted."

" You know him, then ? "

"But too well."

" You mean you don't like him ? "

" On the contrary, I like him — to distraction."

"Then what's the matter?" Lady Claude asked with some
impatience.

Her friend hesitated but a moment. "Well, he wouldn't
have me."

"'Have 'you?"

"Ten years ago, after Mr. Harvey's death, when, if he had
lifted a finger, I would have married him."

"But he didn't lift it?"

" He was too grand. I was too small — by his measure. He
wanted to keep himself; he saw his future."

Lady Claude earnestly followed. " His present position ? "

" Yes — everything that was to come to him ; his steady rise
in value."

'" Has it been so great ? "

" Surely — his situation and name. Don't you know his lovely
work and what's thought of it ? "

"Oh yes, I know. That's why " But Lady Claude

stopped. After which: "But if he's still keeping himself?"

" Oh, it's not for me," said Mrs. Harvey.

BROKEN WINGS 7

" And evidently not for me. Whom then," her visitor asked,
" does he think good enough ? "

" Oh, these great people ! " Mrs. Harvey smiled.

" But we're great people — you and I ! " And Lady Claude
kissed her good night.

" You mustn't, all the same," the elder woman said, " betray
the secret of my greatnesss, which I've told you, please remember,
only in the deepest confidence."

Her tone had a quiet purity of bitterness that for a moment
longer held her friend, after which Lady Claude had the happy
inspiration of meeting it with graceful gaiety. " It's quite for the
best, I'm sure, that Mr. Straith wouldn't have you. You've kept
yourself too ; you'll marry yet — an ambassador ! " And with
another good night she reached the door. " You say you don't
get on, but you do."

" Ah ! " said Mrs. Harvey with vague attenuation.

"Oh yes, you do," Lady Claude insisted, while the door
emphasised it with a little clap that sounded through the still
house.

Ill

THE first night of The New Girl occurred, as everyone re-
members, three years ago, and the play is running yet, a fact
that may render strange the failure to be widely conscious of
which two persons in the audience were guilty. It was not till
afterward present either to Krs. Harvey or to Stuart Straith
that The New Girl was one of the greatest successes of modern
times. Indeed if the question had been put to them on the
spot they might have appeared much at sea. But this, I may
as well immediately say, was the result of their having found
themselves side by side in the stalls and thereby given most
of their attention to their own predicament. Straith showed
that he felt the importance of meeting it promptly, for he turned
to his neighbour, who was already in her place, as soon as her
identity had come distinct through his own arrival and subsidence.
. " I don't quite see how you can help speaking to me now."

Her face could only show him how long she had been aware
of his approach. "The sound of your voice, coming to me
straight, makes it indeed as easy for me as I could possibly
desire."

He looked about at the serried rows, the loaded galleries and
the stuffed boxes, with recognitions and nods; and this made
between them another pause, during which, while the music

8 THE BETTER SORT

seemed perfunctory and the bustle that, in a London audience,
represents concentration increased, they felt how effectually, in
the thick, preoccupied medium, how extraordinarily, they were
together.

"Well, that second afternoon at Mundham, just before dinner,
I was very near forcing your hand. But something put me off.
You're really too grand."

" Oh ! " she murmured.

"Ambassadors," said Stuart Straith.

" Oh ! " she again sounded. And before anything more could
pass the curtain was up. It came down in due course and
achieved, after various intervals, the rest of its movements with-
out interrupting, for our friends, the sense of an evening of talk.
They said when it was down almost nothing about the play, and
when one of them toward the end put to the other, vaguely,
" Is — a — this thing going ? " the question had scarce the effect
of being even relevant. What was clearest to them was that the
people about were somehow enough taken up to leave them
at their ease — but what taken up with they but half made out.
Mrs. Harvey had, none the less, mentioned early that her presence
had a reason and that she ought to attend, and her companion
had asked her what she thought of a certain picture made at
a given moment by the stage, in the reception of which he was
so interested that it was really what had brought him. These
were glances, however, that quickly strayed — strayed, for instance
(as this could carry them far), in its coming to one of them
to say that, whatever the piece might be, the real thing, as they
had seen it at Mundham, was more than a match for any piece.
For it was Mundham that was, theatrically, the real thing ; better
for scenery, dresses, music, pretty women, bare shoulders, every-
thing—even incoherent dialogue ; a much bigger and braver
show, and got up, as it were, infinitely more " regardless." By
Mundham they were held long enough to find themselves, though
with an equal surprise, quite at one as to the special oddity
of their having caught each other in such a plight. Straith said
that he supposed what his friend meant was that it was odd he
should have been there ; to which she returned that she had been
imputing to him exactly that judgment of her own presence.

"But why shouldn't you be ? " he asked. " Isn't that just what
you are ? Aren't you, in your way — like those people — a child of
fortune and fashion ? "

He got no more answer to this for some time than if he had
fairly wounded her; he indeed that evening got no answer at
all that was direct. But in the next interval she brought out

BROKEN WINGS 9

with abruptness, taking no account of some other matter he had
just touched, " Don't you really know ?"

She had paused.

"Know what?"

Again she went on without heeding. " A place like Mundham
is, for me, a survival, though poor Mundham in particular won't,
for me, have survived that visit — for which it's to be pitied, isn't
it ? It was a glittering ghost — since laid ! — of my old time."

Straith at this almost gave a start. " Have you got a new
time?"

" Do you mean that you have ? "

" Well," said Straith, " mine may now be called middle-aged.
It seems so long, I mean, since I set my watch to it."

" Oh, I haven't even a watch ! " she returned with a laugh.
" I'm beyond watches." After which she added : " We might
have met more — or, I should say perhaps, have got more out
of it when we have met."

" Yes, it has been too little. But I've always explained it by
our living in such different worlds."

Mrs. Harvey had an occasional incoherence. "Are you
unhappy ? "

He gave her a singular smile. " You said just now that you're
beyond watches. I'm beyond unhappiness."

She turned from him and presently brought out : " I ought
absolutely to take away something of the play."

"By all means. There's certainly something /shall take."

"Ah, then you must help me — give it me."

" With all my heart," said Straith, " if it can help you. It's
my feeling of our renewal."

She had one of the sad, slow head-shakes that at Mundham
had been impressive to Lady Claude. " That won't help me."

" Then you must let me put to you now what I should have
tried to get near enough to you there to put if I hadn't been so
afraid of the Ambassador. What has it been so long — our
impossibility ? "

" Well, I can only answer for my own vision of it, which is —
which always was — that you were sorry for me, but felt a sort
of scruple of showing me that you had nothing better than pity
to give."

" May I come to see you ? " Straith asked some minutes
after this.

Her words, for which he had also awhile to wait, had, in truth,
as little as his own the appearance of a reply. "Arc you un-
happy— really ? Haven't you everything ? "

io THE BETTER SORT

"You're beautiful!" he said for all answer. "Mayn't I
come?"

She hesitated.

" Where is your studio ? "

" Oh, not too far to reach from it. Don't be anxious ; I can
walk, or even take the bus."

Mrs. Harvey once more delayed. Then she answered : "Mayn't
I rather come there ? "

" I shall be but too delighted."

It was said with promptness, even precipitation ; yet the under-
standing, shortly after, appeared to have left between them a
certain awkwardness, and it was almost as if to change the subject
and relieve them equally that she suddenly reminded him of
something he had spoken earlier. "You were to tell me why
in particular you had to be here."

" Oh yes. To see my dresses."

"Yours!" She wondered.

" The second act. I made them out for them— drew them."

Before she could check it her tone escaped. " You ? "

"I." He looked straight before him. "For the fee. And
we didn't even notice them."

"/didn't," she confessed. But it offered the fact as a sign of
her kindness for him, and this kindness was traceably what
inspired something she said in the draughty porch, after the
performance, while the footman of the friend, a fat, rich, im-
mensely pleased lady, who had given her a lift and then rejoined
her from a seat in the balcony, went off to make sure of the
brougham. "May I do something about your things?"

"'Do something'?"

" When I've paid you my visit. W>ite something — about your
pictures. I do a correspondence," said Mrs. Harvey.

He wondered as she had done in the stalls. "For a paper?"

"The Blackport Banner. A 'London Letter.' The new
books, the new plays, the new twaddle of any sort — a little
music, a little gossip, a little 'art.' You'll help me — I need it
awfully — with the art. I do three a month."

" You — wonderful you ? " He spoke as I^dy Claude had done,
and could no more help it again than Mrs. Harvey had been able
to help it in the stalls.

" Oh, as you say, for the fee ! " On which, as the footman
signalled, her old lady began to plunge through the crowd.

BROKEN WINGS n

IV

AT the studio, where she came to him within the week, her first
movement had been to exclaim on the splendid abundance of
his work. She had looked round charmed — so struck as to be,
as she called it, crushed. "You've such a wonderful lot to
show."

" Indeed I have ! " said Stuart Straith.

" That's where you beat us"

"I think it may very well be," he went on, "where I beat
almost everyone."

"And is much of it new?"

He looked about with her. "Some of it is pretty old. But
my things have a way, I admit, of growing old extraordinarily
fast. They seem to me in fact, nowadays, quite ' born old.' "

She had the manner, after a little, of coming back to some-
thing. " You are unhappy. You're not beyond it. You're just
nicely, just fairly and squarely, in the middle of it."

" Well," said Straith, " if it surrounds me like a desert, so that
I'm lost in it, that comes to the same thing. But I want you to
tell me about yourself."

She had continued at first to move about, and had taken out
a pocket-book, which she held up at him. "This time I shall
insist on notes. You made my mind a blank about that play,
which is the sort of thing we can't afford. If it hadn't been for
my fat old lady and the next day's papers ! " She kept looking,
going up to things, saying, " How wonderful ! " and " Oh, your
way /" and then stopping for a general impression, something in
the whole charm. The place, high, handsome, neat, with two or
three pale tapestries and several rare old pieces of furniture,
showed a perfection of order, an absence of loose objects, as if
it had been swept and squared for the occasion and made almost
too immaculate. It was polished and cold — rather cold for the
season and the weather ; and Stuart Straith himself, buttoned
and brushed, as fine and as clean as his room, might at her
arrival have reminded her of the master of a neat, bare ship on
his deck awaiting a cargo. "May I see everything? May I
'use' everything?"

" Oh no ; you mayn't by any means use everything. You
mayn't use half. Did I spoil your 'London Letter'?" he con-
tinued after a moment.

" No one can spoil them as I spoil them myself. I can't do
them — I don't know how, and don't want to. I do them wrong,
and the people want such trash. Of course they'll sack me."

12 THE BETTER SORT

She was in the centre, and he had the effect of going round
her, restless and vague, in large, slow circles. " Have you done
them long?"

" Two or three months — this lot. But I've done others, and
I know what happens. Oh, my dear, I've done strange things ! "

"And is it a good job?"

She hesitated, then puffed, prettily enough, an indifferent sigh.
" Three-and-ninepence. Is that good ? " He had stopped before
her, looking at her up and down. " What do you get," she went
on, " for what you do for a play ? "

"A little more, it would seem, than you. Four-and-sixpence.
But I've only done, as yet, that one. Nothing else has offered."

" I see. But something will> eh ? "

Poor Straith took a turn again. " Did you like them — for
colour?" But again he pulled up. "Oh, I forgot; we didn't
notice them ! "

For a moment they could laugh about it. "I noticed them,
I assure you, in the Banner. ' The costumes in the second act
are of the most marvellous beauty.' That's what I said."

" Oh, that will fetch the managers ! " But before her again
he seemed to take her in from head to foot. "You speak of
'using' things. If you'd only use yourself — for my enlighten-
ment. Tell me all."

"You look at me," said Mrs. Harvey, "as with the wonder of
who designs my costumes. How I dress on it, how I do even
what I still do on it, is that what you want to know ? "

" What has happened to you ? " Straith asked.

" How do I keep it up ? " she continued, as if she had not
heard him. " But I don't keep it up. You do," she declared as
she again looked round her.

Once more it set him off, but for a pause once more almost as
quick. " How long have you been ? "

" Been what ? " she asked as he faltered.

" Unhappy."

She smiled at him from a depth of indulgence. " As long as
you've been ignorant — that what I've been wanting is your pity.
Ah, to have to know, as I believed I did, that you supposed it
would wound me, and not to have been able to make you see
that it was the one thing left to me that would help me ! Give
me your pity now. It's all I want. I don't care for anything
else. But give me that."

He had, as it happened at the moment, to do a smaller and
a usual thing before he could do one so great and so strange.
The youth whom he kept for service arrived with a tea-tray, in

BROKEN WINGS 13

arranging a place for which, with the sequel of serving Mrs.
Harvey, seating her and seeing the youth again out of the room,
some minutes passed.

"What pity could I dream of for you," he demanded as he
at last dropped near her, "when I was myself so miserably
sore?"

" Sore ? " she wondered. " But you were happy — then."

" Happy not to have struck you as good enough ? For I
didn't, you know," he insisted. "You had your success, which
was so immense. You had your high value, your future, your
big possibilities; and I perfectly understood that, given those
things, and given also my very much smaller situation, you
should wish to keep yourself."

" Oh, oh ! " She gasped as if hurt.

" I understand it ; but how could it really make me ' happy ' ? "
he asked.

She turned at him as with her hand on the old scar she could
now carry. "You mean that all these years you've really not
known ? "

" But not known what ? "

His voice was so blank that at the sound of it, and at some-
thing that looked out from him, she only found another "Oh,
oh ! " which became the next instant a burst of tears.

SHE had appeared at first unwilling to receive him at home ; but
he understood it after she had left him, turning over more and
more everything their meeting had shaken to the surface, and
piecing together memories that at last, however darkly, made
a sense. He was to call on her, it was finally agreed, but not
till the end of the week, when she should have finished
"moving" — she had but just changed quarters; and meanwhile,
as he came and went, mainly in the cold chamber of his own
past endeavour, which looked even to himself as studios look
when artists are dead and the public, in the arranged place, are
admitted to stare, he had plenty to think about. What had
come out — he could see it now — was that each, ten years before,
had miserably misunderstood and then had turned for relief
from pain to a perversity of pride. But it was himself above all
that he now sharply judged, since women, he felt, have to get
on as they can, and for the mistake of this woman there were
reasons he had, with a sore heart, to acknowledge. She had

i4 THE BETTER SORT

really found in the pomp of his early success, at the time they
used to meet, and to care to, exactly the ground for her sense
of failure with him that he had found in the vision of her gross
popularity for his conviction that she judged him as compara-
tively small. Each had blundered, as sensitive souls of the
"artistic temperament" blunder, into a conception not only of
the other's attitude, but of the other's material situation at the
moment, that had thrown them back on stupid secrecy, where
their estrangement had grown like an evil plant in the shade.
He had positively believed her to have gone on all the while
making the five thousand a year that the first eight or ten of her
so supremely happy novels had brought her in, just as she, on
her side, had read into the felicity of his first new hits, his
pictures "of the year" at three or four Academies, the absurdest
theory of the sort of career that, thanks to big dealers and intelli-
gent buyers, his gains would have built up for him. It looked
vulgar enough now, but it had been grave enough then. His long,
detached delusion about her "prices," at any rate, appeared to
have been more than matched by the strange stories occasionally
floated to her — and all to make her but draw more closely in —
on the subject of his own.

It was with each equally that everything had changed — every-
thing but the stiff consciousness in either of the need to conceal
changes from the other. If she had cherished for long years the
soreness of her not being "good" enough, so this was what had
counted most in her sustained effort to appear at least as good
as he. London, meanwhile, was big; London was blind and
benighted ; and nothing had ever occurred to undermine for him
the fiction of her prosperity. Before his eyes there, while she
sat with him, she had pulled off one by one those vain coverings
of her state that she confessed she had hitherto done her best —
and so always with an eye on himself — deceptively to draw about
it. He had felt frozen, as he listened, at such likenesses to things
he knew. He recognised as she talked, and he groaned as he
understood. He understood — oh, at last, whatever he had not
done before ! And yet he could well have smiled, out of their
common abyss, at such odd identities and recurrences. Truly
the arts were sisters, as was so often said ; for what apparently
co.uld be more like the experience of one than the experience
of another? And she spared him things with it all. He
felt that too, just as, even while showing her how he fol-
lowed, he had bethought himself of closing his lips for the
hour, none too soon, on his own stale story. There had
been a beautiful intelligence, for that matter, in her having

BROKEN WINGS 15

asked him nothing more. She had overflowed because shaken
by not finding him happy, and her surrender had somehow
offered itself to him as her way — the first that sprang up — of
considering his trouble. She had left him, at all events, in full
possession of all the phases through which in " literary circles "
acclaimed states may pass on their regular march to eclipse and
extinction. One had but one's hour, and if one had it soon — it
was really almost a case of choice— one didn't have it late. It
might, moreover, never even remotely have approached, at its
best, things ridiculously rumoured. Straith felt, on the whole,
how little he had known of literary circles or of any mystery but
his own, indeed ; on which, up to actual impending collapse, he
had mounted such anxious guard.

It was when he went on the Friday to see her that he took
in the latest of the phases in question, which might very well be
almost the final one ; there was at least that comfort in it. She
had just settled in a small flat, where he recognised in the steady
disposal, for the best, of various objects she had not yet parted
with, her reason for having made him wait. Here they had
together — these two worn and baffled workers — a wonderful
hour of gladness in their lost battle and of freshness in their
lost youth; for it was not till Stuart Straith had also raised
the heavy mask and laid it beside her own on the table,
that they began really to feel themselves recover something
of that possibility of each other they had so wearily wasted.
Only she couldn't get over it that he was like herself, and that
what she had shrunken to in her three or four simplified rooms
had its perfect image in the hollow show of his ordered studio
and his accumulated work. He told her everything now, kept as
little back as she had kept at their previous meeting, while
she repeated over and over, "You — wonderful you?" as if the
knowledge made a deeper darkness of fate, as if the pain of his
having come down at all almost quenched the joy of his having
come so much nearer. When she learned that he had not for
three years sold a picture — " You, beautiful you ? " — it seemed
a new cold breath out of the dusk of her own outlook. Dis-
appointment and despair were in such relations contagious, and
there was clearly as much less again left to her as the little
that was left to him. He showed her, laughing at the long
queerness of it, how awfully little, as they called it, this was.
He let it all come, but with more mirth than misery, and with
a final abandonment of pride that was like changing at the end
of a dreadful day from tight boots to slippers. There were
moments when they might have resembled a couple united by

16 THE BETTER SORT

some misdeed and meeting to decide on some desperate course ;
they gave themselves so to the great irony — the vision of the
comic in contrasts — that precedes surrenders and extinctions.

They went s over the whole thing, remounted the dwindling
stream, reconstructed, explained, understood — recognised, in
short, the particular example they gave, and how, without mutual
suspicion, they had been giving it side by side. " We're simply
the case," Straith familiarly put it, " of having been had enough
of. No case is perhaps more common, save that, for you and for
me, each in our line, it did look in the good time — didn't it ? — as
if nobody could have enough." With which they counted back-
ward, gruesome as it was, the symptoms of satiety up to the first
dawn, and lived again together the unforgettable hours — distant
now — out of which it had begun to glimmer that the truth had
to be faced and the right names given to the wrong facts. They
laughed at their original explanations and the minor scale, even,
of their early fears ; compared notes on the fallibility of remedies
and hopes, and, more and more united in the identity of their
lesson, made out perfectly that, though there appeared to be
many kinds of success, there was only one kind of failure. And
yet what had been hardest had not been to have to shrink,
but — the long game of bluff, as Straith called it — to have to keep
up. It fairly swept them away at present, however, the hugeness
of the relief of no longer keeping up as against each other.
This gave them all the measure of the motive their courage, on
either side, in silence and gloom, had forced into its service.

" Only what shall we do now for a motive ? " Straith went on.

She thought. " A motive for courage ? "

11 Yes — to keep up."

"And go again, for instance, do you mean, to Mundham?
We shall, thank heaven, never go again to Mundham. The
Mundhams are over."

" Nous n'irons plus au bois ;
Les lauriers sont coupes,"

sang Straith. " It does cost."

" As everything costs that one does for the rich. It's not our
poor relations who make us pay."

" No ; one must have means to acknowledge the others. We
can't afford the opulent. But it isn't only the money they
take."

"It's the imagination," said Mrs. Harvey. "As they have
none themselves "

" It's an article we have to supply ? We have certainly to use

BROKEN WINGS 17

a lot to protect ourselves," Straith agreed. " And the strange
thing is that they like us."

She thought again. " That's what makes it easy to cut them.
They forgive."

" Yes," her companion laughed ; " once they really don't know
you enough ! "

"They treat you as old friends. But what do we want now
of courage ? " she went on.

He wondered. " Yes, after all, what ? "

" To keep up, I mean. Why should we keep up ? "

It seemed to strike him. "I see. After all, why? The
courage not to keep up "

" We have that, at least," she declared, " haven't we ? " Stand-
ing there at her little high-perched window, which overhung grey
housetops, they let the consideration of this pass between them
in a deep look, as well as in a hush of which the intensity had
something commensurate. " If we're beaten ! " she then con-
tinued.

" Let us at least be beaten together ! " He took her in his
arms ; she let herself go, and he held her long and close for
the compact. But when they had recovered themselves enough
to handle their agreement more responsibly, the words in which
they confirmed it broke in sweetness as well as sadness from
both together : "And now to work ! "

THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN

MRS. MUNDEN had not yet been to my studio on so
good a pretext as when she first put it to me that it
would be quite open to me — should I only care, as she called
it, to throw the handkerchief — to paint her beautiful sister-in-law.
I needn't go here, more than is essential, into the question of
Mrs. Munden, who would really, by the way, be a story in herself.
She has a manner of her own of putting things, and some of

those she has put to me ! Her implication was that Lady

Beldonald had not only seen and admired certain examples of
my work, but had literally been prepossessed in favour of the
painter's "personality." Had I been struck with this sketch
I might easily have imagined that Lady Beldonald was throwing
me the handkerchief. "She hasn't done," my visitor said, " what
she ought."

" Do you mean she has done what she oughtn't ? "

"Nothing horrid — oh dear, no." And something in Mrs.
Munden's tone, with the way she appeared to muse a moment,
even suggested to me that what she " oughtn't " was perhaps
what Lady Beldonald had too much neglected. "She hasn't
got on."

" What's the matter with her ? "

"Well, to begin with, she's American."

" But I thought that was the way of ways to get on."

" It's one of them. But it's one of the ways of being awfully
out of it too. There are so many ! "

" So many Americans ? " I asked.

"Yes, plenty of them" Mrs. Munden sighed. "So many
ways, I mean, of being one."
. " But if your sister-in-law's way is to be beautiful ? "

" Oh, there are different ways of that too."

"And she hasn't taken the right way ? "

"Well," my friend returned, as if it were rather difficult to
express, " she hasn't done with it "

" I see," I laughed ; " what she oughtn't ! "

18

THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 19

Mrs. Munden in a manner corrected me, but it was difficult
to express. " My brother, at all events, was certainly selfish.
Till he died she was almost never in London ; they wintered,
year after year, for what he supposed to be his health — which
it didn't help, since he was so much too soon to meet his end —
in the south of France and in the dullest holes he could pick
out, and when they came back to England he always kept her
in the country. I must say for her that she always behaved
beautifully. Since his death she has been more in London,
but on a stupidly unsuccessful footing. I don't think she quite
understands. She hasn't what / should call a life. It may be,
of course, that she doesn't want one. That's just what I can't
exactly find out. I can't make out how much she knows."

" I can easily make out," I returned with hilarity, " how much
you do ! "

" Well, you're very horrid. Perhaps she's too old."

" Too old for what ? " I persisted.

"For anything. Of course she's no longer even a little
young; only preserved — oh, but preserved, like bottled fruit,
in syrup ! I want to help her, if only because she gets on
my nerves, and I really think the way of it would be just the
right thing of yours at the Academy and on the line."

" But suppose," I threw out, " she should give on my nerves ? "

" Oh, she will. But isn't that all in the day's work, and don't
great beauties always ? "

" You don't," I interrupted ; but I at any rate saw Lady
Beldonald later on — the day came when her kinswoman brought
her, and then I understood that her life had its centre in her
own idea of her appearance. Nothing else about her mattered
— one knew her all when one knew that. She is indeed in one
particular, I think, sole of her kind — a person whom vanity has
had the odd effect of keeping positively safe and sound. This
passion is supposed surely, for the most part, to be a principle
of perversion and injury, leading astray those who listen to it
and landing them, sooner or later, in this or that complication ;
but it has landed her ladyship nowhere whatever — it has kept
her from the first moment of full consciousness, one feels, exactly
in the same place. It has protected her from every danger, has
made her absolutely proper and prim. If she is "preserved,"
as Mrs. Munden originally described her to me, it is her vanity
that has beautifully done it — putting her years ago in a plate-
glass case and closing up the receptacle against every breath
of air. How shouldn't she be preserved, when you might smash
your knuckles on this transparency before you could crack it?

20 THE BETTER SORT

And she is — oh, amazingly ! Preservation is scarce the word for
the rare condition of her surface. She looks naturally new, as
if she took out every night her large, lovely, varnished eyes and
put them in water. The thing was to paint her, I perceived,
in the glass case — a most tempting, attaching feat ; render to the
full the shining, interposing plate and the general show-window
effect.

It was agreed, though it was not quite arranged, that she
should sit to me. If it was not quite arranged, this was because,
as I was made to understand from an early stage, the conditions
for our start must be such as should exclude all elements of
disturbance, such, in a word, as she herself should judge abso-
lutely favourable. And it seemed that these conditions were
easily imperilled. Suddenly, for instance, at a moment when
I was expecting her to meet an appointment — the first — that
I had proposed, I received a hurried visit from Mrs. Munden,
who came on her behalf to let me know that the season
happened just not to be propitious and that our friend couldn't
be quite sure, to the hour, when it would again become so.
Nothing, she felt, would make it so but a total absence of
worry.

"Oh, a 'total absence,'" I said, "is a large order! We live
in a worrying world."

"Yes; and she feels exactly that — more than you'd think.
It's in fact just why she mustn't have, as she has now, a par-
ticular distress on at the very moment. She wants to look, of
course, her best, and such things tell on her appearance."

I shook my head. " Nothing tells on her appearance. Nothing
reaches it in any way; nothing gets at it. However, I can under-
stand her anxiety. But what's her particular distress ? "

" Why, the illness of Miss Dadd."

" And who in the world's Miss Dadd ? "

" Her most intimate friend and constant companion — the lady
who was with us here that first day."

"Oh, the little round, black woman who gurgled with ad-
miration ? "

" None other. But she was taken ill last week, and it may very
well be that she'll gurgle no more. She was very bad yesterday
and is no better to-day, and Nina is much upset. If anything
happens to Miss Dadd she'll have to get another, and, though
she has had two or three before, that won't be so easy."

"Two or three Miss Dadds? Is it possible? And still
wanting another!" I recalled the poor lady completely now.
" No ; I shouldn't indeed think it would be easy to get another.

THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 21

But why is a succession of them necessary to Lady Beldonald's
existence ? "

"Can't you guess?" Mrs. Munden looked deep, yet im-
patient "They help."

" Help what ? Help whom ? "

" Why, every one. You and me for instance. To do what ?
Why, to think Nina beautiful. She has them for that purpose ;
they serve as foils, as accents serve on syllables, as terms of
comparison. They make her * stand out.' It's an effect of con-
trast that must be familiar to you artists ; it's what a woman does
when she puts a band of black velvet under a pearl ornament
that may require, as she thinks, a little showing off."

I wondered. " Do you mean she always has them black ? "

"Dear no; I've seen them blue, green, yellow. They may
be what they like, so long as they're always one other thing."

"Hideous?"

Mrs. Munden hesitated. " Hideous is too much to say ; she
doesn't really require them as bad as that. But consistently,
cheerfully, loyally plain. It's really a most happy relation. She
loves them for it."

" And for what do they love her 1 "

" Why, just for the amiability that they produce in her. Then,
also, for their ' home.' It's a career for them."

"I see. But if that's the case," I asked, "why are they so
difficult to find?"

" Oh, they must be safe ; it's all in that : her being able to
depend on them to keep to the terms of the bargain and never
have moments of rising — as even the ugliest woman will now and
then (say when she's in love) — superior to themselves."

I turned it over. "Then if they can't inspire passions the
poor things mayn't even at least feel them ? "

" She distinctly deprecates it. That's why such a man as you
may be, after all, a complication."

I continued to muse. " You're very sure Miss Dadd's ailment
isn't an affection that, being smothered, has struck in?" My
joke, however, was not well timed, for I afterwards learned that
the unfortunate lady's state had been, even while I spoke, such
as to forbid all hope. The worst symptoms had appeared ; she
was not destined to recover ; and a week later I heard from Mrs.
Munden that she would in fact " gurgle " no more.

22 THE BETTER SORT

II

ALL this, for Lady Beldonald, had been an agitation so great
that access to her apartment was denied for a time even to her
sister-in-law. It was much more out of the question, of course,
that she should unveil her face to a person of my special
business with it ; so that the question of the portrait was, by
common consent, postponed to that of the installation of a
successor to her late companion. Such a successor, I gathered
from Mrs. Munden, widowed, childless, and lonely, as well as
inapt for the minor offices, she had absolutely to have ; a more
or less humble alter ego to deal with the servants, keep the
accounts, make the tea and arrange the light. Nothing seemed
more natural than that she should marry again, and obviously
that might come ; yet the predecessors of Miss Dadd had been
contemporaneous with a first husband, and others formed in her
image might be contemporaneous with a second. I was much
occupied in those months, at any rate, so that these questions
and their ramifications lost themselves for a while to my view,
and I was only brought back to them by Mrs. Munden's coming
to me one day with the news that we were all right again —
her sister-in-law was once more " suited." A certain Mrs. Brash,
an American relative whom she had not seen for years, but with
whom she had continued to communicate, was to come out to
her immediately; and this person, it appeared, could be quite
trusted to meet the conditions. She was ugly — ugly enough,
without abuse of it, and she was uniimitedly good. The position
offered her by Lady Beldonald was, moreover, exactly what she
needed ; widowed also, after many troubles and reverses, with
her fortune of the smallest and her various children either
buried or placed about, she had never had time or means to
come to England, and would really be grateful in her declining
years for the new experience and the pleasant light work involved
in her cousin's hospitality. They had been much together early
in life, and Lady Beldonald was immensely fond of her — would
have in fact tried to get hold of her before had not Mrs. Brash
been always in bondage to family duties, to the variety of her
tribulations. I dare say I laughed at my friend's use of the term
"position" — the position, one might call it, of a candlestick or
a sign-post, and I dare say I must have asked if the special
service the poor lady was to render had been made clear to
her. Mrs. Munden left me, at all events, with the rather droll
image of her faring forth, across the sea, quite consciously and
resignedly to perform it.

THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 23

The point of the communication had, however, been that
my sitter was again looking up and would doubtless, on the
arrival and due initiation of Mrs. Brash, be in form really to wait
on me. The situation must, further, to my knowledge, have
developed happily, for I arranged with Mrs. Munden that our
friend, now all ready to begin, but wanting first just to see the
things I had most recently done, should come once more, as a
final preliminary, to my studio. A good foreign friend of mine,
a French painter, Paul Outreau, was at the moment in London,
and I had proposed, as he was much interested in types, to get
together for his amusement a small afternoon party. Everyone
came, my big room was full, there was music and a modest
spread; and I have not forgotten the light of admiration in
Outreau's expressive face as, at the end of half an hour, he came
up to me in his enthusiasm.

" Bonte divine, mon cher — que cette vieille est done belle! "

I had tried to collect all the beauty I could, and also all the
youth, so that for a moment I was at a loss. I had talked to
many people and provided for the music, and there were figures
in the crowd that were still lost to me. " What old woman do
you mean ? "

"I don't know her name — she was over by the door a
moment ago. I asked somebody and was told, I think, that
she's American."

I looked about and saw one of my guests attach a pair of fine
eyes to Outreau very much as if she knew he must be talking of
her. " Oh, Lady Beldonald ! Yes, she's handsome • but the
great point about her is that she has been * put up,' to keep, and
that she wouldn't be flattered if she knew you spoke of her as
old. A box of sardines is only ' old ' after it has been opened.
Lady Beldonald never has yet been — but I'm going to do it."
I joked, but I was somehow disappointed. It was a type that,
with his unerring sense for the banal, I shouldn't have expected
Outreau to pick out.

" You're going to paint her ? But, my dear man, she is painted
— and as neither you nor I can do it Oil est-elle done?" He
had lost her, and I saw I had made a mistake. " She's the
greatest of all the great Holbeins."

I was relieved. " Ah, then, not Lady Beldonald ! But do
I possess a Holbein, of any price, unawares ? "

"There she is — there she is ! Dear, dear, dear, what a head!"
And I saw whom he meant — and what : a small old lady in a
black dress and a black bonnet, both relieved with a little white,
who had evidently just changed her place to reach a corner

24 THE BETTER SORT

from which more of the room and of the scene was presented
to her. She appeared unnoticed and unknown, and I immedi-
ately recognised that some other guest must have brought her
and, for want of opportunity, had as yet to call my attention to
her. But two things, simultaneously with this and with each
other, struck me with force ; one of them the truth of Outreau's
description of her, the other the fact that the person bringing
her could only have been Lady Beldonald. She was a Holbein
— of the first water ; yet she was also Mrs. Brash, the imported
"foil," the indispensable "accent," the successor to the dreary
Miss Dadd ! By the time I had put these things together —
Outreau's "American" having helped me — I was in just such
full possession of her face as I had found myself, on the other
first occasion, of that of her patroness. Only with so different
a consequence. I couldn't look at her enough, and I stared and
stared till I became aware she might have fancied me challenging
her as a person unpresented. "All the same," Outreau went on,
equally held, "test une tete a fair e. If I were only staying long
enough for a crack at her ! But I tell you what " — and he seized
my arm — " bring her over ! "

"Over?"

" To Paris. She'd have a succesfou?

"Ah, thanks, my dear fellow," I was now quite in a position to
say; "she's the handsomest thing in London, and" — for what
I might do with her was already before me with intensity — " I
propose to keep her to myself." It was before me with intensity, in
the light of Mrs. Brash's distant perfection of a little white old
face, in which every wrinkle was the touch of a master; but
something else, I suddenly felt, was not less so, for Lady Bel-
donald, in the other quarter, and though she couldn't have made
out the subject of our notice, continued to fix us, and her eyes
had the challenge of those of the woman of consequence who
has missed something. A moment later I was close to her,
apologising first for not having been more on the spot at her
arrival, but saying in the next breath uncontrollably, " Why, my
dear lady, it's a Holbein ! "

"A Holbein? What?"

"Why, the wonderful sharp old face — so extraordinarily, con-
summately drawn — in the frame of black velvet. That of Mrs.
Brash, I mean— isn't it her name? — your companion."

This was the beginning of a most odd matter — the essence of
my anecdote ; and I think the very first note of the oddity must
have sounded for me in the tone in which her ladyship spoke
after giving me a silent look. It seemed to come to me out of a

THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 25

distance immeasurably removed from Holbein. " Mrs. Brash is
not my ' companion ' in the sense you appear to mean. She's
my rather near relation and a very dear old friend. I love her —
and you must know her."

"Know her? Rather! Why, to see her is to want, on the
spot, to * go ' for her. She also must sit for me."

11 She? Louisa Brash?" If Lady Beldonald had the theory
that her beauty directly showed it when things were not well with
her, this impression, which the fixed sweetness of her serenity
had hitherto struck me by no means as justifying, gave me now
my first glimpse of its grounds. It was as if I had never before
seen her face invaded by anything I should have called an ex-
pression. This expression, moreover, was of the faintest — was
like the effect produced on a surface by an agitation both deep
within and as yet much confused. " Have you told her so ? " she
then quickly asked, as if to soften the sound of her surprise.

" Dear no, I've but just noticed her — Outreau a moment ago
put me on her. But we're both so taken, and he also wants "

" To paint her ? " Lady Beldonald uncontrollably murmured.

"Don't be afraid we shall fight for her," I returned with a
laugh for this tone. Mrs. Brash was still where I could see her
without appearing to stare, and she mightn't have seen I was
looking at her, though her protectress, I am afraid, could scarce
have failed of this perception. " We must each take our turn,
and at any rate she's a wonderful thing, so that, if you'll take her
to Paris, Outreau promises her there "

" There ? " my companion gasped.

" A career bigger still than among us, as he considers that we
haven't half their eye. He guarantees her a succes fou"

She couldn't get over it. " Louisa Brash ? In Paris ? "

"They do see," I exclaimed, "more than we; and they live
extraordinarily, don't you know, in that. But she'll do some-
thing here too."

"And what will she do?"

If, frankly, now, I couldn't help giving Mrs. Brash a longer
look, so after it I could as little resist sounding my interlocutress.
"You'll see. Only give her time."

She said nothing during the moment in which she met my
eyes ; but then : " Time, it seems to me, is exactly what you and
your friend want. If you haven't talked with her "

" We haven't seen her? Oh, we see bang off — with a click like
a steel spring. It's our trade ; it's our life \ and we should be
donkeys if we made mistakes. That's the way I saw you your-
self, my lady, if I may say so ; that's the way, with a long pin

26 THE BETTER SORT

straight through your body, I've got you. And just so I've
got her?

All this, for reasons, had brought my guest to her feet ; but her
eyes, while we talked, had never once followed the direction of
mine. "You call her a Holbein?"

"Outreau did, and I of course immediately recognised it.
Don't you ? She brings the old boy to life ! It's just as I
should call you a Titian. You bring him to life."

She couldn't be said to relax, because she couldn't be said to
have hardened ; but something at any rate on this took place in
her — something indeed quite disconnected from what I would
have called her. " Don't you understand that she has always
been supposed ? " It had the ring of impatience ; neverthe-
less, on a scruple, it stopped short.

I knew what it was, however, well enough to say it for her if
she preferred. "To be nothing whatever to look at? To be
unfortunately plain— or even if you like repulsively ugly? Oh
yes, I understand it perfectly, just as I understand — I have to as
a part of my trade — many other forms of stupidity. It's nothing
new to one that ninety-nine people out of a hundred have no
eyes, no sense, no taste. There are whole communities im-
penetrably sealed. I don't say your friend is a person to make
the men turn round in Regent Street. But it adds to the joy of
the few who do see that they have it so much to themselves.
Where in the world can she have lived ? You must tell me all
about that — or rather, if she'll be so good, she must."

" You mean then to speak to her ? "

I wondered as she pulled up again. " Of her beauty ? "

" Her beauty ! " cried Lady Beldonald so loud that two or
three persons looked round.

" Ah, with every precaution of respect ! " I declared in a much
lower tone. But her back was by this time turned to me, and
in the movement, as it were, one of the strangest little dramas I
have ever known was well launched.

Ill

IT was a drama of small, smothered intensely private things, and
I knew of but one other person in the secret ; yet that person
and I found it exquisitely susceptible of notation, followed it with
an interest the mutual communication of which did much for
our enjoyment, and were present with emotion at its touching
catastrophe. The small case — for so small a case — had made

THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 27

a great stride even before my little party separated, and in fact
within the next ten minutes.

In that space of time two things had happened ; one of which
was that I made the acquaintance of Mrs. Brash, and the other
that Mrs. Munden reached me, cleaving the crowd, with one of
her usual pieces of news. What she had to impart was that, on
her having just before asked Nina if the conditions of our sitting
had been arranged with me, Nina had replied, with something
like perversity, that she didn't propose to arrange them, that the
whole affair was "off" again, and that she preferred not to be,
for the present, further pressed. The question for Mrs. Munden
was naturally what had happened and whether I understood.
Oh, I understood perfectly, and what I at first most understood
was that even when I had brought in the name of Mrs. Brash
intelligence was not yet in Mrs. Munden. She was quite as
surprised as Lady Beldonald had been on hearing of the esteem
in which I held Mrs. Brash's appearance. She was stupefied at
learning that I had just in my ardour proposed to the possessor
of it to sit to me. Only she came round promptly — which Lady
Beldonald really never did. Mrs. Munden was in fact wonderful ;
for when I had given her quickly " Why, she's a Holbein, you
know," she took it up, after a first fine vacancy, with an immediate
abysmal uOh, is she?" that, as a piece of social gymnastics, did
her the greatest honour ; and she was in fact the first in London
to spread the tidings. For a face-about it was magnificent. But
she was also the first, I must add, to see what would really
happen — though this she put before me only a week or two
later.

" It will kill her, my dear — that's what it will do ! "
She meant neither more nor less than that it would kill Lady
Beldonald if I were to paint Mrs. Brash ; for at this lurid light
had we arrived in so short a space of time. It was for me to
decide whether my aesthetic need of giving life to my idea was
such as to justify me in destroying it in a woman after all, in
most eyes, so beautiful. The situation was, after all, sufficiently
queer ; for it remained to be seen what I should positively gain
by giving up Mrs. Brash. I appeared to have in any case lost
Lady Beldonald, now too " upset " — it was always Mrs. Munden's
word about her and, as I inferred, her own about herself — to meet
me again on our previous footing. The only thing, I of course
soon saw, was to temporise — to drop the whole question for the
present and yet so far as possible keep each of the pair in view.
I may as well say at once that this plan and this process gave
their principal interest to the next several months. Mrs. Brash

28 THE BETTER SORT

had turned up, if I remember, early in the new year, and her
little wonderful career was in our particular circle one of the
features of the following season. It was at all events for myself
the most attaching ; it is not my fault if I am so put together as
often to find more life in situations obscure and subject to inter-
pretation than in the gross rattle of the foreground. And there
were all sorts of things, things touching, amusing, mystifying —
and above all such an instance as I had never yet met — in this
funny little fortune of the useful American cousin. Mrs. Munden
was promptly at one with me as to the rarity and, to a near and
human view, the beauty and interest of the position. We had
neither of us ever before seen that degree and that special sort
of personal success come to a woman for the first time so late in
life. I found it an example of poetic, of absolutely retributive,
justice ; so that my desire grew great to work it, as we say, on
those lines. I had seen it all from the original moment at my
studio ; the poor lady had never known an hour's appreciation —
which, moreover, in perfect good faith, she had never missed.
The very first thing I did after producing so unintentionally the
resentful retreat of her protectress had been to go straight over
to her and say almost without preliminaries that I should hold
myself immeasurably obliged if she would give me a few sittings.
What I thus came face to face with was, on the instant, her
whole unenlightened past, and the full, if foreshortened, revela-
tion of what among us all was now unfailingly in store for her.
To turn the handle and start that tune came to me on the spot
as a temptation. Here was a poor lady who had waited for the
approach of old age to find out what she was worth. Here
was a benighted being to whom it was to be disclosed in her
fifty-seventh year (I was to make that out) that she had some-
thing that might pass for a face. She looked much more than
her age, and was fairly frightened — as if I had been trying on her
some possibly heartless London trick — when she had taken in
my appeal. That showed me in what an air she had lived and
— as I should have been tempted to put it had I spoken out —
among what children of darkness. Later on I did them more
justice; saw more that her wonderful points must have been
points largely the fruit of time, and even that possibly she might
never in all her life have looked so well as at this particular
moment. It might have been that if her hour had struck I just
happened to be present at the striking. What had occurred, all
the same, was at the worst a sufficient comedy.

The famous "irony of fate" takes many forms, but I had
never yet seen it take quite this one. She had been " had over "

THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 29

on an understanding, and she was not playing fair. She had
broken the law of her ugliness and had turned beautiful on the
hands of her employer. More interesting even perhaps than a
view of the conscious triumph that this might prepare for her,
and of which, had I doubted of my own judgment, I could still
take Outreau's fine start as the full guarantee — more interesting
was the question of the process by which such a history could
get itself enacted. The curious thing was that, all the while, the
reasons of her having passed for plain — the reasons for Lady
Beldonald's fond calculation, which they quite justified — were
written large in her face, so large that it was easy to understand
them as the only ones she herself had ever read. What was
it, then, that actually made the old stale sentence mean something
so different? — into what new combinations, what extraordinary
language, unknown but understood at a glance, had time and
life translated it ? The only thing to be said was that time and
life were artists who beat us all, working with recipes and secrets
that we could never find out. I really ought to have, like
a lecturer or a showman, a chart or a blackboard to present
properly the relation, in the wonderful old tender, battered,
blanched face, between the original elements and the exquisite
final " style." I could do it with chalks, but I can scarcely do
it thus. However, the thing was, for any artist who respected
himself, to fee/ it — which I abundantly did; and then not to con-
ceal from her that I felt it — which I neglected as little. But she
was really, to do her complete justice, the last to understand ;
and I am not sure that, to the end — for there was an end — she
quite made it all out or knew where she was. When you have
been brought up for fifty years on black, it must be hard to
adjust your organism, at a day's notice, to gold -colour. Her
whole nature had been pitched in the key of her supposed
plainness. She had known how to be ugly — it was the only
thing she had learnt save, if possible, how not to mind it.
Being beautiful, at any rate, took a new set of muscles. It was
on the prior theory, literally, that she had developed her admir-
able dress, instinctively felicitous, always either black or white,
and a matter of rather severe squareness and studied line. She
was magnificently neat ; everything she showed had a way of
looking both old and fresh ; and there was on every occasion
the same picture in her draped head — draped in low-falling black
— and the fine white plaits (of a painter's white, somehow)
disposed on her chest. What had happened was that these
arrangements, determined by certain considerations, lent them-
selves in effect much better to certain others. Adopted as a

30 THE BETTER SORT

kind of refuge, they had really only deepened her accent. It
was singular, moreover, that, so constituted, there was nothing
in her aspect of the ascetic or the nun. She was a good, hard,
sixteenth-century figure, not withered with innocence, bleached
rather by life in the open. She was, in short, just what we had
made of her, a Holbein for a great museum ; and our position,
Mrs. Munden's and mine, rapidly became that of persons having
such a treasure to dispose of. The world— I speak of course
mainly of the art-world — flocked to see it.

\
IV

" BUT has she any idea herself, poor thing ? " was the way I had
put it to Mrs. Munden on our next meeting after the incident
at my studio; with the effect, however, only of leaving my
friend at first to take me as alluding to Mrs. Brash's possible
prevision of the chatter she might create. I had my own sense
of that — this prevision had been nil; the question was of her
consciousness of the office for which Lady Beldonald had
counted on her and for which we were so promptly proceeding
to spoil her altogether.

" Oh, I think she arrived with a goodish notion," Mrs. Munden
had replied when I had explained; "for she's clever too, you
know, as well as good-looking, and I don't see how, if she ever
really knew Nina, she could have supposed for a moment that
she was not wanted for whatever she might have left to give
up. Hasn't she moreover always been made to feel that she's
ugly enough for anything?" It was even at this point already
wonderful how my friend had mastered the case, and what lights,
alike for its past and its future, she was prepared to throw on it.
" If she has seen herself as ugly enough for anything, she has
seen herself — and that was the only way — as ugly enough for
Nina ; and she has had her own manner of showing that she
understands without making Nina commit herself to anything
vulgar. Women are never without ways for doing such things —
both for communicating and receiving knowledge — that I can't
explain to you, and that you wouldn't understand if I could, as
you must be a woman even to do that. I dare say they've ex-
pressed it all to each other simply in the language of kisses. But
doesn't it, at any rate, make something rather beautiful of the
relation between them as affected by our discovery?"

I had a laugh for her plural possessive. " The point is, of
course, that if there was a conscious bargain, and our action on
Mrs. Brash is to deprive her of the sense of keeping her side of

THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 31

it, various things may happen that won't be good either for her
or for ourselves. She may conscientiously throw up the
position."

" Yes," my companion mused — " for she is conscientious. Or
Nina, without waiting for that, may cast her forth."

I faced it all. " Then we should have to keep her."

"As a regular model?" Mrs. Munden was ready for any-
thing. " Oh, that would be lovely ! "

But I further worked it out. " The difficulty is that she's not
a model, hang it — that she's too good for one, that she's the very
thing herself. When Outreau and I have each had our go, that
will be all; there'll be nothing left for anyone else. Therefore
it behoves us quite to understand that our attitude's a responsi-
bility. If we can't do for her positively more than Nina
does "

" We must let her alone ? " My companion continued to
muse. " I see ! "

"Yet don't," I returned, "see too much. We can do more."

"Than Nina?" She was again on the spot. "It wouldn't,
after all, be difficult. We only want the directly opposite thing
— and which is the only one the poor dear can give. Unless,
indeed," she suggested, " we simply retract — we back out."

I turned it over. "It's too late for that. Whether Mrs.
Brash's peace is gone, I can't say. But Nina's is."

" Yes, and there's no way to bring it back that won't sacrifice
her friend. We can't turn round and say Mrs. Brash is ugly,
can we? But fancy Nina's not having seen/" Mrs. Munden
exclaimed.

" She doesn't see now," I answered. " She can't, I'm certain,
make out what we mean. The woman, for her still, is just what
she always was. But she has, nevertheless, had her stroke, and
her blindness, while she wavers and gropes in the dark, only adds
to her discomfort. Her blow was to see the attention of the
world deviate."

"All the same, I don't think, you know," my interlocutress
said, "that Nina will have made her a scene, or that, whatever
we do, she'll ever make her one. That isn't the way it will
happen, for she's exactly as conscientious as Mrs. Brash."

" Then what is the way ? " I asked.

" It will just happen in silence."

" And what will ' it,' as you call it, be ? "

" Isn't that what we want really to see ? "

"Well," I replied after a turn or two about, "whether we want
it or not, it's exactly what we shall see; which is a reason the

32 THE BETTER SORT

more for fancying, between the pair there — in the quiet, exquisite
house, and full of superiorities and suppressions as they both are
— the extraordinary situation. If I said just now that it's too
late to do anything but accept, it's because I've taken the full
measure of what happened at my studio. It took but a few
moments — but she tasted of the tree."

My companion wondered. " Nina ? "

"Mrs. Brash." And to have to put it so ministered, while
I took yet another turn, to a sort of agitation. Our attitude was
a responsibility.

But I had suggested something else to my friend, who
appeared for a moment detached. " Should you say she'll hate
her worse if she doesrit see ? "

" Lady Beldonald ? Doesn't see what we see, you mean, than
if she does ? Ah, I give that up ! " I laughed. " But what I can
tell you is why I hold that, as I said just now, we can do most.
We can do this : we can give to a harmless and sensitive creature
hitherto practically disinherited — and give with an unexpectedness
that will immensely add to its price — the pure joy of a deep
draught of the very pride of life, of an acclaimed personal
triumph in our superior, sophisticated world."

Mrs. Munden had a glow of response for my sudden eloquence.
" Oh, it will be beautiful ! "

WELL, that is what, on the whole, and in spite of everything, it
really was. It has dropped into my memory a rich little gallery
of pictures, a regular panorama of those occasions that were the
proof of the privilege that had made me for a moment — in the
words I have just recorded — lyrical. I see Mrs. Brash on each
of these occasions practically enthroned and surrounded and more
or less mobbed ; see the hurrying and the nudging and the press-
ing and the staring ; see the people " making up " and introduced,
and catch the word when they have had their turn ; hear it above
all, the great one — "Ah yes, the famous Holbein!" — passed
about with that perfection of promptitude that makes the motions
of the London mind so happy a mixture of those of the parrot
and the sheep. Nothing would be easier, of course, than to tell
the whole little tale with an eye only for that silly side of it. Great
was the silliness, but great also as to this case of poor Mrs. Brash,
I will say for it, the good nature. Of course, furthermore, it took
in particular " our set," with its positive child-terror of the banal,
to be either so foolish or so wise ; though indeed I've never quite

THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 33

known where our set begins and ends, and have had to content
myself on this score with the indication once given me by a lady
next whom I was placed at dinner : " Oh, it's bounded on the
north by Ibsen and on the south by Sargent ! " Mrs. Brash never
sat to me ; she absolutely declined ; and when she declared that
it was quite enough for her that I had with that fine precipitation
invited her, I quite took this as she meant it, for before we had
gone very far our understanding, hers and mine, was complete.
Her attitude was as happy as her success was prodigious. The
sacrifice of the portrait was a sacrifice to the true inwardness of
Lady Beldonald, and did much, for the time, I divined, toward
muffling their domestic tension. All that was thus in her power
to say — and I heard of a few cases of her having said it — was
that she was sure I would have painted her beautifully if she
hadn't prevented me. She couldn't even tell the truth, which was
that I certainly would have done so if Lady Beldonald hadn't ;
and she never could mention the subject at all before that person-
age. I can only describe the affair, naturally, from the outside,
and heaven forbid indeed that I should try too closely to recon-
struct the possible strange intercourse of these good friends at
home.

My anecdote, however, would lose half such point as it may
possess were I to omit all mention of the charming turn that her
ladyship appeared gradually to have found herself able to give to
her deportment. She had made it impossible I should myself
bring up our old, our original question, but there was real dis-
tinction in her manner of now accepting certain other possibilities.
Let me do her that justice ; her effort at magnanimity must have
been immense. There couldn't fail, of course, to be ways in
which poor Mrs. Brash paid for it. How much she had to pay
we were, in fact, soon enough to see ; and it is my intimate con-
viction that, as a climax, her life at last was the price. But while
she lived, at least — and it was with an intensity, for those
wondrous weeks, of which she had never dreamed — Lady
Beldonald herself faced the music. This is what I mean by the
possibilities, by the sharp actualities indeed, that she accepted.
She took our friend out, she showed her at home, never
attempted to hide or to betray her, played her no trick whatever
so long as the ordeal lasted. She drank deep, on her side too,
of the cup — the cup that for her own lips could only be bitter-
ness. There was, I think, scarce a special success of her com-
panion's at which she was not personally present. Mrs. Munden's
theory of the silence in which all this would be muffled for them
was, none the less, and in abundance, confirmed by our observa-

34 THE BETTER SORT

tions. The whole thing was to be the death of one or the other
of them, but they never spoke of it at tea. I remember even
that Nina went so far as to say to me once, looking me full in
the eyes, quite sublimely, " I've made out what you mean — she
is a picture." The beauty of this, moreover, was that, as I am
persuaded, she hadn't really made it out at all — the words were
the mere hypocrisy of her reflective endeavour for virtue. She
couldn't possibly have made it out; her friend was as much as
ever " dreadfully plain " to her ; she must have wondered to the
last what on earth possessed us. Wouldn't it in fact have been,
after all, just this failure of vision, this supreme stupidity in
short, that kept the catastrophe so long at bay? There was
a certain sense of greatness for her in seeing so many of us so
absurdly mistaken; and I recall that on various occasions, and
in particular when she uttered the words just quoted, this high
serenity, as a sign of the relief of her soreness, if not of the
effort of her conscience, did something quite visible to my eyes,
and also quite unprecedented, for the beauty of her face. She
got a real lift from it — such a momentary discernible sublimity
that I recollect coming out on the spot with a queer, crude,
amused " Do you know I believe I could paint you now ? "

She was a fool not to have closed with me then and there;
for what has happened since has altered everything — what was
to happen a little later was so much more than I could swallow.
This was the disappearance of the famous Holbein from one day
to the other — producing a consternation among us all as great as
if the Venus of Milo had suddenly vanished from the Louvre.
"She has simply shipped her straight back" — the explanation
was given in that form by Mrs. Munden, who added that any
cord pulled tight enough would end at last by snapping. At the
snap, in any case, we mightily jumped, for the masterpiece we
had for three or four months been living with had made us feel
its presence as a luminous lesson and a daily need. We recog-
nised more than ever that it had been, for high finish, the gem
of our collection — we found what a blank it left on the wall.
Lady Beldonald might fill up the blank, but we couldn't. That
she did soon fill it up— and, heaven help us, how? — was put
before me after an interval of no great length, but during which
I had not seen her. I dined on the Christmas of last year
at Mrs. Munden's, and Nina, with a " scratch lot," as our hostess
said, was there, and, the preliminary wait being longish, ap-
proached me very sweetly. " I'll come to you to-morrow if you
like," she said ; and the effect of it, after a first stare at her, was
to make me look all round. I took in, in these two motions,

THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 35

two things ; one of which was that, though now again so satisfied
herself of her high state, she could give me nothing comparable
to what I should have got had she taken me up at the moment
of my meeting her on her distinguished concession ; the other
that she was "suited" afresh, and that Mrs. Brash's successor
was fully installed. Mrs. Brash's successor was at the other side
of the room, and I became conscious that Mrs. Munden was
waiting to see my eyes seek her. I guessed the meaning of the
wait ; what was one, this time, to say ? Oh, first and foremost,
assuredly, that it was immensely droll, for this time, at least,
there was no mistake. The lady I looked upon, and as to whom
my friend, again quite at sea, appealed to me for a formula, was
as little a Holbein, or a specimen of any other school, as she
was, like Lady Beldonald herself, a Titian. The formula was
easy to give, for the amusement was that her prettiness — yes,
literally, prodigiously, her prettiness — was distinct. Lady Bel-
donald had been magnificent — had been almost intelligent.
Miss What's-her-name continues pretty, continues even young,
and doesn't matter a straw ! She matters so ideally little that
Lady Beldonald is practically safer, I judge, than she has ever
been. There has not been a symptom of chatter about this
person, and I believe her protectress is much surprised that we
are not more struck.

It was, at any rate, strictly impossible to me to make an
appointment for the day as to which I have just recorded Nina's
proposal ; and the turn of events since then has not quickened
my eagerness. Mrs. Munden remained in correspondence with
Mrs. Brash — to the extent, that is, of three letters, each of which
she showed me. They so told, to our imagination, her terrible
little story that we were quite prepared — or thought we were —
for her going out like a snuffed candle. She resisted, on her
return to her original conditions, less than a year ; the taste of
the tree, as I had called it, had been fatal to her ; what she had
contentedly enough lived without before for half a century she
couldn't now live without for a day^ I know nothing of her
original conditions — some minor American city — save that for
her to have gone back to them was clearly to have stepped out
of her frame. We performed, Mrs. Munden and I, a small
funeral service for her by talking it all over and making it all out.
It wasn't — the minor American city — a market for Holbeins, and
what had occurred was that the poor old picture, banished from
its museum and refreshed by the rise of no new movement to
hang it, was capable of the miracle of a silent revolution, of itself
turning, in its dire dishonour, its face to the wall. So it stood,

36 THE BETTER SORT

without the intervention of the ghost of a critic, till they
happened to pull it round again and find it mere dead paint.
Well, it had had, if that is anything, its season of fame, its name
on a thousand tongues and printed in capitals in the catalogue.
We had not been at fault. I haven't, all the same, the least note
of her — not a scratch. And I did her so in intention ! Mrs.
Munden continues to remind me, however, that this is not the
sort of rendering with which, on the other side, after all, Lady
Beldonald proposes to content herself. She has come back to
the question of her own portrait. Let me settle it then at last.
Since she will have the real thing — well, hang it, she shall !

THE TWO FACES

THE servant, who, in spite of his sealed, stamped look,
appeared to have his reasons, stood there for instruction,
in a manner not quite usual, after announcing the name. Mrs.
Grantham, however, took it up — " Lord Gwyther ? " — with a
quick surprise that for an instant justified him even to the small
scintilla in the glance she gave her companion, which might
have had exactly the sense of the butler's hesitation. This com-
panion, a shortish, fairish, youngish man, clean-shaven and keen-
eyed, had, with a promptitude that would have struck an observer
— which the butler indeed was — sprung to his feet and moved to
the chimney-piece, though his hostess herself, meanwhile, man-
aged not otherwise to stir. " Well ? " she said, as for the visitor
to advance; which she immediately followed with a sharper "He's
not there ? "

" Shall I show him up, ma'am ? "

" But of course ! " The point of his doubt made her at last
rise for impatience, and Bates, before leaving the room, might
still have caught the achieved irony of her appeal to the gentle-
man into whose communion with her he had broken. " Why in

the world not ? What a way !" she exclaimed, as

Sutton felt beside his cheek the passage of her eyes to the glass
behind him.

" He wasn't sure you'd see anyone."
"I don't see 'anyone,' but I see individuals."
"That's just it ; and sometimes you don't see them."
"Do you mean ever because of youV she asked as she
touched into place a tendril of hair. "That's just his imper-
tinence, as to which I shall speak to him."

" Don't," said Shirley Sutton. " Never notice anything."
"That's nice advice from you," she laughed, "who notice
everything ! "

" Ah, but I speak of nothing."

37

38 THE BETTER SORT

She looked at him a moment. "You're still more impertinent
than Bates. You'll please not budge," she went on.

"Really? I must sit him out?" he continued as, after a
minute, she had not again spoken — only glancing about, while
she changed her place, partly for another look at the glass and
partly to see if she could improve her seat. What she felt was
rather more than, clever and charming though she was, she
could hide. "If you're wondering how you seem, I can tell
you. Awfully cool and easy."

She gave him another stare. She was beautiful and conscious.
" And if you're wondering how you seem "

"Oh, I'm not!" he laughed from before the fire; "I always
perfectly know."

" How you seem," she retorted, " is as if you didn't ! "

Once more for a little he watched her. "You're looking
lovely for him — extraordinarily lovely, within the marked limits
of your range. But that's enough. Don't be clever."

"Then who will be?"

" There you are ! " he sighed with amusement.

"Do you know him?" she asked as, through the door left
open by Bates, they heard steps on the landing.

Sutton had to think an instant, and produced a " No " just as
Lord Gwyther was again announced, which gave an unexpected-
ness to the greeting offered him a moment later by this person-
age— a young man, stout and smooth and fresh, but not at all
shy, who, after the happiest rapid passage with Mrs. Grantham,
put out a hand with a frank, pleasant " How d'ye do ? "

" Mr. Shirley Sutton," Mrs. Grantham explained.

"Oh yes," said her second visitor, quite as if he knew; which,
as he couldn't have known, had for her first the interest of con-
firming a perception that his lordship would be — no, not at all, in
general, embarrassed, only was now exceptionally and especially
agitated. As it is, for that matter, with Sutton's total impression
that we are particularly and almost exclusively concerned, it may
be further mentioned that he was not less clear as to the really
handsome way in which the young man kept himself together
and little by little— though with all proper aid indeed— finally
found his feet. All sorts of things, for the twenty minutes,
occurred to Sutton, though one of them was certainly not that it
would, after all, be better he should go. One of them was that
their hostess was doing it in perfection — simply, easily, kindly,
yet with something the least bit queer in her wonderful eyes;
another was that if he had been recognised without the least
ground it was through a tension of nerves on the part of his

THE TWO FACES 39

fellow-guest that produced inconsequent motions; still another
was that, even had departure been indicated, he would positively
have felt dissuasion in the rare promise of the scene. This was
in especial after Lord Gwyther not only had announced that he
was now married, but had mentioned that he wished to bring his
wife to Mrs. Grantham for the benefit so certain to be derived.
It was the passage immediately produced by that speech that
provoked in Sutton the intensity, as it were, of his arrest. He
already knew of the marriage as well as Mrs. Grantham herself,
and as well also as he knew of some other things ; and this gave
him, doubtless, the better measure of what took place before him
and the keener consciousness of the quick look that, at a marked
moment — though it was not absolutely meant for him any more
than for his companion — Mrs. Grantham let him catch.

She smiled, but it had a gravity. " I think, you know, you
ought to have told me before."

" Do you mean when I first got engaged ? Well, it all took
place so far away, and we really told, at home, so few people."

Oh, there might have been reasons ; but it had not been quite
right. "You were married at Stuttgart? That wasn't too far
for my interest, at least, to reach."

" Awfully kind of you — and of course one knew you would be
kind. But it wasn't at Stuttgart ; it was over there, but quite in
the country. We should have managed it in England but that
her mother naturally wished to be present, yet was not in health
to come. So it was really, you see, a sort of little hole-and-
corner German affair."

This didn't in the least check Mrs. Grantham's claim, but it
started a slight anxiety. " Will she be — a, then, German ? "

Sutton knew her to know perfectly what Lady Gwyther would
"be," but he had by this time, while their friend explained, his
independent interest. " Oh dear, no ! My father-in-law has
never parted with the proud birthright of a Briton. But his
wife, you see, holds an estate in Wiirtemberg from her mother,
Countess Kremnitz, on which, with the awful condition of his
English property, you know, they've found it for years a
tremendous saving to live. So that though Valda was luckily
born at home she has practically spent her life over there."

"Oh, I see." Then, after a slight pause, "Is Valda her
pretty name?" Mrs. Grantham asked.

" Well," said the young man, only wishing, in his candour, it
was clear, to be drawn out — "well, she has, in the manner of her
mother's people, about thirteen ; but that's the one we generally

40 THE BETTER SORT

Mrs. Grantham hesitated but an instant. "Then may /
generally use it ? "

" It would be too charming of you ; and nothing would give
her— as, I assure you, nothing would give me, greater pleasure."
Lord Gwyther quite glowed with the thought.

" Then I think that instead of coming alone you might have
brought her to see me."

" It's exactly what," he instantly replied, " I came to ask your
leave to do." He explained that for the moment Lady Gwyther
was not in town, having as soon as she arrived gone down to
Torquay to put in a few days with one of her aunts, also her
godmother, to whom she was an object of great interest. She
had seen no one yet, and no one — not that that mattered — had
seen her ; she knew nothing whatever of London and was awfully
frightened at facing it and at what — however little — might be
expected of her. " She wants some one," he said, " some one
who knows the whole thing, don't you see? and who's thoroughly
kind and clever, as you would be, if I may say so, to take her by
the hand." It was at this point and on these words that the eyes
of Lord Gwyther's two auditors inevitably and wonderfully met.
But there was nothing in the way he kept it up to show that he
caught the encounter. " She wants, if I may tell you so, for the
great labyrinth, a real friend ; and asking myself what I could
do to make things ready for her, and who would be absolutely
the best woman in London "

"You thought, naturally, of met" Mrs. Grantham had
listened with no sign but the faint flash just noted ; now,
however, she gave him the full light of her expressive face —
which immediately brought Shirley Sutton, looking at his watch,
once more to his feet.

"She is the best woman in London ! " He addressed himself
with a laugh to the other visitor, but offered his hand in farewell
to their hostess.

"You're going?"

" I must," he said without scruple.

" Then we do meet at dinner ? "

" I hope so." On which, to take leave, he returned with
interest to Lord Gwyther the friendly clutch he had a short time
before received.

THE TWO FACES 41

II

THEY did meet at dinner, and if they were not, as it happened,
side by side, they made that up afterwards in the happiest angle
of a drawing-room that offered both shine and shadow and that
was positively much appreciated, in the circle in which they
moved, for the favourable "corners" created by its shrewd
mistress. Her face, charged with something produced in it by
Lord Gwyther's visit, had been with him so constantly for the
previous hours that, when she instantly challenged him on his
"treatment" of her in the afternoon, he was on the point of
naming it as his reason for not having remained with her.
Something new had quickly come into her beauty ; he couldn't
as yet have said what, nor whether on the whole to its advantage
or its loss. Till he could make up his mind about that, at any
rate, he would say nothing ; so that, with sufficient presence of
mind, he found a better excuse. If in short he had in defiance
of her particular request left her alone with Lord Gwyther, it was
simply because the situation had suddenly turned so exciting
that he had fairly feared the contagion of it — the temptation of
its making him, most improperly, put in his word.

They could now talk of these things at their ease. Other
couples, ensconced and scattered, enjoyed the same privilege,
and Button had more and more the profit, such as it was, of
feeling that his interest in Mrs. Grantham had become — what
was the luxury of so high a social code — an acknowledged and
protected relation. He knew his London well enough to know
that he was on the way to be regarded as her main source of
consolation for the trick that, several months before, Lord
Gwyther had publicly played her. Many persons had not held
that, by the high social code in question, his lordship could
have "reserved the right" to turn up in that way, from one day
to another, engaged. For himself London took, with its short
cuts and its cheap psychology, an immense deal for granted.
To his own sense he was never — could in the nature of things
never be — any man's "successor." Just what had constituted
the predecessorship of other men was apparently that they had
been able to make up their mind. He, worse luck, was at the
mercy of her face, and more than ever at the mercy of it now,
which meant, moreover, not that it made a slave of him, but
that it made, disconcertingly, a sceptic. It was the absolute
perfection of the handsome; but things had a way of coming
into it. "I felt," he said, "that you were there together at a
point at which you had a right to the ease that the absence of

42 THE BETTER SORT

a listener would give. I reflected that when you made me
promise to stay you hadn't guessed "

" That he could possibly have come to me on such an extra-
ordinary errand ? No, of course I hadn't guessed. Who would?
But didn't you see how little I was upset by it ? "

Sutton demurred. Then with a smile, "I think he saw how
little."

"You yourself didn't, then?"

He again held back, but not, after all, to answer. " He was
wonderful, wasn't he ? "

" I think he was," she replied after a moment. To which she
added: "Why did he pretend that way he knew you?"

" He didn't pretend. He felt on the spot as if we were
friends." Sutton had found this afterwards, and found truth in
it. " It was an effusion of cheer and hope. He was so glad to
see me there, and to find you happy."

"Happy?"

"Happy. Aren't you?"

"Because of you?"

" Well— according to the impression he received as he came
in."

" That was sudden then," she asked, " and unexpected ? "

Her companion thought. "Prepared in some degree, but
confirmed by the sight of us, there together, so awfully jolly
and sociable over your fire."

Mrs. Grantham turned this round. "If he knew I was
' happy ' then — which, by the way, is none of his business, nor
of yours either — why in the world did he come ? "

" Well, for good manners, and for his idea," said Sutton.

She took it in, appearing to have no hardness of rancour that
could bar discussion. " Do you mean by his idea his proposal
that I should grandmother his wife? And, if you do, is the
proposal your reason for calling him wonderful?"

Sutton laughed. " Pray, what's yours ? " As this was a ques-
tion, however, that she took her time to answer or not to answer —
only appearing interested for a moment in a combination that
had formed itself on the other side of the room — he presently
went on. " What's his ? — that would seem to be the point. His,
I mean, for having decided on the extraordinary step of throwing
his little wife, bound hands and feet, into your arms. Intelligent
as you are, and with these three or four hours to have thought it
over, I yet don't see how that can fail still to mystify you."

She continued to watch their opposite neighbours. " ' Little,'
you call her. Is she so very small ? >J

THE TWO FACES 43

"Tiny, tiny — she must be; as different as possible in every
way — of necessity — from you. They always are the opposite
pole, you know," said Shirley Sutton.

She glanced at him now. "You strike me as of an impu-
dence !"

" No, no. I only like to make it out with you."

She looked away again and, after a little, went on. " I'm sure
she's charming, and only hope one isn't to gather that he's
already tired of her."

" Not a bit ! He's tremendously in love, and he'll remain so."

"So much the better. And if it's a question," said Mrs.
Grantham, " of one's doing what one can for her, he has only, as
I told him when you had gone, to give me the chance."

" Good ! So he is to commit her to you ? "

"You use extraordinary expressions, but it's settled that he
brings her."

" And you'll really and truly help her ? "

" Really and truly ? " said Mrs. Grantham, with her eyes again
upon him. " Why not ? For what do you take me ? "

" Ah, isn't that just what I still have the discomfort, every day
I live, of asking myself?"

She had made, as she spoke, a movement to rise, which, as
if she was tired of his tone, his last words appeared to determine.
But, also getting up, he held her, when they were on their feet,
long enough to hear the rest of what he had to say. "If you do
help her, you know, you'll show him that you've understood."

"Understood what?"

"Why, his idea — the deep, acute train of reasoning that has
led him to take, as one may say, the bull by the horns ; to reflect
that as you might, as you probably would^ in any case, get at
her, he plays the wise game, as well as the bold one, by assuming
your generosity and placing himself publicly under an obligation
to you."

Mrs. Grantham showed not only that she had listened, but
that she had for an instant considered. " What is it you elegantly
describe as my getting * at ' her ? "

" He takes his risk, but puts you, you see, on your honour."

She thought a moment more. "What profundities indeed
then over the simplest of matters ! And if your idea is," she
went on, "that if I do help her I shall show him I've understood
them, so it will be that if I don't "

"You'll show him"— Sutton took her up— "that you haven't?
Precisely. But in spite of not wanting to appear to have under-
stood too much "

44 THE BETTER SORT

" I may still be depended on to do what I can ? Quite
certainly. You'll see what I may still be depended on to do."
And she moved away.

Ill

IT was not, doubtless, that there had been anything in their
rather sharp separation at that moment to sustain or prolong the
interruption ; yet it definitely befell that, circumstances aiding,
they practically failed to meet again before the great party at
Burbeck. This occasion was to gather in some thirty persons
from a certain Friday to the following Monday, and it was on the
Friday that Sutton went down. He had known in advance that
Mrs. Grantham was to be there, and this perhaps, during the
interval of hindrance, had helped him a little to be patient. He
had before him the certitude of a real full cup — two days
brimming over with the sight of her. He found, however, on
his arrival that she was not yet in the field, and presently learned
that her place would be in a small contingent that was to join
the party on the morrow. This knowledge he extracted from
Miss Banker, who was always the first to present herself at any
gathering that was to enjoy her, and whom, moreover — partly on
that very account — the wary not less than the speculative were
apt to hold themselves well-advised to engage with at as early as
possible a stage of the business. She was stout, red, rich,
mature, universal — a massive, much-fingered volume, alphabeti-
cal, wonderful, indexed, that opened of itself at the right place.

She opened for Sutton instinctively at G , which happened to

be remarkably convenient. " What she's really waiting over for
is to bring down Lady Gwyther."

" Ah, the Gwythers are coming ? "

"Yes; caught, through Mrs. Grantham, just in time. She'll
be the feature — everyone wants to see her."

Speculation and wariness met and combined at this moment
in Shirley Sutton. " Do you mean — a — Mrs. Grantham ? "

" Dear no ! Poor little Lady Gwyther, who, but just arrived in
England, appears now literally for the first time in her life in any
society whatever, and whom (don't you know the extraordinary
story? you ought to — you I) she, of all people, has so wonder-
fully taken up. It will be quite — here — as if she were ' present-
ing' her."

Sutton, of course, took in more things than even appeared.
" I never know what I ought to know ; I only know, inveterately,
what I oughtn't. So what is the extraordinary story ? "

THE TWO FACES 45

" You really haven't heard ? "

" Really ! " he replied without winking.

" It happened, indeed, but the other day," said Miss Banker,
" yet everyone is already wondering. Gwyther has thrown his
wife on her mercy — but I won't believe you if you pretend to me
you don't know why he shouldn't."

Sutton asked himself then what he could pretend. " Do you
mean because she's merciless ? "

She hesitated. " If you don't know, perhaps I oughtn't to
tell you."

He liked Miss Banker, and found just the right tone to plead.
"Do tell me."

"Well," she sighed, "it will be your own fault ! They

had been such friends that there could have been but one name
for the crudity of his original precede. When I was a girl we
used to call it throwing over. They call it in French to lacker.
But I refer not so much to the act itself as to the manner of it,
though you may say indeed, of course, that there is in such
cases, after all, only one manner. Least said, soonest mended."

Sutton seemed to wonder. " Oh, he said too much ? "

" He said nothing. That was it."

Sutton kept it up. " But was what?"

" Why, what she must, like any woman in her shoes, have felt
to be his perfidy. He simply went and did it — took to himself
this child, that is, without the preliminary of a scandal or a rupture
— before she could turn round."

" I follow you. But it would appear from what you say that
she has turned round now."

"Well," Miss Banker laughed, "we shall see for ourselves how
far. It will be what everyone will try to see."

" Oh, then we've work cut out ! " And Sutton certainly felt
that he himself had— an impression that lost nothing from a
further talk with Miss Banker in the course of a short stroll in
the grounds with her the next day. He spoke as one who had
now considered many things.

" Did I understand from you yesterday that Lady Gwyther's a
'child'?"

" Nobody knows. It's prodigious the way she has managed."

" The way Lady Gwyther has ? "

" No ; the way May Grantham has kept her till this hour in
her pocket."

He was quick at his watch. "Do you mean by 'this hour'
that they're due now ? "

" Not till tea. All the others arrive together in time for that."

46 THE BETTER SORT

Miss Banker had clearly, since the previous day, filled in gaps
and become, as it were, revised and enlarged. " She'll have kept
a cat from seeing her, so as to produce her entirely herself."

"Well," Sutton mused, " that will have been a very noble sort
of return "

" For Gwyther's behaviour? Very. Yet I feel creepy."

"Creepy?"

" Because so much depends for the girl — in the way of the
right start or the wrong start — on the signs and omens of this first
appearance. It's a great house and a great occasion, and we're
assembled here, it strikes me, very much as the Roman mob at
the circus used to be to see the next Christian maiden brought
out to the tigers."

" Oh, if she is a Christian maiden ! " Sutton murmured.

But he stopped at what his imagination called up.

It perhaps fed that faculty a little that Miss Banker had the
effect of making out that Mrs. Grantham might individually be,
in any case, something of a Roman matron. "She has kept her
in the dark so that we may only take her from her hand. She
will have formed her for us."

" In so few days ? "

" Well, she will have prepared her — decked her for the sacrifice
with ribbons and flowers."

" Ah, if you only mean that she will have taken her to her

dressmaker !" And it came to Sutton, at once as a new light

and as a check, almost, to anxiety, that this was all poor Gwyther,
mistrustful probably of a taste formed by Stuttgart, might have
desired of their friend.

There were usually at Burbeck many things taking place at
once ; so that wherever else, on such occasions, tea might be
served, it went forward with matchless pomp, weather permitting,
on a shaded stretch of one of the terraces and in presence of
one of the prospects. Shirley Sutton, moving, as the afternoon
waned, more restlessly about and mingling in dispersed groups
only to find they had nothing to keep him quiet, came upon it as
he turned a corner of the house — saw it seated there in all its
state. It might be said that at Burbeck it was, like everything
else, made the most of. It constituted immediately, with multi-
plied tables and glittering plate, with rugs and cushions and ices
and fruit and wonderful porcelain and beautiful women, a scene
of splendour, almost an incident of grand opera. One of the
beautiful women might quite have been expected to rise with a
gold cup and a celebrated song.

One of them did rise, as it happened, while Sutton drew near,

THE TWO FACES 47

and he found himself a moment later seeing nothing and nobody
but Mrs. Grantham. They met on the terrace, just away from
the others, and the movement in which he had the effect of
arresting her might have been that of withdrawal. He quickly
saw, however, that if she had been about to pass into the house
it was only on some errand — to get something or to call someone
— that would immediately have restored her to the public. It
somehow struck him on the spot — and more than ever yet, though
the impression was not wholly new to him — that she felt herself a
figure for the forefront of the stage and indeed would have been
recognised by anyone at a glance as the prima donna assoluta.
She caused, in fact, during the few minutes he stood talking to
her, an extraordinary series of waves to roll extraordinarily fast
over his sense, not the least mark of the matter being that the
appearance with which it ended was again the one with which it
had begun. " The face — the face," as he kept dumbly repeating ;
that was at last, as at first, all he could clearly see. She had a
perfection resplendent, but what in the world had it done, this
perfection, to her beauty? It was her beauty, doubtless, that
looked out at him, but it was into something else that, as their
eyes met, he strangely found himself looking.

It was as if something had happened in consequence of which
she had changed, and there was that in this swift perception that
made him glance eagerly about for Lady Gwyther. But as he
took in the recruited group — identities of the hour added to
those of the previous twenty-four — he saw, among his recogni-
tions, one of which was the husband of the person missing,
that Lady Gwyther was not there. Nothing in the whole busi-
ness was more singular than his consciousness that, as he came
back to his interlocutress after the nods and smiles and hand-
waves he had launched, she knew what had been his thought.
She knew for whom he had looked without success ; but why
should this knowledge visibly have hardened and sharpened her,
and precisely at a moment when she was unprecedentedly mag-
nificent ? The indefinable apprehension that had somewhat sunk
after his second talk with Miss Banker and then had perversely
risen again — this nameless anxiety now produced on him, with a
sudden sharper pinch, the effect of a great suspense. The
action of that, in turn, was to show him that he had not yet fully
known how much he had at stake on a final view. It was re-
vealed to him for the first time that he " really cared " whether
Mrs. Grantham were a safe nature. It was too ridiculous by
what a thread it hung, but something was certainly in the air
that would definitely tell him.

48 THE BETTER SORT

What was in the air descended the next moment to earth. He
turned round as he caught the expression with which her eyes
attached themselves to something that approached. A little
person, very young and very much dressed, had come out of the
house, and the expression in Mrs. Grantham's eyes was that of
the artist confronted with her work and interested, even to im-
patience, in the judgment of others. The little person drew
nearer, and though Button's companion, without looking at him
now, gave it a name and met it, he had jumped for himself at
certitude. He saw many things — too many, and they appeared
to be feathers, frills, excrescences of silk and lace — massed
together and conflicting, and after a moment also saw struggling
out of them a small face that struck him as either scared or sick.
Then, with his eyes again returning to Mrs. Grantham, he saw
another.

He had no more talk with Miss Banker till late that evening —
an evening during which he had felt himself too noticeably
silent; but something had passed between this pair, across
dinner-table and drawing-room, without speech, and when they
at last found words it was in the needed ease of a quiet end of
the long, lighted gallery, where she opened again at the very
paragraph.

"You were right — that was it. She did the only thing that,
at such short notice, she could do. She took her to her dress-
maker."

Sutton, with his back to the reach of the gallery, had, as if to
banish a vision, buried his eyes for a minute in his hands. "And
oh, the face— the face ! "

" Which ? " Miss Banker asked.

" Whichever one looks at."

"But May Grantham's glorious. She has turned herself
out "

"With a splendour of taste and a sense of effect, eh? Yes."
Sutton showed he saw far.

" She has the sense of effect. The sense of effect as exhibited

in Lady Gwyther's clothes ! " was something Miss Banker

failed of words to express. " Everybody's overwhelmed. Here,
you know, that sort of thing's grave. The poor creature's lost."

"Lost?"

" Since on the first impression, as we said, so much depends.
The first impression's made — oh, made ! I defy her now ever to
unmake it. Her husband, who's proud, won't like her the better
for it. And I don't see," Miss Banker went on, " that her pretti-
ness was enough — a mere little feverish, frightened freshness;

THE TWO FACES 49

what did he see in her? — to be so blasted. It has been done
with an atrocity of art "

" That supposes the dressmaker then also a devil ? "

" Oh, your London women and their dressmakers ! " Miss
Banker laughed.

" But the face-— the face ! " Sutton woefully repeated.

"May's?"

" The little girl's. It's exquisite."

" Exquisite ? "

" For unimaginable pathos."

"Oh!" Miss Banker dropped.

" She has at last begun to see." Sutton showed again how far
he saw. " It glimmers upon her innocence, she makes it dimly
out — what has been done with her. She's even worse this evening
— the way, my eye, she looked at dinner ! — than when she came.
Yes " — he was confident — "it has dawned (how couldn't it, out of
all of you ?) and she knows."

" She ought to have known before ! " Miss Banker intelligently
sighed.

" No ; she wouldn't in that case have been so beautiful."

" Beautiful ? " cried Miss Banker ; " overloaded like a monkey
in a show ! "

"The face, yes ; which goes to the heart. It's that that makes
it," said Shirley Sutton. "And it's that"— he thought it out—
"that makes the other."

"I see. Conscious?"

" Horrible ! "

" You take it hard," said Miss Banker.

Lord Gwyther, just before she spoke, had come in sight and
now was near them. Sutton on this, appearing to wish to avoid
him, reached, before answering his companion's observation, a
door that opened close at hand. "So hard," he replied from that
point, " that I shall be off to-morrow morning."

" And not see the rest ? " she called after him.

But he had already gone, and Lord Gwyther, arriving, amiably
took up her question. " The rest of what ? "

Miss Banker looked him well in the eyes. " Of Mrs. Grant-
ham's clothes."

THE TONE OF TIME

i

I WAS too pleased with what it struck me that, as an old, old
friend, I had done for her, not to go to her that very after-
noon with the news. I knew she worked late, as in general I also
did ; but I sacrificed for her sake a good hour of the February
daylight. She was in her studio, as I had believed she would be,
where her card (" Mary J. Tredick " — not Mary Jane, but Mary
Juliana) was manfully on the door ; a little tired, a little old and
a good deal spotted, but with her ugly spectacles taken off, as
soon as I appeared, to greet me. She kept on, while she scraped
her palette and wiped her brushes, the big stained apron that
covered her from head to foot and that I have often enough
before seen her retain in conditions giving the measure of her
renunciation of her desire to dazzle. Every fresh reminder of
this brought home to me that she had given up everything but
her work, and that there had been in her history some reason.
But I was as far from the reason as ever. She had given up too
much ; this was just why one wanted to lend her a hand. I told
her, at any rate, that I had a lovely job for her.

" To copy something I do like ? "

Her complaint, I knew, was that people only gave orders,
if they gave them at all, for things she did not like. But this
wasn't a case of copying — not at all, at least, in the common
sense. " It's for a portrait — quite in the air."

" Ah, you do portraits yourself! "

"Yes, and you know how. My trick won't serve for this.
What's wanted is a pretty picture."

"Then of whom?"
' " Of nobody. That is of anybody. Anybody you like."

She naturally wondered. " Do you mean I'm myself to choose
my sitter ? "

" Well, the oddity is that there is to be no sitter."

" Whom then is the picture to represent ? "

" Why, a handsome, distinguished, agreeable man, of not more

50

THE TONE OF TIME 51

than forty, clean-shaven, thoroughly well-dressed, and a perfect
gentleman."

She continued to stare. "And I'm to find him myself?"

I laughed at the term she used. " Yes, as you ' find ' the
canvas, the colours and the frame." After which I immediately
explained. "I've just had the 'rummest' visit, the effect of
which was to make me think of you. A lady, unknown to me
and unintroduced, turned up at my place at three o'clock. She
had come straight, she let me know, without preliminaries, on
account of one's high reputation — the usual thing — and of her
having admired one's work. Of course I instantly saw — I mean
I saw it as soon as she named her affair — that she hadn't under-
stood my work at all. What am I good for in the world but just
the impression of the given, the presented case ? I can do but
the face I see."

" And do you think I can do the face I don't ? "

" No, but you see so many more. You see them in fancy and
memory, and they come out, for you, from all the museums you've
haunted and all the great things you've studied. I know you'll
be able to see the one my visitor wants and to give it — what's
the crux of the business — the tone of time."

She turned the question over. " What does she want it for ? "

"Just for that — for the tone of time. And, except that it's
to hang over her chimney, she didn't tell me. I've only my idea
that it's to represent, to symbolise, as it were, her husband, who's
not alive and who perhaps never was. This is exactly what will
give you a free hand."

" With nothing to go by — no photographs or other portraits ? "

" Nothing."

" She only proposes to describe him ? "

" Not even ; she wants the picture itself to do that. Her only
condition is that he be a tres-bel homme"

She had begun at last, a little thoughtfully, to remove her
apron. " Is she French ? "

" I don't know. I give it up. She calls herself Mrs. Bridge-
north."

Mary wondered. " Connais pas ! I never heard of her."

"You wouldn't."

" You mean it's not her real name ? "

I hesitated. " I mean that she's a very downright fact, full of
the implication that she'll pay a downright price. It's clear to
me that you can ask what you like ; and it's therefore a chance
that I can't consent to your missing." My friend gave no sign
either way, and I told my story. "She's a woman of fifty,

52 THE BETTER SORT

perhaps of more, who has been pretty, and who still presents
herself, with her grey hair a good deal powdered, as I judge, to
carry it off, extraordinarily well. She was a little frightened and
a little free ; the latter because of the former. But she did
uncommonly well, I thought, considering the oddity of her wish.
This oddity she quite admits ; she began indeed by insisting
on it so in advance that I found myself expecting I didn't know
what. She broke at moments into French, which was perfect,
but no better than her English, which isn't vulgar ; not more at
least than that of everybody else. The things people do say,
and the way they say them, to artists ! She wanted immensely,
I could see, not to fail of her errand, not to be treated as
absurd ; and she was extremely grateful to me for meeting her
so far as I did. She was beautifully dressed and she came in
a brougham."

My listener took it in; then, very quietly, "Is she respect-
able?" she inquired.

"Ah, there you are!" I laughed; "and how you always pick
the point right out, even when one has endeavoured to diffuse
a specious glamour! She's extraordinary," I pursued after an
instant; "and just what she wants of the picture, I think, is to
make her a little less so."

"Who is she, then? What is she?" my companion simply
went on.

It threw me straightway back on one of my hobbies. " Ah,
my dear, what is so interesting as life? What is, above all, so
stupendous as London ? There's everything in it, everything in
the world, and nothing too amazing not some day to pop out at
you. What is a woman, faded, preserved, pretty, powdered, vague,
odd, dropping on one without credentials, but with a carnage
and very good lace ? What is such a person but a person who
may have had adventures, and have made them, in one way or
another, pay ? They're, however, none of one's business ; it's
scarcely on the cards that one should ask her. I should like,
with Mrs. Bridgenorth, to see a fellow ask ! She goes in for
propriety, the real thing. If I suspect her of being the creation
of her own talents, she has clearly, on the other hand, seen a
lot of life. Will you meet her ? " I next demanded.

My hostess waited. " No."

" Then you won't try ? "

" Need I meet her to try ? " And the question made me guess
that, so far as she had understood, she began to feel herself a
little taken. "It seems strange," she none the less mused, "to
attempt to please her on such a basis. To attempt," she pre-

THE TONE OF TIME 53

sently added, " to please her at all It's your idea that she's not
married ? " she, with this, a trifle inconsequently asked.

"Well," I replied, "I've only had an hour to think of it, but
I somehow already see the scene. Not immediately, not the day
after, or even perhaps the year after the thing she desires is set
up there, but in due process of time and on convenient oppor-
tunity, the transfiguration will occur. 'Who is that awfully
handsome man ? ' ' That ? Oh, that's an old sketch of my dear
dead husband.' Because I told her — insidiously sounding her —
that she would want it to look old, and that the tone of time is
exactly what you're full of."

" I believe I am," Mary sighed at last.

"Then put on your hat." I had proposed to her on my
arrival to come out to tea with me, and it was when left alone in
the studio while she went to her room that I began to feel sure
of the success of my errand. The vision that had an hour
before determined me grew deeper and brighter for her while
I moved about and looked at her things. There were more of
them there on her hands than one liked to see ; but at least they
sharpened my confidence, which was pleasant for me in view of
that of my visitor, who had accepted without reserve my plea for
Miss Tredick. Four or five of her copies of famous portraits —
ornaments of great public and private collections — were on the
walls, and to see them again together was to feel at ease about
my guarantee. The mellow manner of them was what I had
had in my mind in saying, to excuse myself to Mrs. Bridgenorth,
" Oh, my things, you know, look as if they had been painted
to-morrow ! " It made no difference that Mary's Vandykes and
Gainsboroughs were reproductions and replicas, for I had known
her more than once to amuse herself with doing the thing quite,
as she called it, off her own bat. She had copied so bravely so
many brave things that she had at the end of her brush an extra-
ordinary bag of tricks. She had always replied to me that such
things were mere clever humbug, but mere clever humbug was
what our client happened to want. The thing was to let her
have it — one could trust her for the rest. And at the same time
that I mused in this way I observed to myself that there was
already something more than, as the phrase is, met the eye in
such response as I felt my friend had made. I had touched,
without intention, more than one spring; I had set in motion
more than one impulse. I found myself indeed quite certain of
this after she had come back in her hat and her jacket. She
was different — her idea had flowered ; and she smiled at me from
under her tense veil, while she drew over her firm, narrow hands

54 THE BETTER SORT

a pair of fresh gloves, with a light distinctly new. " Please tell
your friend that I'm greatly obliged to both of you and that
I take the order."

"Good. And to give him all his good looks?"

" It's just to do that that I accept. I shall make him supremely
beautiful — and supremely base."

"Base?" I just demurred.

"The finest gentleman you'll ever have seen, and the worst
friend."

I wondered, as I was startled ; but after an instant I laughed
for joy. "Ah well, so long as he's not mine ! I see we shall
have him," I said as we went, for truly I had touched a spring.
In fact I had touched the spring.

It rang, more or less, I was presently to find, all over the place.
I went, as I had promised, to report to Mrs. Bridgenorth on my
mission, and though she declared herself much gratified at the
success of it I could see she a little resented the apparent
absence of any desire on Miss Tredick's part for a preliminary
conference. "I only thought she might have liked just to see
me, and have imagined I might like to see her."

But I was full of comfort. " You'll see her when it's finished.
You'll see her in time to thank her."

"And to pay her, I suppose," my hostess laughed, with an
asperity that was, after all, not excessive. "Will she take
very long?"

I thought. " She's so full of it that my impression would be
that she'll do it off at a heat."

" She is full of it then ? " she asked ; and on hearing to what
tune, though I told her but half, she broke out with admiration.
" You artists are the most extraordinary people ! " It was almost
with a bad conscience that I confessed we indeed were, and
while she said that what she meant was that we seemed to under-
stand everything, and I rejoined that this was also what /meant,
she took me into another room to see the place for the picture —
a proceeding of which the effect was singularly to confirm the
truth in question. The place for the picture — in her own room,
as she called it, a boudoir at the back, overlooking the general
garden of the approved modern row and, as she said, only just
wanting that touch — proved exactly the place (the space of a
large panel in the white woodwork over the mantel) that I had
spoken of to my friend. She put it quite candidly, " Don't you
see what it will do?" and looked at me, wonderfully, as for a
sign that I could sympathetically take from her what she didn't
literally say. She said it, poor woman, so very nearly that I had

THE TONE OF TIME 55

no difficulty whatever. The portrait, tastefully enshrined there,
of the finest gentleman one should ever have seen, would do
even more for herself than it would do for the room.

I may as well mention at once that my observation of Mrs.
Bridgenorth was not in the least of a nature to unseat me from
the hobby I have already named. In the light of the impression
she made on me life seemed quite as prodigious and London
quite as amazing as I had ever contended, and nothing could
have been more in the key of that experience than the manner
in which everything was vivid between us and nothing expressed.
We remained on the surface with the tenacity of shipwrecked
persons clinging to a plank. Our plank was our concentrated
gaze at Mrs. Bridgenorth's mere present. We allowed her past
to exist for us only in the form of the prettiness that she had
gallantly rescued from it and to which a few scraps of its identity
still adhered. She was amiable, gentle, consistently proper. She
gave me more than anything else the sense, simply, of waiting.
She was like a house so freshly and successfully " done up " that
you were surprised it wasn't occupied. She was waiting for
something to happen — for somebody to come. She was waiting,
above all, for Mary Tredick's work. She clearly counted that it
would help her.

I had foreseen the fact — the picture was produced at a heat ;
rapidly, directly, at all events, for the sort of thing it proved to
be. I left my friend alone at first, left the ferment to work,
troubling her with no questions and asking her for no news;
two or three weeks passed, and I never went near her. Then
at last, one afternoon as the light was failing, I looked in.
She immediately knew what I wanted. "Oh yes, I'm doing
him."

"Well," I said, "I've respected your intensity, but I have felt
curious."

I may not perhaps say that she was never so sad as when she
laughed, but it's certain that she always laughed when she was
sad. When, however, poor dear, for that matter, was she,
secretly, not? Her little gasps of mirth were the mark of her
worst moments. But why should she have one of these just
now ? " Oh, I know your curiosity ! " she replied to me ; and the
small chill of her amusement scarcely met it. " He's coming
out, but I can't show him to you yet. I must muddle it through
in my own way. It has insisted on being, after all, a 'likeness,'"
she added. " But nobody will ever know."

"Nobody?"

" Nobody she sees."

56 THE BETTER SORT

"Ah, she doesn't, poor thing," I returned, "seem to see
anybody ! "

" So much the better. I'll risk it," On which I felt I should
have to wait, though I had suddenly grown impatient. But I
still hung about, and while I did so she explained. " If what
I've done is really a portrait, the conditions itself prescribed it.
If I was to do the most beautiful man in the world I could do
but one."

We looked at each other ; then I laughed. " It can scarcely
be me! But you're getting," I asked, "the great thing?"

" The infamy ? Oh yes, please God."

It took away my breath a little, and I even for the moment
scarce felt at liberty to press. But one could always be cheerful.
" What I meant is the tone of time."

" Getting it, my dear man ? Didn't I get it long ago ? Don't
I show it — the tone of time ? " she suddenly, strangely sighed at
me, with something in her face I had never yet seen. " I can't
give it to him more than — for all these years — he was to have
given it to me."

I scarce knew what smothered passion, what remembered
wrong, what mixture of joy and pain my words had accidentally
quickened. Such an effect of them could only become, for me,
an instant pity, which, however, I brought out but indirectly.
" It's the tone," I smiled, "in which you're speaking now."

This served, unfortunately, as something of a check. " I
didn't mean to speak now." Then with her eyes on the picture,
"I've said everything there. Come back," she added, "in three
days. He'll be all right."

He was indeed when at last I saw him. She had produced an
extraordinary thing — a thing wonderful, ideal, for the part it was
to play. My only reserve, from the first, was that it was too fine
for its part, that something much less " sincere " would equally
have served Mrs. Bridgenorth's purpose, and that relegation to
that lady's " own room " — whatever charm it was to work there —
might only mean for it cruel obscurity. The picture is before
me now, so that I could describe it if description availed. It
represents a man of about five-and-thirty, seen only as to the head
and shoulders, but dressed, the observer gathers, in a fashion now
almost antique and which was far from contemporaneous with
the date of the work. His high, slightly narrow face, which
would be perhaps too aquiline but for the beauty of the forehead
and the sweetness of the mouth, has a charm that even, after all
these years, still stirs my imagination. His type has altogether
a distinction that you feel to have been firmly caught and yet not

THE TONE OF TIME 57

vulgarly emphasised. The eyes are just too near together, but
they are, in a wondrous way, both careless and intense, while lip,
cheek, and chin, smooth and clear, are admirably drawn. Youth
is still, you see, in all his presence, the joy and pride of life,
the perfection of a high spirit and the expectation of a great
fortune, which he takes for granted with unconscious insolence.
Nothing has ever happened to humiliate or disappoint him, and
if my fancy doesn't run away with me the whole presentation of
him is a guarantee that he will die without having suffered. He
is so handsome, in short, that you can scarcely say what he
means, and so happy that you can scarcely guess what he feels.

It is of course, I hasten to add, an appreciably feminine
rendering, light, delicate, vague, imperfectly synthetic — insistent
and evasive, above all, in the wrong places ; but the composition,
none the less, is beautiful and the suggestion infinite. The
grandest air of the thing struck me in fact, when first I saw it,
as coming from the high artistic impertinence with which it
offered itself as painted about 1850. It would have been a
rare flower of refinement for that dark day. The " tone " — that
of such a past as it pretended to — was there almost to excess, a
brown bloom into which the image seemed mysteriously to
retreat. The subject of it looks at me now across more years
and more knowledge, but what I felt at the moment was that he
managed to be at once a triumphant trick and a plausible
evocation. He hushed me, I remember, with so many kinds of
awe that I shouldn't have dreamt of asking who he was. All
I said, after my first incoherences of wonder at my friend's
practised skill, was: "And you've arrived at this truth without
documents ? "

" It depends on what you call documents."

"Without notes, sketches, studies?"

" I destroyed them years ago."

" Then you once had them ? "

She just hung fire. " I once had everything."

It told me both more and less then I had asked ; enough at
all events to make my next question, as I uttered it, sound even
to myself a little foolish. "So that it's all memory?"

From where she stood she looked once more at her work ; after
which she jerked away and, taking several steps, came back to
me with something new — whatever it was I had already seen — in
her air and answer. " It's all hate /" she threw at me, and then
went out of the room. It was not till she had gone that I quite
understood why. Extremely affected by the impression visibly
made on me, she had burst into tears but had wished me not to see

58 THE BETTER SORT

them. She left me alone for some time with her wonderful sub-
ject, and I again, in her absence, made things out. He was dead
— he had been dead for years ; the sole humiliation, as I have
called it, that he was to know had come to him in that form.
The canvas held and cherished him, in any case, as it only holds
the dead. She had suffered from him, it came to me, the worst
that a woman can suffer, and the wound he had dealt her, though
hidden, had never effectually healed. It had bled again while
she worked. Yet when she at last reappeared there was but one
thing to say. " The beauty, heaven knows, I see. But I don't
see what you call the infamy."

She gave him a last look — again she turned away. " Oh, he
was like that."

"Well, whatever he was like," I remember replying, "I wonder
you can bear to part with him. Isn't it better to let her see the
picture first here ? "

As to this she doubted, " I don't think I want her to come."

I wondered. " You continue to object so to meet her ? "

" What good will it do ? It's quite impossible I should alter
him for her."

"Oh, she won't want that!" I laughed. "She'll adore him as
he is."

" Are you quite sure of your idea ? "

"That he's to figure as Mr. Bridgenorth? Well, if I hadn't
been from the first, my dear lady, I should be now. Fancy, with
the chance, her not jumping at him ! Yes, he'll figure as Mr.
Bridgenorth."

" Mr. Bridgenorth ! " she echoed, making the sound, with her
small, cold laugh, grotesquely poor for him. He might really
have been a prince, and I wondered if he hadn't been. She had,
at all events, a new notion. " Do you mind my having it taken
to your place and letting her come to see it there ? " Which — as
I immediately embraced her proposal, deferring to her reasons,
whatever they were — was what was speedily arranged.

II

THE next day therefore I had the picture in charge, and on the
following Mrs. Bridgenorth, whom I had notified, arrived. I had
placed it, framed and on an easel, well in evidence, and I have
never forgotten the look and the cry that, as she became aware
of it, leaped into her face and from her lips. It was an extra-
ordinary moment, all the more that it found me quite unprepared
— so extraordinary that I scarce knew at first what had happened.

THE TONE OF TIME 59

By the time I really perceived, moreover, more things had
happened than one, so that when I pulled myself together it was
to face the situation as a whole. She had recognised on the
instant the subject ; that came first and was irrepressibly vivid in
her. Her recognition had, for the length of a flash, lighted for
her the possibility that the stroke had been directed. That came
second, and she flushed with it as with a blow in the face. What
came third — and it was what was really most wondrous — was the
quick instinct of getting both her strange recognition and her
blind suspicion well in hand. She couldn't control, however,
poor woman, the strong colour in her face and the quick tears in
her eyes. She could only glare at the canvas, gasping, grimacing,
and try to gain time. Whether in surprise or in resentment she
intensely reflected, feeling more than anything else how little she
might prudently show ; and I was conscious even at the moment
that nothing of its kind could have been finer than her effort to
swallow her shock in ten seconds.

How many seconds she took I didn't measure ; enough, as-
suredly, for me also to profit. I gained more time than she,
and the greatest oddity doubtless was my own private manoeuvre
— the quickest calculation that, acting from a mere confused
instinct, I had ever made. If she had known the great gentleman
represented there and yet had determined on the spot to carry
herself as ignorant, all my loyalty to Mary Tredick came to the
surface in a prompt counter-move. What gave me opportunity
was the red in her cheek. " Why, you've known him ! "

I saw her ask herself for an instant if she mightn't successfully
make her startled state pass as the mere glow of pleasure — her
natural greeting to her acquisition. She was pathetically, yet at
the same time almost comically, divided. Her line was so to
cover her tracks that every avowal of a past connection was a
danger ; but it also concerned her safety to learn, in the light of
our astounding coincidence, how far she already stood exposed.
She meanwhile begged the question. She smiled through her
tears. " He's too magnificent ! "

But I gave her, as I say, all too little time. "Who is he?
Who was he ? "

It must have been my look still more than my words that
determined her. She wavered but an instant longer, panted,
laughed, cried again, and then, dropping into the nearest seat,
gave herself up so completely that I was almost ashamed. " Do
you think I'd tell you his name ? " The burden of the backward
years — all the effaced and ignored — lived again, almost like an
accent unlearned but freshly breaking out at a touch, in the very

6o THE BETTER SORT

sound of the words. These perceptions she, however, the next
thing showed me, were a game at which two could play. She
had to look at me but an instant. " Why, you really don't
know it ! "

I judged best to be frank. "I don't know it."

"Then how does she?"

" How do you ? " I laughed. " I'm a different matter."

She sat a minute turning things round, staring at the picture.
"The likeness, the likeness ! " It was almost too much.

"It's so true?"

" Beyond everything."

I considered. " But a resemblance to a known individual —
that wasn't what you wanted."

She sprang up at this in eager protest. "Ah, no one else
would see it."

I showed again, I fear, my amusement. "No one but you
and she ? "

" It's her doing him ! " She was held by her wonder. " Doesn't
she, on your honour, know ? "

" That his is the very head you would have liked if you had
dared ? Not a bit. How should she ? She knows nothing — on
my honour."

Mrs. Bridgenorth continued to marvel. " She just painted him
for the kind of face ? "

" That corresponds with my description of what you wished ?
Precisely."

" But how — after so long ? From memory ? As a friend ? "

"As a reminiscence — yes. Visual memory, you see, in our
uncanny race, is wonderful. As the ideal thing, simply, for your
purpose. You are then suited ? " I after an instant added.

She had again been gazing, and at this turned her eyes on me ;
but I saw she couldn't speak, couldn't do more at least than
sound, unutterably, " Suited ! " so that I was positively not sur-
prised when suddenly — just as Mary had done, the power to
produce this effect seeming a property of the model — she burst
into tears. I feel no harsher in relating it, however I may appear,
than I did at the moment, but it is a fact that while she just
wept I literally had a fresh inspiration on behalf of Miss Tredick's
interests. I knew exactly, moreover, before my companion had
recovered herself, what she would next ask me ; and I consciously
brought this appeal on in order to have it over. I explained that
I had not the least idea of the identity of our artist's sitter, to
which she had given me no clue. I had nothing but my impres-
sion that she had known him — known him well ; and, from what-

THE TONE OF TIME 61

ever material she had worked, the fact of his having also been
known to Mrs. Bridgenorth was a coincidence pure and simple.
It partook of the nature of prodigy, but such prodigies did occur.
My visitor listened with avidity and credulity. She was so far
reassured. Then I saw her question come. " Well, if she
doesn't dream he was ever anything to me — or what he will be
now — I'm going to ask you, as a very particular favour, never to
tell her. She will want to know of course exactly how I've been
struck. You'll naturally say that I'm delighted, but may I exact
from you that you say nothing else ? "

There was supplication in her face, but I had to think.
" There are conditions I must put to you first, and one of them
is also a question, only more frank than yours. Was this
mysterious personage — frustrated by death — to have married
you ? "

She met it bravely. " Certainly, if he had lived."

I was only amused at an artlessness in her "certainly." " Very
good. But why do you wish the coincidence "

" Kept from her ? " She knew exactly why. " Because if she
suspects it she won't let me have the picture. Therefore," she
added with decision, "you must let me pay for it on the spot."

"What do you mean by on the spot?"

" I'll send you a cheque as soon as I get home."

" Oh," I laughed, " let us understand. Why do you consider
she won't let you have the picture ? "

She made me wait a little for this, but when it came it was
perfectly lucid. " Because she'll then see how much more I
must want it."

" How much less — wouldn't it be rather, since the bargain was,
as the more convenient thing, not for a likeness ? "

"Oh," said Mrs. Bridgenorth with impatience, "the likeness
will take care of itself. She'll put this and that together." Then
she brought out her real apprehension. " She'll be jealous."

" Oh ! " I laughed. But I was startled.

" She'll hate me ! "

I wondered. " But I don't think she liked him."

" Don't think ?" She stared at me, with her echo, over all that
might be in it, then seemed to find little enough. " I say/"

It was almost comically the old Mrs. Bridgenorth. " But I
gather from her that he was bad."

"Then what was she?"

I barely hesitated. " What were you ? "

"That's my own business." And she turned again to the
picture. " He was good enough for her to do that of him."

62 THE BETTER SORT

I took it in once more. "Artistically speaking, for the way
it's done, it's one of the most curious things I've ever seen."

" It's a grand treat ! " said poor Mrs. Bridgenorth more simply.

It was, it fs really ; which is exactly what made the case so
interesting. " Yet I feel somehow that, as I say, it wasn't done
with love."

It was wonderful how she understood. " It was done with
rage."

" Then what have you to fear ? "

She knew again perfectly. " What happened when he made
me jealous. So much," she declared, "that if you'll give me
your word for silence "

" Well ? "

" Why, I'll double the money."

"Oh," I replied, taking a turn about in the excitement of our
concurrence, " that's exactly what — to do a still better stroke for
her — it had just come to me to propose ! "

"It's understood then, on your oath as a gentleman?" She
was so eager that practically this settled it, though I moved to
and fro a little while she watched me in suspense. It vibrated
all round us that she had gone out to the thing in a stifled flare,
that a whole close relation had in the few minutes revived. We
know it of the truly amiable person that he will strain a point for
another that he wouldn't strain for himself. The stroke to put in
for Mary was positively prescribed. The work represented really
much more than had been covenanted, and if the purchaser
chose so to value it this was her own affair. I decided. " If it's
understood also on your word."

We were so at one that we shook hands on it. "And when
may I send ? "

" Well, I shall see her this evening. Say early to-morrow."

" Early to-morrow." And I went with her to her brougham,
into which, I remember, as she took leave, she expressed regret
that she mightn't then and there have introduced the canvas for
removal. I consoled her with remarking that she couldn't have
got it in — which was not quite true.

I saw Mary Tredick before dinner, and though I was not quite
ideally sure of my present ground with her I instantly brought
out my news. " She's so delighted that I felt I must in conscience
do something still better for you. She's not to have it on the
original terms. I've put up the price."

Mary wondered. " But to what ? "

" Well, to four hundred. If you say so I'll try even for five."

" Oh, she'll never give that."

THE TONE OF TIME 63

" I beg your pardon."

"After the agreement?" She looked grave. "I don't like
such leaps and bounds."

" But, my dear child, they're yours. You contracted for a
decorative trifle and you've produced a breathing masterpiece."

She thought. " Is that what she calls it ? " Then, as having
to think too, I hesitated, " What does she know ? " she pursued.

" She knows she wants it."

"So much as that?"

At this I had to brace myself a little. " So much that she'll
send me the cheque this afternoon, and that you'll have mine
by the first post in the morning."

" Before she has even received the picture ? "

'• Oh, she'll send for it to-morrow." And as I was dining out
and had still to dress, my time was up. Mary came with me to
the door, where I repeated my assurance. " You shall receive
my cheque by the first post." To which I added : " If it's little
enough for a lady so much in need to pay for any husband, it
isn't worth mentioning as the price of such a one as you've given
her!"

I was in a hurry, but she held me. " Then you've felt your
idea confirmed ? "

"My idea?"

" That that's what I have given her?"

I suddenly fancied I had perhaps gone too far ; but I had kept
my cab and was already in it. "Well, put it," I called with
excess of humour over the front, " that you've, at any rate, given
him a wife ! "

When on my return from dinner that night I let myself in, my
first care, in my dusky studio, was to make light for another look
at Mary's subject. I felt the impulse to bid him good night, but,
to my astonishment, he was no longer there. His place was a
void — he had already disappeared. I saw, however, after my first
surprise, what had happened — saw it moreover, frankly, with
some relief. As my servants were in bed I could ask no
questions, but it was clear that Mrs. Bridgenorth, whose note,
containing its cheque, lay on my table, had been after all
unable to wait. The note, I found, mentioned nothing but the
enclosure ; but it had come by hand, and it was her silence that
told the tale. Her messenger had been instructed to " act " ; he
had come with a vehicle, he had transferred to it canvas and frame.
The prize was now therefore landed and the incident closed.
I didn't altogether, the next morning, know why, but I had slept
the better for the sense of these things, and as soon as my

64 THE BETTER SORT

attendant came in I asked for details. It was on this that his answer
surprised me. " No, sir, there was no man ; she came herself.
She had only a four-wheeler, but I helped her, and we got it in.
It was a squeeze, sir, but she mould take it."

I wondered. " She had a four-wheeler ? and not her servant ? "

" No, no, sir. She came, as you may say, single-handed."

"And not even in her brougham, which would have been
larger?"

My man, with his habit, weighed it. " But have she a
brougham, sir?"

" Why, the one she was here in yesterday."

Then light broke. " Oh, that lady ! It wasn't her, sir. It
was Miss Tredick."

Light broke, but darkness a little followed it— a darkness that,
after breakfast, guided my steps back to my friend. There, in its
own first place, I met her creation ; but I saw it would be a
different thing meeting her. She immediately put down on a
table, as if she had expected me, the cheque I had sent her
overnight. "Yes, I've brought it away. And I can't take the
money."

I found myself in despair. " You want to keep him ? "

" I don't understand what has happened."

"You just back out?"

" I don't understand," she repeated, " what has happened."
But what I had already perceived was, on the contrary, that she
very nearly, that she in fact quite remarkably, did understand. It
was as if in my zeal I had given away my case, and I felt that
my test was coming. She had been thinking all night with
intensity, and Mrs. Bridgenorth's generosity, coupled with Mrs.
Bridgenorth's promptitude, had kept her awake. Thence, for a
woman nervous and critical, imaginations, visions, questions.
" Why, in writing me last night, did you take for granted it was
she who had swooped down ? Why," asked Mary Tredick,
" should she swoop ? "

Well, if I could drive a bargain for Mary I felt I could a
fortiori lie for her. " Because it's her way. She does swoop.
She's impatient and uncontrolled. And it's affectation for you
to pretend," I said with diplomacy, " that you see no reason for
her falling in love "

" Falling in love? " She took me straight up.

"With that gentleman. Certainly. What woman wouldn't?
What woman didn't ? I really don't see, you know, your right to
back out."

" I won't back out," she presently returned, " if you'll answer

THE TONE OF TIME 65

me a question. Does she know the man represented ? " Then
as I hung fire : " It has come to me that she must. It would
account for so much. For the strange way I feel," she went on,
" and for the extraordinary sum you've been able to extract
from her."

It was a pity, and I flushed with it, besides wincing at the word
she used. But Mrs. Bridgenorth and I, between us, had clearly
made the figure too high. " You think that, if she had guessed,
I would naturally work it to ' extract ' more ? "

She turned away from me on this and, looking blank in her
trouble, moved vaguely about. Then she stopped. " I see him
set up there. I hear her say it. What you said she would make
him pass for."

I believe I foolishly tried — though only for an instant — to look
as if I didn't remember what I had said. " Her husband ? "

" He wasn't."

The next minute I had risked it. " Was he yours ? "

I don't know what I had expected, but I found myself surprised
at her mere pacific head-shake. " No."

" Then why mayn't he have been ? "

" Another woman's ? Because he died, to my absolute know-
ledge, unmarried." She spoke as quietly. "He had known
many women, and there was one in particular with whom he
became — and too long remained — ruinously intimate. She
tried to make him marry her, and he was very near it. Death,
however, saved him. But she was the reason "

"Yes?" I feared again from her a wave of pain, and I went
on while she kept it back. " Did you know her ? "

" She was one I wouldn't." Then she brought it out. " She
was the reason he failed me." Her successful detachment some-
how said all, reduced me to a flat, kind " Oh ! " that marked my
sense of her telling me, against my expectation, more than I
knew what to do with. But it was just while I wondered how
to turn her confidence that she repeated, in a changed voice,
her challenge of a moment before. "Does she know the man
represented ? "

"I haven't the least idea." And having so acquitted myself I
added, with what strikes me now as futility : " She certainly —
yesterday — didn't name him."

" Only recognised him ? "

" If she did she brilliantly concealed it."

" So that you got nothing from her ? "

It was a question that offered me a certain advantage. " I
thought you accused me of getting too much."

66 THE BETTER SORT

She gave me a long look, and I now saw everything in her
face. " It's very nice — what you're doing for me, and you do it
handsomely. It's beautiful — beautiful, and I thank you with all
my heart. But I know."

" And what do you know ? "

She went about now preparing her usual work. "What he
must have been to her."

" You mean she was the person ? "

" Well," she said, putting on her old spectacles, " she was one
of them."

"And you accept so easily the astounding coincidence ?"

" Of my finding myself, after years, in so extraordinary a rela-
tion with her ? What do you call easily ? I've passed a night of
torment."

" But what put it into your head ? "

" That I had so blindly and strangely given him back to her ?
You put it — yesterday."

"And how?"

" I can't tell you. You didn't in the least mean to — on the
contrary. But you dropped the seed. The plant, after you had
gone," she said with a business-like pull at her easel, "the plant
began to grow. I saw them there — in your studio — face to face."

" You were jealous ? " I laughed.

She gave me through her glasses another look, and they
seemed, from this moment, in their queerness, to have placed
her quite on the other side of the gulf of time. She was firm
there ; she was settled ; I couldn't get at her now. " I see she
told you I would 'be." I doubtless kept down too little my start
at it, and she immediately pursued. "You say I accept the
coincidence, which is of course prodigious. But such things
happen. Why shouldn't I accept it if you do?"

" Do I?" I smiled.

She began her work in silence, but she presently exclaimed :
" I'm glad I didn't meet her ! "

" I don't yet see why you wouldn't."

" Neither do I. It was an instinct."

"Your instincts" — I tried to be ironic — "are miraculous."

"They have to be, to meet such accidents. I must ask you
kindly to tell her, when you return her gift, that now I have done
the picture I find I must after all keep it for myself."

" Giving no reason ? "

She painted away. "She'll know the reason."

Well, by this time I knew it too; I knew so many things
that I fear my resistance was weak. If our wonderful client

THE TONE OF TIME 67

hadn't been his wife in fact, she was not to be helped to become
his wife in fiction. I knew almost more than I can say, more at
any rate than I could then betray. He had been bound in
common mercy to stand by my friend, and he had basely for-
saken her. This indeed brought up the obscure, into which I
shyly gazed. "Why, even granting your theory, should you
grudge her the portrait? It was painted in bitterness."

"Yes. Without that !"

" It wouldn't have come ? Precisely. Is it in bitterness, then,
you'll keep it ? "

She looked up from her canvas. "In what would you keep it?"

It made me jump. " Do you mean I may ? " Then I had my
idea. "I'd give you her price for it ! "

Her smile through her glasses was beautiful. " And afterwards
make it over to her? You shall have it when I die." With which
she came away from her easel, and I saw that I was staying her
work and should properly go. So I put out my hand to her.
"It took — whatever you will ! — to paint it," she said, "but I shall
keep it in joy." I could answer nothing now — had to cease to
pretend ; the thing was in her hands. For a moment we stood
there, and I had again the sense, melancholy and final, of her
being, as it were, remotely glazed and fixed into what she had
done. " He's taken from me, and for all those years he's kept.

Then she herself, by a prodigy ! " She lost herself again in

the wonder of it.

" Unwittingly gives him back ? "

She fairly, for an instant over the marvel, closed her eyes.
"Gives him back."

Then it was I saw how he would be kept ! But it was the
end of my vision. I could only write, ruefully enough, to Mrs.
Bridgenorth, whom I never met again, but of whose death —
preceding by a couple of years Mary Tredick's — I happened to
hear. This is an old man's tale. I have inherited the picture,
in the deep beauty of which, however, darkness still lurks. No
one, strange to say, has ever recognised the model, but everyone
asks his name. I don't even know it.

THE SPECIAL TYPE

I NOTE it as a wonderful case of its kind — the finest of all
perhaps, in fact, that I have ever chanced to encounter.
The kind, moreover, is the greatest kind, the roll recruited, for
our high esteem and emulation, from history and fiction, legend
and song. In the way of service and sacrifice for love I've
really known nothing go beyond it. However, you can judge.
My own sense of it happens just now to be remarkably rounded
off by the sequel — more or less looked for on her part — of the
legal step taken by Mrs. Brivet. I hear from America that, a
decent interval being held to have elapsed since her gain of her
divorce, she is about to marry again — an event that will, it would
seem, put an end to any question of the disclosure of the real
story. It's this that's the real story, or will be, with nothing
wanting, as soon as I shall have heard that her husband (who, on
his side, has only been waiting for her to move first) has sanctified
his union with Mrs. Cavenham.

I

SHE was, of course, often in and out, Mrs. Cavenham, three
years ago, when I was painting her portrait; and the more so
that I found her, I remember, one of those comparatively rare
sitters who present themselves at odd hours, turn up without
an appointment. The thing is to get most women to keep those
they do make; but she used to pop in, as she called it, on
the chance, letting me know that if I had a moment free she
was quite at my service. When I hadn't the moment free
she liked to stay to chatter, and she more than once expressed
to me, I recollect, her theory that an artist really, for the time,
could never see too much of his model. I must have shown her
rather frankly that I understood her as meaning that a model
could never see too much of her artist. I understood in fact
everything, and especially that she was, in Brivet's absence, so
unoccupied and restless that she didn't know what to do with
herself. I was conscious in short that it was he who would pay

68

THE SPECIAL TYPE 69

for the picture, and that gives, I think, the measure of my
enlightenment. If I took such pains and bore so with her folly,
it was fundamentally for Brivet.

I was often at that time, as I had often been before, occupied
— for various "subjects" — with Mrs. Dundene, in connection
with which a certain occasion comes back to me as the first
slide in the lantern. If I had invented my story I couldn't
have made it begin better than with Mrs. Cavenham's irruption
during the presence one morning of that lady. My door, by
some chance, had been unguarded, and she was upon us without
a warning. This was the sort of thing my model hated — the
one, I mean, who, after all, sat mainly to oblige ; but I remember
how well she behaved. She was not dressed for company,
though indeed a dress was never strictly necessary to her best
effect. I recall that I had a moment of uncertainty, but I
must have dropped the name of each for the other, as it was
Mrs. Cavenham's line always, later on, that I had made them
acquainted ; and inevitably, though I wished her not to stay and
got rid of her as soon as possible, the two women, of such
different places in the scale, but of such almost equal beauty,
were face to face for some minutes, of which I was not even
at the moment unaware that they made an extraordinary use for
mutual inspection. It was sufficient; they from that instant
knew each other.

"Isn't she lovely?" I remember asking — and quite without
the spirit of mischief — when I came back from restoring my
visitor to her cab.

" Yes, awfully pretty. But I hate her."

" Oh," I laughed, " she's not so bad as that."

"Not so handsome as I, you mean?" And my sitter pro-
tested. " It isn't fair of you to speak as if I were one of those
who can't bear even at the worst — or the best — another woman's
looks. I should hate her even if she were ugly."

"But what have you to do with her ? "

She hesitated ; then with characteristic looseness : " What have
I to do with anyone ? "

"Well, there's no one else I know of that you do hate."

" That shows," she replied, " how good a reason there must be,
even if I don't know it yet."

She knew it in the course of time, but I have never seen
a reason, I must say, operate so little for relief. As a history
of the hatred of Alice Dundene my anecdote becomes won-
drous indeed. Meanwhile, at any rate, I had Mrs. Cavenham
again with me for her regular sitting, and quite as curious

70 THE BETTER SORT

as I had expected her to be about the person of the previous
time.

" Do you mean she isn't, so to speak, a lady ? " she asked after
I had, for reasons of my own, fenced a little. "Then if she's
not ' professional ' either, what is she ? "

"Well," I returned as I got at work, "she escapes, to my
mind, any classification save as one of the most beautiful and
good-natured of women."

"I see her beauty," Mrs. Cavenham said. "It's immense.
Do you mean that her good-nature's as great ? "

I had to think a little. " On the whole, yes."

" Then I understand. That represents a greater quantity than
/, I think, should ever have occasion for."

" Oh, the great thing's to be sure to have enough," I growled.

But she laughed it off. "Enough, certainly, is as good as
a feast ! "

It was — I forget how long, some months — after this that
Frank Brivet, whom I had not seen for two years, knocked
again at my door. I didn't at all object to him at my other
work as I did to Mrs. Cavenham, but it was not till he had
been in and out several times that Alice — which is what most
people still really call her — chanced to see him and received
in such an extraordinary way the impression that was to be
of such advantage to him. She had been obliged to leave
me that day before he went — though he stayed but a few minutes
later ; and it was not till the next time we were alone together
that I was struck with her sudden interest, which became
frankly pressing. I had met her, to begin with, expansively
enough.

"An American? But what sort — don't you know? There
are so many."

I didn't mean it as an offence, but in the matter of men,
and though her acquaintance with them is so large, I always
simplify with her. " The sort. He's rich."

" And how rich ? "

" Why, as an American. Disgustingly."

I told her on this occasion more about him, but it was on
that fact, I remember, that, after a short silence, she brought out
with a sigh : " Well, I'm sorry. I should have liked to love him
for himself."

THE SPECIAL TYPE 71

II

QUITE apart from having been at school with him, I'm conscious
— though at times he so puts me out — that I've a taste for
Frank Brivet. I'm quite aware, by the same token — and even
if when a man's so rich it's difficult to tell — that he's not every-
one's affinity. I was struck, at all events, from the first of the
affair, with the way he clung to me and seemed inclined to haunt
my studio. He's fond of art, though he has some awful pictures,
and more or less understands mine; but it wasn't this that
brought him. Accustomed as I was to notice what his wealth
everywhere does for him, I was rather struck with his being
so much thrown upon me and not giving London— the big
fish that rises so to the hook baited with gold — more of a chance
to perform to him. I very soon, however, understood. He had
his reasons for wishing not to be seen much with Mrs. Cavenham,
and, as he was in love with her, felt the want of some machinery
for keeping temporarily away from her. I was his machinery,
and, when once I perceived this, was willing enough to turn
his wheel. His situation, moreover, became interesting from
the moment I fairly grasped it, which he soon enabled me to
do. His old reserve on the subject of Mrs. Brivet went to
the winds, and it's not my fault if I let him see how little I was
shocked by his confidence. His marriage had originally seemed
to me to require much more explanation than anyone could
give, and indeed in the matter of women in general, I confess,
I've never seized his point of view. His inclinations are strange,
and strange, too, perhaps, his indifferences. Still, I can enter
into some of his aversions, and I agreed with him that his
wife was odious.

" She has hitherto, since we began practically to live apart,"
he said, " mortally hated the idea of doing anything so pleasant
for me as to divorce me. But I've reason to believe she has now
changed her mind. She'd like to get clear."

I waited a moment. " For a man ? "

" Oh, such a jolly good one ! Remson Sturch."

I wondered. " Do you call him good ? "

"Good for her. If she only can be got to be — which it oughtn't
to be difficult to make her — fool enough to marry him, he'll give
her the real size of his foot, and I shall be avenged in a manner
positively ideal."

"Then will she institute proceedings ? "

"She can't, as things stand. She has nothing to go upon.
I've been," said poor Brivet, " I positively have, so blameless."

72 THE BETTER SORT

I thought of Mrs. Cavenham, and, though I said nothing, he
went on after an instant as if he knew it. "They can't put a
finger. I've been so d d particular."

I hesitated. "And your idea is now not to be particular any
more ? »

"Oh, about her? he eagerly replied, "always!" On which
I laughed out and he coloured. "But my idea is nevertheless,
at present," he went on, " to pave the way ; that is, I mean, if
I can keep the person you're thinking of so totally out of it that
not a breath in the whole business can possibly touch her."

" I see," I reflected. " She isn't willing ? "

He stared. "To be compromised ? Why the devil should
she be?"

" Why shouldn't she — for you ? Doesn't she love you ? "

"Yes, and it's because she does, dearly, that I don't feel the
right way to repay her is by spattering her over."

"Yet if she stands," I argued, "straight in the splash ! "

" She doesn't ! " he interrupted me, with some curtness. " She
stands a thousand miles out of it ; she stands on a pinnacle ;
she stands as she stands in your charming portrait — lovely, lonely,
untouched. And so she must remain."

"It's beautiful, it's doubtless inevitable," I returned after a
little, " that you should feel so. Only, if your wife doesn't divorce
you for a woman you love, I don't quite see how she can do it
for the woman you don't."

"Nothing is more simple," he declared; on which I saw he
had figured it out rather more than I thought. " It will be quite
enough if she believes I love her."

" If the lady in question does — or Mrs. Brivet ? "

" Mrs. Brivet — confound her ! If she believes I love some-
body else. I must have the appearance, and the appearance must
of course be complete. All I've got to do is to take up "

" To take up ? " I asked, as he paused.

" Well, publicly, with someone or other ; someone who could
easily be squared. One would undertake, after all, to produce
the impression."

" On your wife naturally, you mean ? "

" On my wife, and on the person concerned."

I turned it over and did justice to his ingenuity. " But what
impression would you undertake to produce on ? "

"Well?" he inquired as I just faltered.

"On the person not concerned. How would the lady you
just accused me of having in mind be affected toward such a
proceeding ? "

THE SPECIAL TYPE 73

He had to think a little, but he thought with success. " Oh,
I'd answer for her."

"To the other lady?" I laughed.

He remained quite grave. "To myself. She'd leave us
alone. As it would be for her good, she'd understand."

I was sorry for him, but he struck me as artless. "Under-
stand, in that interest, the ' spattering ' of another person ? "

He coloured again, but he was sturdy. " It must of course
be exactly the right person — a special type. Someone who, in
the first place," he explained, " wouldn't mind, and of whom,
in the second, she wouldn't be jealous."

I followed perfectly, but it struck me as important all
round that we should be clear. "But wouldn't the danger
be great that any woman who shouldn't have that effect — the
effect of jealousy — upon her wouldn't have it either on your
wife ? "

"Ah," he acutely returned, "my wife wouldn't be warned.
She wouldn't be 'in the know.'"

" I see." I quite caught up. " The two other ladies distinctly
would."

But he seemed for an instant at a loss. "Wouldn't it be
indispensable only as regards one?"

" Then the other would be simply sacrificed ? "

" She would be," Brivet splendidly put it, " remunerated."

I was pleased even with the sense of financial power betrayed
by the way he said it, and I at any rate so took the measure
of his intention of generosity and his characteristically big view
of the matter that this quickly suggested to me what at least
might be his exposure. " But suppose that, in spite of 'remunera-
tion,' this secondary personage should perversely like you ? She
would have to be indeed, as you say, a special type, but even
special types may have general feelings. Suppose she should like
you too much."

Ii had pulled him up a little. " What do you mean by ' too
much'?"

" Well, more than enough to leave the case quite as simple as
you'd require it."

" Oh, money always simplifies. Besides, I should make a
point of being a brute." And on my laughing at this: "I should
pay her enough to keep her down, to make her easy. But the
thing," he went on with a drop back to the less mitigated real —
" the thing, hang it ! is first to find her."

"Surely," I concurred; "for she should have to lack, you
see, no requirement whatever for plausibility. She must be, for

74 THE BETTER SORT

instance, not only ' squareable,' but — before anything else even —
awfully handsome."

"Oh, < awfully'!" He could make light of that, which was
what Mrs. Cavenham was.

" It wouldn't do for her, at all events," I maintained, " to be a
bit less attractive than "

" Well, than who ? " he broke in, not only with a comic effect
of disputing my point, but also as if he knew whom I was think-
ing of.

Before I could answer him, however, the door opened, and we
were interrupted by a visitor — a visitor who, on the spot, in a flash,
primed me with a reply. But I had of course for the moment
to keep it to myself. "Than Mrs. Dundene!"

Ill

I HAD nothing more than that to do with it, but before I could
turn round it was done ; by which I mean that Brivet, whose
previous impression of her had, for some sufficient reason, failed
of sharpness, now jumped straight to the perception that here to
his hand for the solution of his problem was the missing quantity
and the appointed aid. They were in presence on this occasion,
for the first time, half an hour, during which he sufficiently showed
me that he felt himself to have found the special type. He was
certainly to that extent right that nobody could — in those days in
particular — without a rapid sense that she was indeed " special,"
spend any such time in the company of our extraordinary friend.
I couldn't quarrel with his recognising so quickly what I had
myself instantly recognised, yet if it did in truth appear almost
at a glance that she would, through the particular facts of situa-
tion, history, aspect, tone, temper, beautifully "do," I felt from
the first so affected by the business that I desired to wash my
hands of it. There was something I wished to say to him before
it went further, but after that I cared only to be out of it. I may
as well say at once, however, that I never was out of it ; for a man
habitually ridden by the twin demons of imagination and observa-
tion is never — enough for his peace — out of anything. But I
wanted to be able to apply to either, should anything happen,
" ' Thou canst not say / did it ! " What might in particular
happen was represented by what I said to Brivet the first time he
gave me a chance. It was what I had wished before the affair
went further, but it had then already gone so far that he had been
twice — as he immediately let me know — to see her at home. He
clearly desired me to keep up with him, which I was eager to

THE SPECIAL TYPE 75

declare impossible; but he came again to see me only after he
had called. Then I instantly made my point, which was that she
was really, hang it ! too good for his fell purpose.

"But, my dear man, my purpose is a sacred one. And if,
moreover, she herself doesn't think she's too good "

" Ah," said I, "she's in love with you, and so it isn't fair."

He wondered. " Fair to me ?"

" Oh, I don't care a button for you ! What I'm thinking of
is her risk."

"And what do you mean by her risk?"

" Why, her finding, of course, before you've done with her, that
she can't do without you."

He met me as if he had quite thought of that. " Isn't it much
more my risk ? "

" Ah, but you take it deliberately, walk into it with your eyes
open. What I want to be sure of, liking her as I do, is that she
fully understands."

He had been moving about my place with his hands in his
pockets, and at this he stopped short. " How much do you like
her?"

"Oh, ten times more than she likes me ; so that needn't trouble
you. Does she understand that it can be only to help somebody
else?"

" Why, my dear chap, she's as sharp as a steam-whistle."

"So that she also already knows who the other person is?"

He took a turn again, then brought out, "There's no other
person for her but me. Of course, as yet, there are things one
doesn't say ; I haven't set straight to work to dot all my i's, and
the beauty of her, as she's really charming — and would be charm-
ing in any relation — is just exactly that I don't expect to have to.
We'll work it out all right, I think, so that what I most wanted
just to make sure of from you was what you've been good enough
to tell me. I mean that you don't object — for yourself."

I could with philosophic mirth allay that scruple, but what I
couldn't do was to let him see what really most worried me. It
stuck, as they say, in my crop that a woman like — yes, when all
was said and done — Alice Dundene should simply minister to the
convenience of a woman like Rose Cavenham. "But there's
one thing more." This was as far as I could go. " I may take
from you then that she not only knows it's for your divorce and
remarriage, but can fit the shoe on the very person?"

He waited a moment. " Well, you may take from me that I
find her no more of a fool than, as I seem to see, many other
fellows have found her."

76 THE BETTER SORT

I too was silent a little, but with a superior sense of being able
to think it all out further than he. " She's magnificent ! "

" Well, so am I ! " said Brivet. And for months afterward
there was much — in fact everything — in the whole picture to
justify his claim. I remember how it struck me as a lively sign
of this that Mrs. Cavenham, at an early day, gave up her pretty
house in Wilton Street and withdrew for a time to America.
That was palpable design and diplomacy, but I'm afraid that
I quite as much, and doubtless very vulgarly, read into it that she
had had money from Brivet to go. I even promised myself,
I confess, the entertainment of finally making out that, whether
or no the marriage should come off, she would not have been
the person to find the episode least lucrative.

She left the others, at all events, completely together, and so,
as the plot, with this, might be said definitely to thicken, it came
to me in all sorts of ways that the curtain had gone up on the
drama. It came to me, I hasten to add, much less from the two
actors themselves than from other quarters — the usual sources,
which never fail, of chatter; for after my friends' direction was
fairly taken they had the good taste on either side to handle it, in
talk, with gloves, not to expose it to what I should have called
the danger of definition. I even seemed to divine that, allowing
for needful preliminaries, they dealt even with each other on this
same unformulated plane, and that it well might be that no
relation in London at that moment, between a remarkable man
and a beautiful woman, had more of the general air of good
manners. I saw for a long time, directly, but little of them, for
they were naturally much taken up, and Mrs. Dundene in par-
ticular intermitted, as she had never yet done in any complication
of her chequered career, her calls at my studio. As the months
went by I couldn't but feel — partly, perhaps, for this very reason
— that their undertaking announced itself as likely not to fall
short of its aim. I gathered from the voices of the air that
nothing whatever was neglected that could make it a success, and
just this vision it was that made me privately project wonders
into it, caused anxiety and curiosity often again to revisit me, and
led me in fine to say to myself that so rich an effect could be
arrived at on either side only by a great deal of heroism. As
the omens markedly developed I supposed the heroism had
likewise done so, and that the march of the matter was logical I
inferred from the fact that even though the ordeal, all round, was
more protracted than might have been feared, Mrs. Cavenham
made no fresh appearance. This I took as a sign that she knew
she was safe — took indeed as the feature not the least striking of

THE SPECIAL TYPE 77

the situation constituted in her interest. I held my tongue,
naturally, about her interest, but I watched it from a distance
with an attention that, had I been caught in the act, might have
led to a mistake about the direction of my sympathy. I had to
make it my proper secret that, while I lost as little as possible of
what was being done for her, I felt more and more that I myself
could never have begun to do it.

IV

SHE came back at last, however, and one of the first things she
did on her arrival was to knock at my door and let me know im-
mediately, to smooth the way, that she was there on particular
business. I was not to be surprised — though even if I were she
shouldn't mind — to hear that she wished to bespeak from me, on
the smallest possible delay, a portrait, full-length for preference,
of our delightful friend Mr. Brivet. She brought this out with
a light perfection of assurance of which the first effect — I
couldn't help it — was to make me show myself almost too much
amused for good manners. She first stared at my laughter, then
wonderfully joined in it, looking meanwhile extraordinarily pretty
and elegant — more completely handsome in fact, as well as more
completely happy, than I had ever yet seen her. She was
distinctly the better, I quickly saw, for what was being done for
her, and it was an odd spectacle indeed that while, out of her
sight and to the exclusion of her very name, the good work went
on, it put roses in her cheeks and rings on her fingers and the
sense of success in her heart. What had made me laugh, at all
events, was the number of other ideas suddenly evoked by her
request, two of which, the next moment, had disengaged them-
selves with particular brightness. She wanted, for all her confi-
dence, to omit no precaution, to close up every issue, and she
had acutely conceived that the possession of Brivet's picture —
full-lsngth, above all ! — would constitute for her the strongest
possible appearance of holding his supreme pledge. If that had
been her foremost thought her second then had been that if
I should paint him he would have to sit, and that in order to sit
he would have to return. He had been at this time, as I knew,
for many weeks in foreign cities — which helped moreover to
explain to me that Mrs. Cavenham had thought it compatible
with her safety to reopen her London house. Everything
accordingly seemed to make for a victory, but there was such
a thing, her proceeding implied, as one's — at least as her —
susceptibility and her nerves. This question of his return I

78 THE BETTER SORT

of course immediately put to her; on which she immediately
answered that it was expressed in her very proposal, inasmuch as
this proposal was nothing but the offer that Brivet had himself
made her. The thing was to be his gift ; she had only, he had
assured her, to choose her artist and arrange the time ; and she
had amiably chosen me — chosen me for the dates, as she called
them, immediately before us. I doubtless — but I don't care —
give the measure of my native cynicism in confessing that I
didn't the least avoid showing her that I saw through her game.
"Well, I'll do him," I said, "if he'll come himself and ask
me."

She wanted to know, at this, of course, if I impugned her
veracity. "You don't believe what I tell you? You're afraid
for your money ? "

I took it in high good-humour. " For my money not a bit."

" For what then ? "

I had to think first how much I could say, which seemed to
me, naturally, as yet but little. " I know perfectly that what-
ever happens Brivet always pays. But let him come ; then we'll
talk."

"Ah, well," she returned, " you'll see if he doesn't come." And
come he did in fact — though without a word from myself directly
— at the end of ten days ; on which we immediately got to work,
an idea highly favourable to it having meanwhile shaped itself in
my own breast. Meanwhile too, however, before his arrival, Mrs.
Cavenham had been again to see me, and this it was precisely,
I think, that determined my idea. My present explanation of
what afresh passed between us is that she really felt the need
to build up her security a little higher by borrowing from my
own vision of what had been happening. I had not, she saw,
been very near to that, but I had been at least, during her time
in America, nearer than she. And I had doubtless somehow
"aggravated" her by appearing to disbelieve in the guarantee
she had come in such pride to parade to me. It had in any case
befallen that, on the occasion of her second visit, what I least
expected or desired — her avowal of being "in the know" —
suddenly went too far to stop. When she did speak she spoke
with elation. " Mrs. Brivet has filed her petition."

" For getting rid of him ? "

"Yes, in order to marry again ; which is exactly what he wants
her to do. It's wonderful — and, in a manner, I think, quite
splendid — the way he has made it easy for her. He has met her
wishes handsomely — obliged her in every particular."

As she preferred, subtly enough, to put it all as if it were for

THE SPECIAL TYPE 79

the sole benefit of his wife, I was quite ready for this tone ; but
I privately defied her to keep it up. "Well, then, he hasn't
laboured in vain."

" Oh, it couldn't have been in vain. What has happened has
been the sort of thing that she couldn't possibly fail to act upon."

" Too great a scandal, eh ? "

She but just paused at it. "Nothing neglected, certainly,
or omitted. He was not the man to undertake it "

"And not put it through? No, I should say he wasn't the
man. In any case he apparently hasn't been. But he must
have found the job "

" Rather a bore?" she asked as I had hesitated.

" Well, not so much a bore as a delicate matter."

She seemed to demur. " Delicate ? "

" Why, your sex likes him so."

" But isn't just that what has made it easy ? "

" Easy for him — yes," I after a moment admitted.

But it wasn't what she meant. " And not difficult, also, for
them."

This was the nearest approach I was to have heard her make,
since the day of the meeting of the two women at my studio,
to naming Mrs. Dundene. She never, to the end of the affair,
came any closer to her in speech than by the collective and
promiscuous plural pronoun. There might have been a dozen
of them, and she took cognizance, in respect to them, only of
quantity. It was as if it had been a way of showing how little
of anything else she imputed. Quality, as distinguished from
quantity, was what she had. " Oh, I think," I said, " that we
can scarcely speak for them."

" Why not ? They must certainly have had the most beautiful
time. Operas, theatres, suppers, dinners, diamonds, carriages,
journeys hither and yon with him, poor dear, telegrams sent by
each from everywhere to everywhere and always lying about,
elaborate arrivals and departures at stations for everyone to see,
and, in fact, quite a crowd usually collected — as many witnesses
as you like. Then," she wound up, "his brougham standing
always — half the day and half the night — at their doors. He
has had to keep a brougham, and the proper sort of man, just
for that alone. In other words unlimited publicity."

"I see. What more can they have wanted? Yes," I pon-
dered, " they like, for the most part, we suppose, a studied, out-
rageous affichage, and they must have thoroughly enjoyed it."

" Ah, but it was only that."

I wondered. " Only what ? "

So THE BETTER SORT

" Only affiche. Only outrageous. Only the form of — well, of
what would definitely serve. He never saw them alone."

I wondered — or at least appeared to — still more. " Never ? "

"Never. Never once." She had a wonderful air of answer-
ing for it. " I know."

I saw that, after all, she really believed she knew, and I had
indeed, for that matter, to recognise that I myself believed her
knowledge to be sound. Only there went with it a complacency,
an enjoyment of having really made me see what could be done
for her, so little to my taste that for a minute or two I could
scarce trust myself to speak : she looked somehow, as she sat
there, so lovely, and yet, in spite of her loveliness — or perhaps
even just because of it — so smugly selfish ; she put it to me with
so small a consciousness of anything but her personal triumph
that, while she had kept her skirts clear, her name unuttered and
her reputation untouched, " they " had been in it even more than
her success required. It was their skirts, their name and their
reputation that, in the proceedings at hand, would bear the
brunt. It was only after waiting a while that I could at last say :
" You're perfectly sure then of Mrs. Brivet's intention ? "

" Oh, we've had formal notice."

"And he's himself satisfied of the sufficiency ?"

"Of the sufficiency ?"

" Of what he has done."

She rectified. " Of what he has appeared to do."

" That is then enough ? "

" Enough," she laughed, " to send him to the gallows ! " To
which I could only reply that all was well that ended well.

ALL for me, however, as it proved, had not ended yet. Brivet,
as I have mentioned, duly reappeared to sit for me, and Mrs.
Cavenham, on his arrival, as consistently went abroad. He con-
firmed to me that lady's news of how he had "fetched," as he
called it, his wife — let me know, as decently owing to me after
what had passed, on the subject, between us, that the forces set
in motion had logically operated ; but he made no other allusion
to his late accomplice — for I now took for granted the close
of the connection — than was conveyed in this intimation. He
spoke — and the effect was almost droll — as if he had had, since
our previous meeting, a busy and responsible year and wound up
an affair (as he was accustomed to wind up affairs) involving
a mass of detail ; he even dropped into occasional reminiscence

THE SPECIAL TYPE 81

of what he had seen and enjoyed and disliked during a recent
period of rather far-reaching adventure ; but he stopped just as
short as Mrs. Cavenham had done — and, indeed, much shorter
than she — of introducing Mrs. Dundene by name into our talk.
And what was singular in this, I soon saw, was — apart from
a general discretion — that he abstained not at all because his
mind was troubled, but just because, on the contrary, it was
so much at ease. It was perhaps even more singular still, mean-
while, that, though I had scarce been able to bear Mrs. Caven-
ham's manner in this particular, I found I could put up perfectly
with that of her friend. She had annoyed me, but he didn't —
I give the inconsistency for what it is worth. The obvious state
of his conscience had always been a strong point in him and one
that exactly irritated some people as much as it charmed others ;
so that if, in general, it was positively, and in fact quite aggres-
sively approving, this monitor, it had never held its head so high
as at the juncture of which I speak. I took all this in with
eagerness, for I saw how it would play into my work. Seeking
as I always do, instinctively, to represent sitters in the light of
the thing, whatever it may be, that facially, least wittingly or
responsibly, gives the pitch of their aspect, I felt immediately
that I should have the clue for making a capital thing of Brivet
were I to succeed in showing him in just this freshness of his
cheer. His cheer was that of his being able to say to himself
that he had got all he wanted precisely as he wanted : without
having harmed a fly. He had arrived so neatly where most men
arrive besmirched, and what he seemed to cry out as he stood
before my canvas — wishing everyone well all round — was : " See
how clever and pleasant and practicable, how jolly and lucky and
rich I've been ! " I determined, at all events, that I would make
some such characteristic words as these cross, at any cost, the
footlights, as it were, of my frame.

Well, I can't but feel to this hour that I really hit my nail —
that the man is fairly painted in the light and that the work re-
mains as yet my high-water mark. He himself was delighted
with it — and all the more, I think, that before it was finished he
received from America the news of his liberation. He had not
defended the suit — as to which judgment, therefore, had been
expeditiously rendered ; and he was accordingly free as air and
with the added sweetness of every augmented appearance that
his wife was herself blindly preparing to seek chastisement at
the hands of destiny. There being at last no obstacle to his
open association with Mrs. Cavenham, he called her directly back
to London to admire my achievement, over which, from the very

82 THE BETTER SORT

first glance, she as amiably let herself go. It was the very view
of him she had desired to possess ; it was the dear man in his
intimate essence for those who knew him ; and for any one who
should ever be deprived of him it would be the next best thing
to the sound of his voice. We of course by no means lingered,
however, on the contingency of privation, which was promptly
swept away in the rush of Mrs. Cavenham's vision of how straight
also, above and beyond, I had, as she called it, attacked. I
couldn't quite myself, I fear, tell how straight, but Mrs. Cavenham
perfectly could, and did, for everybody : she had at her fingers'
ends all the reasons why the thing would be a treasure even for
those who had never seen " Frank."

I had finished the picture, but was, according to my practice,
keeping it near me a little, for afterthoughts, when I received
from Mrs. Dundene the first visit she had paid me for many a
month. " I've come," she immediately said, " to ask you a
favour " ; and she turned her eyes, for a minute, as if contentedly
full of her thought, round the large workroom she already knew
so well and in which her beauty had really rendered more services
than could ever be repaid. There were studies of her yet on the
walls ; there were others thrust away in corners ; others still had
gone forth from where she stood and carried to far-away places
the reach of her lingering look. I had greatly, almost incon-
veniently missed her, and I don't know why it was that she
struck me now as more beautiful than ever. She had always, for
that matter, had a way of seeming each time a little different and
a little better. Dressed very simply in black materials, feathers
and lace, that gave the impression of being light and fine, she
had indeed the air of a special type, but quite as some great
lady might have had it. She looked like a princess in Court
mourning. Oh, she had been a case for the petitioner — was
everything the other side wanted ! " Mr. Brivet," she went on to
say, " has kindly offered me a present. I'm to ask of him what-
ever in the world I most desire."

I knew in an instant, on this, what was coming, but I was at
first wholly taken up with the simplicity of her allusion to her
late connection. Had I supposed that, like Brivet, she wouldn't
allude to it at all? or had I stupidly assumed that if she did it
would be with ribaldry and rancour? I hardly know; I only
know that I suddenly found myself charmed to receive from
her thus the key of my own freedom. There was something I
wanted to say to her, and she had thus given me leave. But for
the moment I only repeated as with amused interest : "Whatever
in the world ? "

THE SPECIAL TYPE 83

" Whatever in all the world."

" But that's immense, and in what way can poor / help ? "

" By painting him for me. I want a portrait of him."

I looked at her a moment in silence. She was lovely. " That's
what — * in all the world ' — you've chosen ? "

" Yes — thinking it over : full-length. I want it for remem-
brance, and I want it as you will do it. It's the only thing I do
want."

"Nothing else?"

"Oh, it's enough." I turned about — she was wonderful. I
had whisked out of sight for a month the picture I had produced
for Mrs. Cavenham, and it was now completely covered with a
large piece of stuff. I stood there a little, thinking of it, and
she went on as if she feared I might be unwilling. " Can't you
doit?"

It showed me that she had not heard from him of my having
painted him, and this, further, was an indication that, his purpose
effected, he had ceased to see her. " I suppose you know," I
presently said, " what you've done for him ? "

" Oh yes ; it was what I wanted."

" It was what he wanted ! " I laughed.

" Well, I want what he wants."

" Even to his marrying Mrs. Cavenham ? "

She hesitated. " As well her as anyone, from the moment he
couldn't marry me"

" It was beautiful of you to be so sure of that," I returned.

" How could I be anything else but sure ? He doesn't so
much as know me ! " said Alice Dundene.

" No," I declared, " I verily believe he doesn't. There's your
picture," I added, unveiling my work.

She was amazed and delighted. " I may have that ? "

" So far as I'm concerned— absolutely."

" Then he had himself the beautiful thought of sitting for me ? "

I faltered but an instant. "Yes."

Her pleasure in what I had done was a joy to me. " Why, it's
of a truth ! It's perfection."

" I think it is."

" It's the whole story. It's life."

"That's what I tried for," I said; and I added to myself:
"Why the deuce do we?"

" It will be him for me," she meanwhile went on. " I shall live
with it, keep it all to myself, and — do you know what it will do ?
— it will seem to make up."

"To make up?"

84 THE BETTER SORT

" I never saw him alone," said Mrs. Dundene.

I am still keeping the thing to send to her, punctually, on the
day he's married; but I had of course, on my understanding
with her, a tremendous bout with Mrs. Cavenham, who pro-
tested with indignation against my " base treachery" and made to
Brivet an appeal for redress which, enlightened, face to face with
the magnificent humility of his other friend's selection, he
couldn't, for shame, entertain. All he was able to do was to
suggest to me that I might for one or other of the ladies, at my
choice, do him again ; but I had no difficulty in replying that
my best was my best and that what was done was done. He
assented with the awkwardness of a man in dispute between
women, and Mrs. Cavenham remained furious. "Can't 'they' —
of all possible things, think ! — take something else ? "

"Oh, they want him!"

" Him ? " It was monstrous.

"To live with," I explained— " to make up."

" To make up for what ? "

" Why, you know, they never saw him alone."

MRS. MED WIN

v

I

" \ T 7 ELL, we are a pair ! " the poor lady's visitor broke out
V V to her, at the end of her explanation, in a manner dis-
concerting enough. The poor lady was Miss Cutter, who lived
in South Audley Street, where she had an "upper half" so
concise that it had to pass, boldly, for convenient ; and her
visitor was her half-brother, whom she had not seen for three
years. She was remarkable for a maturity of which every
symptom might have been observed to be admirably controlled,
had not a tendency to stoutness just affirmed its independence.
Her present, no doubt, insisted too much on her past, but with
the excuse, sufficiently valid, that she must certainly once have
been prettier. She was clearly not contented with once — she
wished to be prettier again. She neglected nothing that could
produce that illusion, and, being both fair and fat, dressed almost
wholly in black. When she added a little colour it was not, at
any rate, to her drapery. Her small rooms had the peculiarity
that everything they contained appeared to testify with vividness
to her position in society, quite as if they had been furnished by
the bounty of admiring friends. They were adorned indeed
almost exclusively with objects that nobody buys, as had more
than once been remarked by spectators of her own sex, for her-
self, and would have been luxurious if luxury consisted mainly in
photographic portraits slashed across with signatures, in baskets
of flowers beribboned with the cards of passing compatriots, and
in a neat collection of red volumes, blue volumes, alphabetical
volumes, aids to London lucidity, of every sort, devoted to
addresses and engagements. To be in Miss Cutter's tiny drawing-
room, in short, even with Miss Cutter alone — should you by any
chance have found her so — was somehow to be in the world and
in a crowd. It was like an agency — it bristled with particulars.

This was what the tall, lean, loose gentleman lounging there
before her might have appeared to read in the suggestive scene
over which, while she talked to him, his eyes moved without
haste and without rest. " Oh, come, Mamie ! " he occasionally

85

86 THE BETTER SORT

threw off; and the words were evidently connected with the im-
pression thus absorbed. His comparative youth spoke of waste
even as her positive — her too positive — spoke of economy.
There was only one thing, that is, to make up in him for every-
thing he had lost, though it was distinct enough indeed that this
thing might sometimes serve. It consisted in the perfection of
an indifference, an indifference at the present moment directed
to the plea — a plea of inability, of pure destitution — with which
his sister had met him. Yet it had even now a wider embrace,
took in quite sufficiently all consequences of queerness, confessed
in advance to the false note that, in such a setting, he almost
excruciatingly constituted. He cared as little that he looked at
moments all his impudence as that he looked all his shabbiness,
all his cleverness, all his history. These different things were
written in him — in his premature baldness, his seamed, strained
face, the lapse from bravery of his long tawny moustache ; above
all, in his easy, friendly, universally acquainted eye, so much too
sociable for mere conversation. What possible relation with him
could be natural enough to meet it ? He wore a scant, rough
Inverness cape and a pair of black trousers, wanting in substance
and marked with the sheen of time, that had presumably once
served for evening use. He spoke with the slowness helplessly
permitted to Americans — as something too slow to be stopped
— and he repeated that he found himself associated with Miss
Cutter in a harmony worthy of wonder. She had been telling
him not only that she couldn't possibly give him ten pounds, but
that his unexpected arrival, should he insist on being much in
view, might seriously interfere with arrangements necessary to
her own maintenance ; on which he had begun by replying that
he of course knew she had long ago spent her money, but that he
looked to her now exactly because she had, without the aid of
that convenience, mastered the art of life.

" I'd really go away with a fiver, my dear, if you'd only tell me
how you do it. It's no use saying only, as you've always said,
that 'people are very kind to you.' What the devil are they kind
to you fort"

" Well, one reason is precisely that no particular inconvenience
has hitherto been supposed to attach to me. I'm just what I
am," said Mamie Cutter ; " nothing less and nothing more. It's
awkward to have to explain to you, which, moreover, I really
needn't in the least. I'm clever and amusing and charming."
She was uneasy and even frightened, but she kept her temper
and met him with a grace of her own. " I don't think you ought
to ask me more questions than I ask you."

MRS. MEDWIN 87

"Ah, my dear," said the odd young man, "/'#£ no mysteries.
Why in the world, since it was what you came out for and have
devoted so much of your time to, haven't you pulled it off ? Why
haven't you married ? "

" Why haven't you ? " she retorted. " Do you think that if I
had it would have been better for you ? — that my husband would
for a moment have put up with you ? Do you mind my asking
you if you'll kindly go now ? " she went on after a glance at the
clock. " I'm expecting a friend, whom I must see alone, on a
matter of great importance "

" And my being seen with you may compromise your respecta-
bility or undermine your nerve ? " He sprawled imperturbably
in his place, crossing again, in another sense, his long black legs
and showing, above his low shoes, an absurd reach of parti-
coloured sock. " I take your point well enough, but mayn't you
be after all quite wrong? If you can't do anything for me
couldn't you at least do something with me ? If it comes to
that, I'm clever and amusing and charming too ! I've been such
an ass that you don't appreciate me. But people like me — I
assure you they do. They usually don't know what an ass I've
been ; they only see the surface, which " — and he stretched him-
self afresh as she looked him up and down — " you can imagine
them, can't you, rather taken with? I'm 'what I am' too;
nothing less and nothing more. That's true of us as a family,
you see. We are a crew ! " He delivered himself serenely. His
voice was soft and flat, his pleasant eyes, his simple tones tending
to the solemn, achieved at moments that effect of quaintness
which is, in certain connections, socially so known and enjoyed.
" English people have quite a weakness for me — more than any
others. I get on with them beautifully. I've always been with
them abroad. They think me," the young man explained,
"diabolically American."

" You ! " Such stupidity drew from her a sigh of compassion.

Her companion apparently quite understood it. "Are you
homesick, Mamie ? " he asked, with wondering irrelevance.

The manner of the question made her for some reason, in spite
of her preoccupations, break into a laugh. A shade of indulgence,
a sense of other things, came back to her. "You are funny,
Scott ! "

" Well," remarked Scott, " that's just what I claim. But are
you so homesick ? " he spaciously inquired, not as if to a practical
end, but from an easy play of intelligence.

" I'm just dying of it ! " said Mamie Cutter.

" Why, so am I ! " Her visitor had a sweetness of concurrence.

88 THE BETTER SORT

" We're the only decent people," Miss Cutter declared. " And
I know. You don't — you can't ; and I can't explain. Come in,"
she continued with a return of her impatience and an increase of
her decision, "at seven sharp."

She had quitted her seat some time before, and now, to get
him into motion, hovered before him while, still motionless, he
looked up at her. Something intimate, in the silence, appeared
to pass between them — a community of fatigue and failure and,
after all, of intelligence. There was a final, cynical humour in it.
It determined him, at any rate, at last, and he slowly rose, taking
in again as he stood there the testimony of the room. He might
have been counting the photographs, but he looked at the flowers
with detachment. " Who's coming ? "

" Mrs. Medwin."
. "American?"

"Dear no!"

" Then what are you doing for her ? "

" I work for everyone," she promptly returned.

"For everyone who pays? So I suppose. Yet isn't it only
we who do pay ? "

There was a drollery, not lost on her, in the way his queer
presence lent itself to his emphasised plural. " Do you consider
that you do?"

At this, with his deliberation, he came back to his charming
idea. " Only try me, and see if I can't be made to. Work me
in." On her sharply presenting her back he stared a little at the
clock. " If I come at seven may I stay to dinner? "

It brought her round again. " Impossible. I'm dining out."

"With whom?"

She had to think. " With Lord Considine."

" Oh, my eye ! " Scott exclaimed.

She looked at him gloomily. "Is that sort of tone what
makes you pay? I think you might understand," she went on,
"that if you're to sponge on me successfully you mustn't ruin
me. I must have some remote resemblance to a lady."

"Yes? But why must /?" Her exasperated silence was full
of answers, of which, however, his inimitable manner took no
account. "You don't understand my real strength; I doubt
if you even understand your own. You're clever, Mamie, but
you're not so clever as I supposed. However," he pursued, " it's
out of Mrs. Medwin that you'll get it."

"Get what?"

" Why, the cheque that will enable you to assist me."

On this, for a moment, she met his eyes. " If you'll come

MRS. MEDWIN 89

back at seven sharp — not a minute before, and not a minute
after, I'll give you two five-pound notes."

He thought it over. "Whom are you expecting a minute
after?"

It sent her to the window with a groan almost of anguish, and
she answered nothing till she had looked at the street. " If you
injure me, you know, Scott, you'll be sorry."

" I wouldn't injure you for the world. What I want to do in
fact is really to help you, and I promise you that I won't leave
you — by which I mean won't leave London — till I've effected
something really pleasant for you. I like you, Mamie, because
I like pluck ; I like you much more than you like me. I like
you very, very much." He had at last with this reached the
door and opened it, but he remained with his hand on the latch.
" What does Mrs. Medwin want of you ? " he thus brought out.

She had come round to see him disappear, and in the relief of
this prospect she again just indulged him. "The impossible."

He waited another minute. " And you're going to do it ? "

" I'm going to do it," said Mamie Cutter.

" Well, then, that ought to be a haul. Call it three fivers ! "
he laughed. " At seven sharp." And at last he left her alone.

II

Miss CUTTER waited till she heard the house-door close; after
which, in a sightless, mechanical way, she moved about the room,
readjusting various objects that he had not touched. It was as
if his mere voice and accent had spoiled her form. But she
was not left too long to reckon with these things, for Mrs.
Medwin was promptly announced. This lady was not, more
than her hostess, in the first flush of her youth; her appear-
ance— the scattered remains of beauty manipulated by taste —
resembled one of the light repasts in which the fragments of
yesterday's dinner figure with a conscious ease that makes up
for the want of presence. She was perhaps of an effect still
too immediate to be called interesting, but she was candid,
gentle and surprised — not fatiguingly surprised, only just in the
right degree; and her white face — it was too white — with the
fixed eyes, the somewhat touzled hair and the Louis Seize hat,
might at the end of the very long neck have suggested the head
of a princess carried, in a revolution, on a pike. She im-
mediately took up the business that had brought her, with the
air, however, of drawing from the omens then discernible less
confidence than she had hoped. The complication lay in the

90 THE BETTER SORT

fact that if it was Mamie's part to present the omens, that lady
yet had so to colour them as to make her own service large.
She perhaps over-coloured, for her friend gave way to momentary
despair.

" What you mean is then that it's simply impossible ? "

"Oh no," said Mamie, with a qualified emphasis. "It's
possible'1

" But disgustingly difficult ? "

" As difficult as you like."

" Then what can I do that I haven't done ? "

" You can only wait a little longer."

"But that's just what I have done. I've done nothing else.
I'm always waiting a little longer ! "

Miss Cutter retained, in spite of this pathos, her grasp of
the subject. "The thing, as I've told you, is for you first to
be seen."

"But if people won't look at me?"

"They will."

"They will?" Mrs. Medwin was eager.

"They shall," her hostess went on. "It's their only having
heard — without having seen."

"But if they stare straight the other way?" Mrs. Medwin
continued to object. "You can't simply go up to them and
twist their heads about."

" It's just what I can," said Mamie Cutter.

But her charming visitor, heedless for the moment of this
attenuation, had found the way to put it. " It's the old story.
You can't go into the water till you swim, and you can't swim
till you go into the water. I can't be spoken to till I'm seen,
but I can't be seen till I'm spoken to."

She met this lucidity, Miss Cutter, with but an instant's lapse.
"You say I can't twist their heads about. But I have twisted
them."

It had been quietly produced, but it gave her companion a
jerk. "They say 'Yes'?"

She summed it up. " All but one. She says ' No.' "

Mrs. Medwin thought ; then jumped. " Lady Wantridge ? "

Miss Cutter, as more delicate, only bowed admission. " I
shall see her either this afternoon or late to-morrow. But she
has written."

Her visitor wondered again. " May I see her letter? "

"No." She spoke with decision. "But I shall square her."

"Then how?"

"Well"— and Miss Cutter, as if looking upward for inspira-

MRS. MEDWIN gi

tion, fixed her eyes awhile on the ceiling — "well, it will come
to me."

Mrs. Medwin watched her — it was impressive. " And will
they come to you — the others ? " This question drew out the
fact that they would — so far, at least, as they consisted of Lady
Edward, Lady Bellhouse and Mrs. Pouncer, who had engaged
to muster, at the signal of tea, on the i4th — prepared, as it were,
for the worst. There was of course always the chance that
Lady Wantridge might take the field in such force as to paralyse
them, though that danger, at the same time, seemed inconsistent
with her being squared. It didn't perhaps all quite ideally hang
together; but what it sufficiently came to was that if she was
the one who could do most for a person in Mrs. Medwin's
position she was also the one who could do most against It
would therefore be distinctly what our friend familiarly spoke of
as " collar-work." The effect of these mixed considerations was
at any rate that Mamie eventually acquiesced in the idea, hand-
somely thrown out by her client, that she should have an
"advance" to go on with. Miss Cutter confessed that it seemed
at times as if one scarce could go on ; but the advance was, in
spite of this delicacy, still more delicately made — made in the
form of a banknote, several sovereigns, some loose silver and
two coppers, the whole contents of her purse, neatly disposed by
Mrs. Medwin on one of the tiny tables. It seemed to clear the
air for deeper intimacies, the fruit of which was that Mamie,
lonely, after all, in her crowd, and always more helpful than
helped, eventually brought out that the way Scott had been
going on was what seemed momentarily to overshadow her own
power to do so.

" I've had a descent from him." But she had to explain. " My
half-brother—Scott Homer. A wretch."

"What kind of a wretch?"

"Every kind. I lose sight of him at times — he disappears
abroad. But he always turns up again, worse than ever."

"Violent?"

" No."

"Maudlin?"

"No."

" Only unpleasant ? "

"No. Rather pleasant. Awfully clever — awfully travelled
and easy."

"Then what's the matter with him? "

Mamie mused, hesitated — seemed to see a wide past. " I
don't know."

92 THE BETTER SORT

"Something in the background?" Then as her friend was
silent, " Something queer about cards ? " Mrs. Medwin threw off.

" I don't know — and I don't want to ! "

"Ah well, I'm sure / don't," Mrs. Medwin returned with
spirit. The note of sharpness was perhaps also a little in the
observation she made as she gathered herself to go. " Do you
mind my saying something ? "

Mamie took her eyes quickly from the money on the little
stand. " You may say what you like."

" I only mean that anything awkward you may have to keep
out of the way does seem to make more wonderful, doesn't it,
that you should have got just where you are? I allude, you
know, to your position/'

"I see." Miss Cutter somewhat coldly smiled. "To my
power."

" So awfully remarkable in an American."

" Ah, you like us so."

Mrs. Medwin candidly considered. " But we don't, dearest."

Her companion's smile brightened. " Then why do you come
tome?"

"Oh, I likejflw /" Mrs. Medwin made out.

"Then that's it. There are no 'Americans.' It's always
'you.'"

" Me ? " Mrs. Medwin looked lovely, but a little muddled.

" Me!" Mamie Cutter laughed. "But if you like me, you
dear thing, you can judge if I like you." She gave her a kiss to
dismiss her. " I'll see you again when I've seen her."

" Lady Wantridge ? I hope so, indeed. I'll turn up late to-
morrow, if you don't catch me first. Has it come to you yet ? "
the visitor, now at the door, went on.

" No ; but it will. There's time."

" Oh, a little less every day ! "

Miss Cutter had approached the table and glanced again at the
gold and silver and the note, not indeed absolutely overlooked the
two coppers. " The balance," she put it, " the day after ?"

" That very night, if you like."

" Then count on me."

" Oh, if I didn't ! " But the door closed on the dark idea.

Yearningly then, and only when it had done so, Miss Cutter took
up the money.

She went out with it ten minutes later, and, the calls on her
time being many, remained out so long that at half-past six she
had not come back. At that hour, on the other hand, Scott
Homer knocked at her door, where her maid, who opened it with

MRS. MEDWIN 93

a weak pretence of holding it firm, ventured to announce to him,
as a lesson well learnt, that he had not been expected till seven.
No lesson, none the less, could prevail against his native art. He
pleaded fatigue, her, the maid's, dreadful depressing London, and
the need to curl up somewhere. If she would just leave him
quiet half an hour that old sofa upstairs would do for it, of which
he took quickly such effectual possession that when, five minutes
later, she peeped, nervous for her broken vow, into the drawing-
room, the faithless young woman found him extended at his length
and peacefully asleep.

Ill

THE situation before Miss Cutter's return developed in other
directions still, and when that event took place, at a few minutes
past seven, these circumstances were, by the foot of the stair,
between mistress and maid, the subject of some interrogative
gasps and scared admissions. Lady Wantridge had arrived shortly
after the interloper, and wishing, as she said, to wait, had gone
straight up in spite of being told he was lying down.

" She distinctly understood he was there ? "

" Oh yes, ma'am ; I thought it right to mention."

" And what did you call him ? "

" Well, ma'am, I thought it unfair to you to call him anything
but a gentleman."

Mamie took it all in, though there might well be more of it
than one could quickly embrace. " But if she has had time,"
she flashed, " to find out he isn't one ? "

" Oh, ma'am, she had a quarter of an hour."

" Then she isn't with him still ? "

" No, ma'am ; she came down again at last. She rang, and I
saw her here, and she said she wouldn't wait longer."

Miss Cutter darkly mused. " Yet had already waited ? "

" Quite a quarter."

" Mercy on us ! " She began to mount. Before reaching the
top, however, she had reflected that quite a quarter was long if
Lady Wantridge had only been shocked. On the other hand, it
was short if she had only been pleased. But how could she have
been pleased ? The very essence of their actual crisis was just
that there was no pleasing her. Mamie had but to open the
drawing-room door indeed to perceive that this was not true at
least of Scott Homer, who was horribly cheerful.

Miss Cutter expressed to her brother without reserve her sense
of the constitutional, the brutal selfishness that had determined

94 THE BETTER SORT

his mistimed return. It had taken place, in violation of their
agreement, exactly at the moment when it was most cruel to her
that he should be there, and if she must now completely wash
her hands of him he had only himself to thank. She had come
in flushed with resentment and for a moment had been voluble ;
but it would have been striking that, though the way he received
her might have seemed but to aggravate, it presently justified him
by causing their relation really to take a stride. He had the art
of confounding those who would quarrel with him by reducing
them to the humiliation of an irritated curiosity.

" What could she have made of you ? " Mamie demanded.

" My dear girl, she's not a woman who's eager to make too
much of anything — anything, I mean, that will prevent her from
doing as she likes, what she takes into her head. Of course,"
he continued to explain, "if it's something she doesn't want to
do, she'll make as much as Moses."

Mamie wondered if that was the way he talked to her visitor,
but felt obliged to own to his acuteness. It was an exact descrip-
tion of Lady Wantridge, and she was conscious of tucking it away
for future use in a corner of her miscellaneous little mind. She
withheld, however, all present acknowledgment, only addressing
him another question. " Did you really get on with her ? "

" Have you still to learn, darling — I can't help again putting
it to you— that I get on with everybody? That's just what I
don't seem able to drive into you. Only see how I get on with
ymt"

She almost stood corrected. "What I mean is, of course,
whether "

"Whether she made love to me? Shyly, yet — or because —
shamefully? She would certainly have liked awfully to stay."

"Then why didn't she?"

" Because, on account of some other matter — and I could see
it was true— she hadn't time. Twenty minutes — she was here
less — were all she came to give you. So don't be afraid I've
frightened her away. She'll come back."

Mamie thought it over. "Yet you didn't go with her to
the door ? "

" She wouldn't let me, and I know when to do what I'm told
— quite as much as what I'm not told. She wanted to find out
about me. I mean from your little creature ; a pearl of fidelity,
by the way."

"But what on earth did she come up for?" Mamie again
found herself appealing, and, just by that fact, showing her need
of help.

MRS. MEDWIN 95

"Because she always goes up." Then, as, in the presence
of this rapid generalisation, to say nothing of that of such a
relative altogether, Miss Cutter could only show as comparatively
blank : " I mean she knows when to go up and when to come
down. She has instincts ; she didn't know whom you might have
up here. It's a kind of compliment to you anyway. Why,
Mamie," Scott pursued, " you don't know the curiosity we any
of us inspire. You wouldn't believe what I've seen. The bigger
bugs they are the more they're on the look-out."

Mamie still followed, but at a distance. "The look-out for
what?"

" Why, for anything that will help them to live. You've been
here all this time without making out then, about them, what
I've had to pick out as I can ? They're dead, don't you see ?
And we're alive."

" You ? Oh ! " — Mamie almost laughed about it

"Well, they're a worn-out old lot, anyhow; they've used up their
resources. They do look out ; and I'll do them the justice to
say they're not afraid — not even of me!" he continued as his
sister again showed something of the same irony. " Lady
Wantridge, at any rate, wasn't ; that's what I mean by her having
made love to me. She does what she likes. Mind it, you know."
He was by this time fairly teaching her to know one of her best
friends, and when, after it, he had come back to the great point
of his lesson — that of her failure, through feminine inferiority,
practically to grasp the truth that their being just as they were,
he and she, was the real card for them to play — when he had
renewed that reminder he left her absolutely in a state of
dependence. Her impulse to press him on the subject of Lady
Wantridge dropped ; it was as if she had felt that, whatever had
taken place, something would somehow come of it. She was
to be, in a manner, disappointed, but the impression helped to
keep her over to the next morning, when, as Scott had foretold,
his new acquaintance did reappear, explaining to Miss Cutter
that she had acted the day before to gain time and that she
even now sought to gain it by not waiting longer. What, she
promptly intimated she had asked herself, could that friend be
thinking of? She must show where she stood before things had
gone too far. If she had brought her answer without more delay
she wished to make it sharp. Mrs. Medwin ? Never ! " No,
my dear — not I. There I stop."

Mamie had known it would be "collar-work," but somehow
now, at the beginning, she felt her heart sink. It was not that
she had expected to carry the position with a rush, but that,

96 THE BETTER SORT

as always after an interval, her visitor's defences really loomed —
and quite, as it were, to the material vision — too large. She was
always planted with them, voluminous, in the very centre of the
passage ; was like a person accommodated with a chair in some
unlawful place at the theatre. She wouldn't move and you
couldn't get round. Mamie's calculation indeed had not been
on getting round ; she was obliged to recognise that, too foolishly
and fondly, she had dreamed of producing a surrender. Her
dream had been the fruit of her need ; but, conscious that she
was even yet unequipped for pressure, she felt, almost for the first
time in her life, superficial and crude. She was to be paid — but
with what was she, to that end, to pay? She had engaged to
find an answer to this question, but the answer had not, accord-
ing to her promise, " come." And Lady Wantridge meanwhile
massed herself, and there was no view of her that didn't show
her as verily, by some process too obscure to be traced, the hard
depository of the social law. She was no younger, no fresher,
no stronger, really, than any of them ; she was only, with a kind
of haggard fineness, a sharpened taste for life, and, with all sorts of
things behind and beneath her, more abysmal and more immoral,
more secure and more impertinent. The points she made were
two in number. One was that she absolutely declined ; the other
was that she quite doubted if Mamie herself had measured the
job. The thing couldn't be done. But say it could be; was
Mamie quite the person to do it ? To this Miss Cutter, with
a sweet smile, replied that she quite understood how little she
might seem so. " I'm only one of the persons to whom it has
appeared that you are."

" Then who are the others ? "

"Well, to begin with, Lady Edward, Lady Bellhouse and
Mrs. Pouncer."

"Do you mean that they'll come to meet her?"

" I've seen them, and they've promised."

" To come, of course," Lady Wantridge said, " if / come."

Her hostess hesitated. "Oh, of course, you could prevent
them. But I should take it as awfully kind of you not to.
Won't you do this for me?" Mamie pleaded.

Her friend looked about the room very much as Scott had
done. " Do they really understand what it's for ? "

" Perfectly. So that she may call."

"And what good will that do her?"

Miss Cutter faltered, but she presently brought it out. " Of
course what one hopes is that you'll ask her."

"Ask her to call?"

MRS. MEDWIN 97

"Ask her to dine. Ask her, if you'd be so truly sweet, for
a Sunday, or something of that sort, and even if only in one of
your most mixed parties, to Catchmore."

Miss Cutter felt the less hopeful after this effort in that her
companion only showed a strange good nature. And it was not
the amiability of irony; yet it was amusement. "Take Mrs.
Medwin into my family?"

" Some day, when you're taking forty others."

"Ah, but what I don't see is what it does for you. You're
already so welcome among us that you can scarcely improve your
position even by forming for us the most delightful relation."

" Well, I know how dear you are," Mamie Cutter replied ;
" but one has, after all, more than one side, and more than one
sympathy. I like her, you know." And even at this Lady
Wantridge was not shocked ; she showed that ease and blandness
which were her way, unfortunately, of being most impossible.
She remarked that she might listen to such things, because she
was clever enough for them not to matter ; only Mamie should
take care how she went about saying them at large. When she
became definite, however, in a minute, on the subject of the
public facts, Miss Cutter soon found herself ready to make her
own concession. Of course, she didn't dispute them : there they
were ; they were unfortunately on record, and nothing was to
be done about them but to — Mamie found it, in truth, at this
point, a little difficult.

" Well, what ? Pretend already to have forgotten them ? "

" Why not, when you've done it in so many other cases ? "

" There are no other cases so bad. One meets them, at any
rate, as they come. Some you can manage, others you can't.
It's no use, you must give them up. They're past patching;
there's nothing to be done with them. There's nothing, accord-
ingly, to be done with Mrs. Medwin but to put her off." And
Lady Wantridge rose to her height.

"Well, you know, I do do things," Mamie quavered with a
smile so strained that it partook of exaltation.

" You help people ? Oh yes, I've known you to do wonders.
But stick," said Lady Wantridge with strong and cheerful
emphasis, " to your Americans ! "

Miss Cutter, gazing, got up. "You don't do justice, Lady
Wantridge, to your own compatriots. Some of them are really
charming. Besides," said Mamie, "working for mine often
strikes me, so far as the interest — the inspiration and excitement,
don't you know ? — go, as rather too easy. You all, as I constantly
have occasion to say, like us so ! "

98 THE BETTER SORT

Her companion frankly weighed it. "Yes; it takes that to
account for your position. I've always thought of you, never-
theless, as keeping, for their benefit, a regular working agency.
They come to you, and you place them. There remains,
I confess," her ladyship went on in the same free spirit, " the
great wonder "

"Of how I first placed my poor little self? Yes," Mamie
bravely conceded, " when / began there was no agency. I just
worked my passage. I didn't even come to you, did I ? You
never noticed me till, as Mrs. Short Stokes says, 'I was 'way,
'way up ! ' Mrs. Medwin," she threw in, " can't get over
it" Then, as her friend looked vague : " Over my social
situation."

" Well, it's no great flattery to you to say," Lady Wantridge
good-humouredly returned, "that she certainly can't hope for
one resembling it." Yet it really seemed to spread there before
them. " You simply made Mrs. Short Stokes."

" In spite of her name ! " Mamie smiled.

"Oh, your names ! In spite of everything."

"Ah, I'm something of an artist." With which, and a
relapse marked by her wistful eyes into the gravity of the matter,
she supremely fixed her friend. She felt how little she minded
betraying at last the extremity of her need, and it was out of this
extremity that her appeal proceeded. " Have I really had your
last word? It means so much to me."

Lady Wantridge came straight to the point. " You mean you
depend on it ? "

"Awfully!"

" Is it all you have ? "

"All. Now."

"But Mrs. Short Stokes and the others — 'rolling,' aren't they?
Don't they pay up?"

"Ah," sighed Mamie, "if it wasn't for them !"

Lady Wantridge perceived. " You've had so much ? "

" I couldn't have gone on."

" Then what do you do with it all ? "

" Oh, most of it goes back to them. There are all sorts, and
it's all help. Some of them have nothing."

"Oh, if you feed the hungry," Lady Wantridge laughed,
"you're indeed in a great way of business. Is Mrs. Medwin"
— her transition was immediate — "really rich?"

" Really. He left her everything."

"So that if I do say 'yes' "

" It will quite set me up."

MRS. MEDWIN 99

" I see — and how much more responsible it makes one ! But
I'd rather myself give you the money."

" Oh ! " Mamie coldly murmured.

"You mean I mayn't suspect your prices? Well, I daresay
I don't ! But I'd rather give you ten pounds."

" Oh ! " Mamie repeated in a tone that sufficiently covered
her prices. The question was in every way larger. " Do you
never forgive?" she reproachfully inquired. The door opened,
however, at the moment she spoke, and Scott Homer presented
himself.

IV

SCOTT HOMER wore exactly, to his sister's eyes, the aspect he
had worn the day before, and it also formed, to her sense, the
great feature of his impartial greeting.

" How d'ye do, Mamie ? How d'ye do, Lady Wantridge ? "

"How d'ye do again ? " Lady Wantridge replied with an
equanimity striking to her hostess. It was as if Scott's own had
been contagious ; it was almost indeed as if she had seen him
before. Had she ever so seen him — before the previous day?
While Miss Cutter put to herself this question her visitor, at all
events, met the one she had previously uttered.

" Ever ' forgive ' ? " this personage echoed in a tone that made
as little account as possible of the interruption. " Dear, yes !
The people I have forgiven ! " She laughed — perhaps a little
nervously; and she was now looking at Scott. The way she
looked at him was precisely what had already had its effect for
his sister. " The people I can ! "

" Can you forgive me ? " asked Scott Homer.

She took it so easily. " But — what ? "

Mamie interposed; she turned directly to her brother.
"Don't try her. Leave it so." She had had an inspiration; it
was the most extraordinary thing in the world. "Don't try
him" — she had turned to their companion. She looked grave,
sad, strange. "Leave it so." Yes, it was a distinct inspira-
tion, which she couldn't have explained, but which had come,
prompted by something she had caught — the extent of the
recognition expressed — in Lady Wantridge's face. It had come
absolutely of a sudden, straight out of the opposition of the
two figures before her— quite as if a concussion had struck a
light. The light was helped by her quickened sense that her
friend's silence on the incident of the day before showed some
sort of consciousness. She looked surprised. " Do you know
my brother ? "

ioo THE BETTER SORT

" Do I know you ? " Lady Wantridge asked of him.

"No, Lady Wantridge," Scott pleasantly confessed, "not one
little mite ! "

" Well, then, if you must go ! " and Mamie offered her a

hand. " But I'll go down with you. Not you I " she launched
at her brother, who immediately effaced himself. His way of
doing so — and he had already done so, as for Lady Wantridge,
in respect to their previous encounter — struck her even at
the moment as an instinctive, if slightly blind, tribute to her
possession of an idea ; and as such, in its celerity, made her so
admire him, and their common wit, that, on the spot, she more
than forgave him his queerness. He was right. He could be
as queer as he liked ! The queerer the better ! It was at the
foot of the stairs, when she had got her guest down, that what
she had assured Mrs. Medwin would come did indeed come.
" Did you meet him here yesterday ? "

" Dear, yes. Isn't he too funny ? "

" Yes," said Mamie gloomily. " He is funny. But had you
ever met him before ? "

"Dear, no!"

" Oh ! "—and Mamie's tone might have meant many things.

Lady Wantridge, however, after all, easily overlooked it. "I
only knew he was one of your odd Americans. That's why,
when I heard yesterday, here, that he was up there awaiting your
return, I didn't let that prevent me. I thought he might be. He
certainly," her ladyship laughed, " is."

"Yes, he's very American," Mamie went on in the same way.

" As you say, we are fond of you ! Good-bye," said Lady
Wantridge.

But Mamie had not half done with her. She felt more and
more — or she hoped at least — that she looked strange. She was,
no doubt, if it came to that, strange. " Lady Wantridge," she
almost convulsively broke out, " I don't know whether you'll
understand me, but I seem to feel that I must act with you — I
don't know what to call it ! — responsibly. He is my brother."

"Surely— and why not?" Lady Wantridge stared. "He's
the image of you ! "

" Thank you ! " — and Mamie was stranger than ever.

" Oh, he's good-looking. He's handsome, my dear. Oddly
— but distinctly ! " Her ladyship was for treating it much as
a joke.

But Mamie, all sombre, would have none of this. She boldly
gave him up. " I think he's awful."

"He is indeed — delightfully. And where do you get your

MRS. MEDWIN 101

ways of saying things ? It isn't anything — and the things aren't
anything. But it's so droll."

"Don't let yourself, all the same," Mamie consistently
pursued, "be carried away by it. The thing can't be done —
simply."

Lady Wantridge wondered. " ' Done simply ' ? "

" Done at all."

" But what can't be ? "

" Why, what you might think — from his pleasantness. What
he spoke of your doing for him."

Lady Wantridge recalled. " Forgiving him ? "

"He asked you if you couldn't. But you can't. It's too
dreadful for me, as so near a relation, to have, loyally — loyally to
you — to say it. But he's impossible."

It was so portentously produced that her ladyship had some-
how to meet it. " What's the matter with him ? "

" I don't know."

"Then what's the matter with you?" Lady Wantridge
inquired.

"It's because I won't know," Mamie — not without dignity —
explained.

"Then /won't either!"

"Precisely. Don't. It's something," Mamie pursued, with
some inconsequence, " that — somewhere or other, at some time
or other — he appears to have done ; something that has made
a difference in his life."

" ' Something ' ? " Lady Wantridge echoed again. " What
kind of thing ? "

Mamie looked up at the light above the door, through which
the London sky was doubly dim. " I haven't the least idea."

" Then what kind of difference ? "

Mamie's gaze was still at the light. "The difference you
see."

Lady Wantridge, rather obligingly, seemed to ask herself what
she saw. " But I don't see any ! It seems, at least," she added,
" such an amusing one ! And he has such nice eyes."

" Oh, dear eyes ! " Mamie conceded ; but with too much sad-
ness, for the moment, about the connections of the subject, to
say more.

It almost forced her companion, after an instant, to proceed.
" Do you mean he can't go home ? "

She weighed her responsibility. "I only make out — more's
the pity !— that he doesn't."

" Is it then something too terrible ? "

102 THE BETTER SORT

She thought again. "I don't know what — for men — is too
terrible."

" Well then, as you don't know what ' is ' for women either —
good-bye ! " her visitor laughed.

It practically wound up the interview; which, however,
terminating thus on a considerable stir of the air, was to give
Miss Cutter, the next few days, the sense of being much blown
about. The degree to which, to begin with, she had been
drawn — or perhaps rather pushed — closer to Scott was marked
in the brief colloquy that, on her friend's departure, she had
with him. He had immediately said it. "You'll see if she
doesn't ask me down ! "

"So soon?"

"Oh, I've known them at places — at Cannes, at Pau, at
Shanghai — to do it sooner still. I always know when they will.
You can't make out they don't love me ! " He spoke almost
plaintively, as if he wished she could.

" Then I don't see why it hasn't done you more good."

" Why, Mamie," he patiently reasoned, " what more good could
it? As I tell you," he explained, "it has just been my life."

" Then why do you come to me for money ? "

"Oh, they don't give me that!" Scott returned.

" So that it only means then, after all, that I, at the best, must
keep you up ? "

He fixed on her the nice eyes that Lady Wantridge admired.
" Do you mean to tell me that already — at this very moment — I
am not distinctly keeping you ? "

She gave him back his look. " Wait till she has asked you,
and then," Mamie added, " decline."

Scott, not too grossly, wondered. " As acting for you ? "

Mamie's next injunction was answer enough. " But before —
yes — call."

He took it in. "Call— but decline. Good."

" The rest," she said, " I leave to you." And she left it, in
fact, with such confidence that for a couple of days she was not
only conscious of no need to give Mrs. Medwin another turn of
the screw, but positively evaded, in her fortitude, the reappearance
of that lady. It was not till the third day that she waited upon
her, finding her, as she had expected, tense.

" Lady Wantridge will ? "

" Yes, though she says she won't."

" She says she won't ? O — oh ! " Mrs. Medwin moaned.

" Sit tight all the same. I have her ! "

" But how ? "

MRS. MEDWIN 103

" Through Scott— whom she wants."

" Your bad brother ! " Mrs. Medwin stared. " What does she
want of him ? "

" To amuse them at Catchmore. Anything for that. And he
would. But he sha'n't!" Mamie declared. "He sha'n't go
unless she comes. She must meet you first — you're my con-
dition."

" O — o — oh ! " Mrs. Medwin's tone was a wonder of hope and
fear. " But doesn't he want to go ? "

" He wants what / want. She draws the line at you. I draw
the line at him"

" But she— doesn't she mind that he's bad ? "

It was so artless that Mamie laughed. " No ; it doesn't touch
her. Besides, perhaps he isn't. It isn't as im you — people seem
not to know. He has settled everything, at all events, by going
to see her. It's before her that he's the thing she will have to
have."

"Have to?"

" For Sundays in the country. A feature — the feature."

" So she has asked him ? "

"Yes; and he has declined."

" For me ? " Mrs. Medwin panted.

" For me," said Mamie, on the doorstep. " But I don't leave
him for long." Her hansom had waited. " She'll come."

Lady Wantridge did come. She met in South Audley Street,
on the fourteenth, at tea, the ladies whom Mamie had named to
her, together with three or four others, and it was rather a master-
stroke for Miss Cutter that, if Mrs. Medwin was modestly present,
Scott Homer was as markedly not. This occasion, however, is a
medal that would take rare casting, as would also, for that matter,
even the minor light and shade, the lower relief, of the pecuniary
transaction that Mrs. Medwin's flushed gratitude scarce awaited
the dispersal of the company munificently to complete. A new
understanding indeed on the spot rebounded from it, the con-
ception of which, in Mamie's mind, had promptly bloomed.
" He sha'n't go now unless he takes you." Then, as her fancy
always moved quicker for her client than her client's own —
" Down with him to Catchmore ! When he goes to amuse them,
you" she comfortably declared, " shall amuse them too." Mrs.
Medwin's response was again rather oddly divided, but she was
sufficiently intelligible when it came to meeting the intimation
that this latter would be an opportunity involving a separate fee.
" Say," Mamie had suggested, " the same."

"Very well; the same."

io4 THE BETTER SORT

The knowledge that it was to be the same had perhaps some-
thing to do, also, with the obliging spirit in which Scott eventually
went. It was all, at the last, rather hurried — a party rapidly got
together for the Grand Duke, who was in England but for the
hour, who had good-naturedly proposed himself, and who liked
his parties small, intimate and funny. This one was of the
smallest, and it was finally judged to conform neither too little
nor too much to the other conditions — after a brief whirlwind of
wires and counterwires, and an iterated waiting of hansoms at
various doors — to include Mrs. Medwin. It was from Catchmore
itself that, snatching a moment on the wondrous Sunday afternoon,
this lady had the harmonious thought of sending the new cheque.
She was in bliss enough, but her scribble none the less intimated
that it was Scott who amused them most. He was the feature.

FLICKERBRIDGE

FRANK GRANGER had arrived from Paris to paint a
portrait — an order given him, as a young compatriot with a
future, whose early work would some day have a price, by a lady
from New York, a friend of his own people and also, as it
happened, of Addie's, the young woman to whom it was publicly
both affirmed and denied that he was engaged. Other young
women in Paris — fellow-members there of the little tight trans-
pontine world of art-study — professed to know that the pair had
been "several times" over so closely contracted. This, however,
was their own affair ; the last phase of the relation, the last time
of the times, had passed into vagueness ; there was perhaps even
an impression that if they were inscrutable to their friends they
were not wholly crystalline to each other and themselves. What
had occurred for Granger, at all events, in connection with the
portrait was that Mrs. Bracken, his intending model, whose
return to America was at hand, had suddenly been called to
London by her husband, occupied there with pressing business,
but had yet desired that her displacement should not interrupt
her sittings. The young man, at her request, had followed her
to England and profited by all she could give him, making shift
with a small studio lent him by a London painter whom he had
known and liked, a few years before, in the French atelier that
then cradled, and that continued to cradle, so many of their
kind.

The British capital was a strange, grey world to him, where
people walked, in more ways than one, by a dim light; but he
was happily of such a turn that the impression, just as it came,
could nowhere ever fail him, and even the worst of these things
was almost as much an occupation — putting it only at that — as
the best. Mrs. Bracken, moreover, passed him on, and while
the darkness ebbed a little in the April days he found himself
consolingly committed to a couple of fresh subjects. This cut
him out work for more than another month, but meanwhile, as

105

106 THE BETTER SORT

he said, he saw a lot — a lot that, with frequency and with much
expression, he wrote about to Addie. She also wrote to her
absent friend, but in briefer snatches, a meagreness to her
reasons for which he had long since assented. She had other
play for her pen, as well as, fortunately, other remuneration ; a
regular correspondence for a "prominent Boston paper," fitful
connections with public sheets perhaps also, in cases, fitful, and
a mind, above all, engrossed at times, to the exclusion of every-
thing else, with the study of the short story. This last was what
she had mainly come out to go into, two or three years after he
had found himself engulfed in the mystery of Carolus. She was
indeed, on her own deep sea, more engulfed than he had ever been,
and he had grown to accept the sense that, for progress too, she
sailed under more canvas. It had not been particularly present
to him till now that he had in the least got on, but the way in
which Addie had — and evidently, still more, would — was the
theme, as it were, of every tongue. She had thirty short stories
out and nine descriptive articles. His three or four portraits
of fat American ladies — they were all fat, all ladies and all
American — were a poor show compared with these triumphs;
especially as Addie had begun to throw out that it was about
time they should go home. It kept perpetually coming up in
Paris, in the transpontine world, that, as the phrase was, America
had grown more interesting since they left. Addie was attentive
to the rumour, and, as full of conscience as she was of taste, of
patriotism as of curiosity, had often put it to him frankly, with
what he, who was of New York, recognised as her New England
emphasis : " I'm not sure, you know, that we do real justice to
our country." Granger felt he would do it on the day — if the
day ever came— he should irrevocably marry her. No other
country could possibly have produced her.

II

BUT meanwhile it befell, in London, that he was stricken with
influenza and with subsequent sorrow. The attack was short
but sharp — had it lasted Addie would certainly have come to his
aid ; most of a blight, really, in its secondary stage. The good
ladies his sitters — the ladies with the frizzled hair, with the
diamond earrings, with the chins tending to the massive —
left for him, at the door of his lodgings, flowers, soup and
love, so that with their assistance he pulled through ; but his
convalescence was slow and his weakness out of proportion to
the muffled shock. He came out, but he went about lame ;

FLICKERBRIDGE 107

it tired him to paint — he felt as if he had been ill for a month.
He strolled in Kensington Gardens when he should have been
at work ; he sat long on penny chairs and helplessly mused and
mooned. Addie desired him to return to Paris, but there were
chances under his hand that he felt he had just wit enough left
not to relinquish. He would have gone for a week to the sea —
he would have gone to Brighton ; but Mrs. Bracken had to be
finished — Mrs. Bracken was so soon to sail. He just managed
to finish her in time — the day before the date fixed for his break-
ing ground on a greater business still, the circumvallation of
Mrs. Dunn. Mrs. Dunn duly waited on him, and he sat down
before her, feeling, however, ere he rose, that he must take a
long breath before the attack. While asking himself that night,
therefore, where he should best replenish his lungs, he received
from Addie, who had had from Mrs. Bracken a poor report of
him, a communication which, besides being of sudden and
startling interest, applied directly to his case.

His friend wrote to him under the lively emotion of having
from one day to another become aware of a new relative, an
ancient cousin, a sequestered gentlewoman, the sole survival of
"the English branch of the family," still resident, at Flicker-
bridge, in the " old family home," and with whom, that he might
immediately betake himself to so auspicious a quarter for change
of air, she had already done what was proper to place him, as
she said, in touch. What came of it all, to be brief, was that
Granger found himself so placed almost as he read : he was in
touch with Miss Wenham of Flickerbridge, to the extent of
being in correspondence with her, before twenty-four hours had
sped. And on the second day he was in the train, settled for
a five-hours' run to the door of this amiable woman, who had
so abruptly and kindly taken him on trust and of whom but
yesterday he had never so much as heard. This was an oddity —
the whole incident was — of which, in the corner of his compart-
ment, as he proceeded, he had time to take the size. But the
surprise, the incongruity, as he felt, could but deepen as he went.
It was a sufficiently queer note, in the light, or the absence of it,
of his late experience, that so complex a product as Addie should
have any simple insular tie ; but it was a queerer note still that
she should have had one so long only to remain unprofitably
unconscious of it. Not to have done something with it, used it,
worked it, talked about it at least, and perhaps even written —
these things, at the rate she moved, represented a loss of oppor-
tunity under which, as he saw her, she was peculiarly formed to
wince. She was at any rate, it was clear, doing something with

io8 THE BETTER SORT

it now } using it, working it, certainly, already talking — and, yes,
quite possibly writing — about it. She was, in short, smartly
making up what she had missed, and he could take such com-
fort from his own action as he had been helped to by the rest of
the facts, succinctly reported from Paris on the very morning of
his start.

It was the singular story of a sharp split — in a good English
house — that dated now from years back. A worthy Briton, of
the best middling stock, had, early in the forties, as a very young
man, in Dresden, whither he had been despatched to qualify in
German for a stool in an uncle's counting-house, met, admired,
wooed and won an American girl, of due attractions, domiciled
at that period with her parents and a sister, who was also attrac-
tive, in the Saxon capital. He had married her, taken her to
England, and there, after some years of harmony and happiness,
lost her. The sister in question had, after her death, come to
him, and to his young child, on a visit, the effect of which,
between the pair, eventually denned itself as a sentiment that
was not to be resisted. The bereaved husband, yielding to a
new attachment and a new response, and finding a new union
thus prescribed, had yet been forced to reckon with the unaccom-
modating law of the land. Encompassed with frowns in his own
country, however, marriages of this particular type were wreathed
in smiles in his sister's-in-law, so that his remedy was not for-
bidden. Choosing between two allegiances he had let the one
go that seemed the least close, and had, in brief, transplanted
his possibilities to an easier air. The knot was tied for the
couple in New York, where, to protect the legitimacy of such
other children as might come to them, they settled and pros-
pered. Children came, and one of the daughters, growing up
and marrying in her turn, was, if Frank rightly followed, the
mother of his own Addie, who had been deprived of the know-
ledge of her indeed, in childhood, by death, and been brought
up, though without undue tension, by a stepmother — a character
thus, in the connection, repeated.

The breach produced in England by the invidious action, as it
was there held, of the girl's grandfather, had not failed to widen
— all the more that nothing had been done on the American side
to close it. Frigidity had settled, and hostility had only been
arrested by indifference. Darkness, therefore, had fortunately
supervened, and a cousinship completely divided. On either
side of the impassable gulf, of the impenetrable curtain, each
branch had put forth its leaves — a foliage wanting, in the
American quarter, it was distinct enough to Granger, in no sign

FLICKERBRIDGE 109

or symptom of climate and environment. The graft in New
York had taken, and Addie was a vivid, an unmistakeable flower.
At Flickerbridge, or wherever, on the other hand, strange to say,
the parent stem had had a fortune comparatively meagre. For-
tune, it was true, in the vulgarest sense, had attended neither
party. Addie's immediate belongings were as poor as they were
numerous, and he gathered that Miss Wenham's pretensions to
wealth were not so marked as to expose the claim of kinship to
the imputation of motive. To this lady's single identity, at all
events, the original stock had dwindled, and our young man was
properly warned that he would find her shy and solitary. What
was singular was that, in these conditions, she should desire, she
should endure, to receive him. But that was all another story,
lucid enough when mastered. He kept Addie's letters, excep-
tionally copious, in his lap; he conned them at intervals; he
held the threads.

He looked out between whiles at the pleasant English land,
an April aquarelle washed in with wondrous breadth. He knew
the French thing, he knew the American, but he had known
nothing of this. He saw it already as the remarkable Miss
Wenham's setting. The doctor's daughter at Flickerbridge, with
nippers on her nose, a palette on her thumb and innocence in
her heart, had been the miraculous link. She had become
aware, even there, in our world of wonders, that the current
fashion for young women so equipped was to enter the Parisian
lists. Addie had accordingly chanced upon her, on the slopes
of Montparnasse, as one of the English girls in one of the
thorough-going sets. They had met in some easy collocation
and had fallen upon common ground; after which the young
woman, restored to Flickerbridge for an interlude and retailing
there her adventures and impressions, had mentioned to Miss
Wenham, who had known and protected her from babyhood,
that that lady's own name of Adelaide was, as well as the sur-
name conjoined with it, borne, to her knowledge, in Paris, by an
extraordinary American specimen. She had then recrossed the
Channel with a wonderful message, a courteous challenge, to her
friend's duplicate, who had in turn granted through her every
satisfaction. The duplicate had, in other words, bravely let
Miss Wenham know exactly who she was. Miss Wenham, in
whose personal tradition the flame of resentment appeared to
have been reduced by time to the palest ashes — for whom,
indeed, the story of the great schism was now but a legend only
needing a little less dimness to make it romantic — Miss Wenham
had promptly responded by a letter fragrant with the hope that

no THE BETTER SORT

old threads might be taken up. It was a relationship that they
must puzzle out together, and she had earnestly sounded the
other party to it on the subject of a possible visit. Addie had
met her with a definite promise; she would come soon, she
would come when free, she would come in July ; but meanwhile
she sent her deputy. Frank asked himself by what name she
had described, by what character introduced him to Flicker-
bridge. He felt mainly, on the whole, as if he were going there
to find out if he were engaged to her. He was at sea, really,
now, as to which of the various views Addie herself took of it.
To Miss Wenham she must definitely have taken one, and
perhaps Miss Wenham would reveal it. This expectation was
really his excuse for a possible indiscretion.

Ill

HE was indeed to learn on arrival to what he had been committed;
but that was for a while so much a part of his first general impres-
sion that the fact took time to detach itself, the first general
impression demanding verily all his faculties of response. He
almost felt, for a day or two, the victim of a practical joke, a gross
abuse of confidence. He had presented himself with the moderate
amount of flutter involved in a sense of due preparation ; but he
had then found that, however primed with prefaces and prompted
with hints, he had not been prepared at all. How could he be,
he asked himself, for anything so foreign to his experience, so alien
to his proper world, so little to be preconceived in the sharp north
light of the newest impressionism, and yet so recognised, after all,
really, in the event, so noted and tasted and assimilated ? It was
a case he would scarce have known how to describe — could doubt-
less have described best with a full, clean brush, supplemented by
a play of gesture ; for it was always his habit to see an occasion,
of whatever kind, primarily as a picture, so that he might get it,
as he was wont to say, so that he might keep it, well together. He
had been treated of a sudden, in this adventure, to one of the
sweetest, fairest, coolest impressions of his life — one, moreover,
visibly, from the start, complete and homogeneous. Oh, it was
there, if that was all one wanted of a thing ! It was so " there "
that, as had befallen him in Italy, in Spain, confronted at last, in
dusky side-chapel or rich museum, with great things dreamed of
or with greater ones unexpectedly presented, he had held his
breath for fear of breaking the spell ; had almost, from the quick
impulse to respect, to prolong, lowered his voice and moved on
tiptoe. Supreme beauty suddenly revealed is apt to strike us as a

FLICKERBRIDGE in

possible illusion, playing with our desire — instant freedom with it
to strike us as a possible rashness.

This fortunately, however— and the more so as his freedom for
the time quite left him — didn't prevent his hostess, the evening of
his advent and while the vision was new, from being exactly as
queer and rare and unpayable, as improbable, as impossible, as
delightful at dinner at eight (she appeared to keep these immense
hours) as she had overwhelmingly been at tea at five. She was
in the most natural way in the world one of the oddest apparitions,
but that the particular means to such an end could be natural was
an inference difficult to make. He failed in fact to make it for
a couple of days ; but then — though then only — he made it with
confidence. By this time indeed he was sure of everything, in-
cluding, luckily, himself. If we compare his impression, with
slight extravagance, to some of the greatest he had ever received,
this is simply because the image before him was so rounded and
stamped. It expressed with pure perfection, it exhausted its
character. It was so absolutely and so unconsciously what it was.
He had been floated by the strangest of chances out of the
rushing stream into a clear, still backwater — a deep and quiet
pool in which objects were sharply mirrored. He had hitherto
in life known nothing that was old except a few statues and
pictures; but here everything was old, was immemorial, and
nothing so much so as the very freshness itself. Vaguely to
have supposed there were such nooks in the world had done
little enough, he now saw, to temper the glare of their opposites.
It was the fine touches that counted, and these had to be seen
to be believed.

Miss Wenham, fifty-five years of age, and unappeasably timid,
unaccountably strange, had, on her reduced scale, an almost
Gothic grotesqueness ; but the final effect of one's sense of it was
an amenity that accompanied one's steps like wafted gratitude.
More flurried, more spasmodic, more apologetic, more completely
at a loss at one moment and more precipitately abounding at
another, he had never before in all his days seen any maiden lady;
yet for no maiden lady he had ever seen had he so promptly con-
ceived a private enthusiasm. Her eyes protruded, her chin receded
and her nose carried on in conversation a queer little independent
motion. She wore on the top of her head an upright circular cap
that made her resemble a caryatid disburdened, and on other
parts of her person strange combinations of colours, stuffs, shapes,
of metal, mineral and plant. The tones of her voice rose and
fell, her facial convulsions, whether tending — one could scarce
make out — to expression or repression, succeeded each other by

ii2 THE BETTER SORT

a law of their own ; she was embarrassed at nothing and at every-
thing, frightened at everything and at nothing, and she approached
objects, subjects, the simplest questions and answers and the
whole material of intercourse, either with the indirectness of terror
or with the violence of despair. These things, none the less, her
refinements of oddity and intensities of custom, her suggestion at
once of conventions and simplicities, of ease and of agony, her
roundabout, retarded suggestions and perceptions, still permitted
her to strike her guest as irresistibly charming. He didn't know
what to call it ; she was a fruit of time. She had a queer distinc-
tion. She had been expensively produced, and there would be a
good deal more of her to come.

The result of the whole quality of her welcome, at any rate,
was that the first evening, in his room, before going to bed, he
relieved his mind in a letter to Addie, which, if space allowed us
to embody it in our text, would usefully perform the office of a
"plate." It would enable us to present ourselves as profusely
illustrated. But the process of reproduction, as we say, costs.
He wished his friend to know how grandly their affair turned out.
She had put him in the way of something absolutely special — an
old house untouched, untouchable, indescribable, an old corner
such as one didn't believe existed, and the holy calm of which
made the chatter of studios, the smell of paint, the slang of critics,
the whole sense and sound of Paris, come back as so many signs
of a huge monkey- cage. He moved about, restless, while he
wrote ; he lighted cigarettes and, nervous and suddenly scrupulous,
put them out again ; the night was mild and one of the windows
of his large high room, which stood over the garden, was up. He
lost himself in the things about him, in the type of the room, the
last century with not a chair moved, not a point stretched. He
hung over the objects and ornaments, blissfully few and adorably
good, perfect pieces all, and never one, for a change, French. The
scene was as rare as some fine old print with the best bits down
in the corners. Old books and old pictures, allusions remembered
and aspects conjectured, reappeared to him ; he knew now what
anxious islanders had been trying for in their backward hunt for
the homely. But the homely at Flickerbridge was all style, even
as style at the same time was mere honesty. The larger, the
smaller past — he scarce knew which to call it — was at all events
so hushed to sleep round him as he wrote that he had almost a
bad conscience about having come. How one might love it, but
how one might spoil it ! To look at it too hard was positively to
make it conscious, and to make it conscious was positively to
wake it up. Its only safety, of a truth, was to be left still to sleep

FLICKERBRIDGE 113

— to sleep in its large, fair chambers, and under its high, clean
canopies.

He added thus restlessly a line to his letter, maundered round
the room again, noted and fingered something else, and then,
dropping on the old flowered sofa, sustained by the tight cubes of
its cushions, yielded afresh to the cigarette, hesitated, stared, wrote
a few words more. He wanted Addie to know, that was what he
most felt, unless he perhaps felt more how much she herself would
want to. Yes, what he supremely saw was all that Addie would
make of it. Up to his neck in it there he fairly turned cold at
the sense of suppressed opportunity, of the outrage of privation,
that his correspondent would retrospectively and, as he even
divined with a vague shudder, almost vindictively nurse. Well,
what had happened was that the acquaintance had been kept for
her, like a packet enveloped and sealed for delivery, till her atten-
tion was free. He saw her there, heard her and felt her — felt how
she would feel and how she would, as she usually said, " rave."
Some of her young compatriots called it "yell," and in the
reference itself, alas ! illustrated their meaning. She would
understand the place, at any rate, down to the ground ; there
wasn't the slightest doubt of that. Her sense of it would be
exactly like his own, and he could see, in anticipation, just the
terms of recognition and rapture in which she would abound.
He knew just what she would call quaint, just what she would call
bland, just what she would call weird, just what she would call
wild. She would take it all in with an intelligence much more
fitted than his own, in fact, to deal with what he supposed he
must regard as its literary relations. She would have read the
obsolete, long-winded memoirs and novels that both the figures
and the setting ought clearly to remind one of; she would know
about the past generations — the lumbering county magnates and
their turbaned wives and round-eyed daughters, who, in other
days, had treated the ruddy, sturdy, tradeless town, the solid
square houses and wide, walled gardens, the streets to-day all
grass and gossip, as the scene of a local " season." She would
have warrant for the assemblies, dinners, deep potations ; for the
smoked sconces in the dusky parlours; for the long, muddy century
of family coaches, "holsters," highwaymen. She would put a
finger, in short, just as he had done, on the vital spot— the rich
humility of the whole thing, the fact that neither Flickerbridge in
general nor Miss Wenham in particular, nor anything nor anyone
concerned, had a suspicion of their character and their merit.
Addie and he would have to come to let in light.

He let it in then, little by little, before going to bed, through the

ii4 THE BETTER SORT

eight or ten pages he addressed to her ; assured her that it was
the happiest case in the world, a little picture — yet full of "style"
too — absolutely composed and transmitted, with tradition, and
tradition only, in every stroke, tradition still noiselessly breathing
and visibly flushing, marking strange hours in the tall mahogany
clocks that were never wound up and that yet audibly ticked on.
All the elements, he was sure he should see, would hang together
with a charm, presenting his hostess — a strange iridescent fish for
the glazed exposure of an aquarium — as floating in her native
medium. He left his letter open on the table, but, looking it
over next morning, felt of a sudden indisposed to send it. He
would keep it to add more, for there would be more to know ;
yet when three days had elapsed he had still not sent it. He
sent instead, after delay, a much briefer report, which he was
moved to make different and, for some reason, less vivid.
Meanwhile he learned from Miss Wenham how Addie had
introduced him. It took time to arrive with her at that point,
but after the Rubicon was crossed they went far afield.

IV

"On yes, she said you were engaged. That was why — since I
had broken out so — she thought I would like to see you ; as I
assure you I've been so delighted to. But arerit you?" the
good lady asked as if she saw in his face some ground for
doubt.

"Assuredly — if she says so. It may seem very odd to you,
but I haven't known, and yet I've felt that, being nothing whatever
to you directly, I need some warrant for consenting thus to be
thrust on you. We were" the young man explained, "engaged
a year ago ; but since then (if you don't mind my telling you
such things ; I feel now as if I could tell you anything !) I
haven't quite known how I stand. It hasn't seemed that we were
in a position to marry. Things are better now, but I haven't
quite known how she would see them. They were so bad six
months ago that I understood her, I thought, as breaking off. I
haven't broken ; I've only accepted, for the time — because men
must be easy with women — being treated as ' the best of friends.'
Well, I try to be. I wouldn't have come here if I hadn't been.
I thought it would be charming for her to know you — when I
heard from her the extraordinary way you had dawned upon her,
and charming therefore if I could help her to it. And if I'm
helping you to know her" he went on, "isn't that charming
too?"

FLICKERBRIDGE 115

" Oh, I so want to ! " Miss Wenham murmured, in her
unpractical, impersonal way. " You're so different!" she wistfully
declared.

" It's you, if I may respectfully, ecstatically say so, who are
different. That's the point of it all. I'm not sure that anything
so terrible really ought to happen to you as to know us."

" Well," said Miss Wenham, " I do know you a little, by this
time, don't I? And I don't find it terrible. It's a delightful
change for me."

" Oh, I'm not sure you ought to have a delightful change ! n

" Why not— if you do ? "

" Ah, I can bear it. I'm not sure that you can. I'm too bad
to spoil — I am spoiled. I'm nobody, in short; I'm nothing.
I've no type. You're all type. It has taken long, delicious
years of security and monotony to produce you. You fit your
frame with a perfection only equalled by the perfection with
which your frame fits you. So this admirable old house, all
time-softened white within and time-faded red without, so every-
thing that surrounds you here and that has, by some extraordinary
mercy, escaped the inevitable fate of exploitation : so it all, I say,
is the sort of thing that, if it were the least bit to fall to pieces,
could never, ah, never more, be put together again. I have, dear
Miss \Venhan," Granger went on, happy himself in his extravagance,
which was yet all sincere, and happier still in her deep, but alto-
gether pleased, mystification — " I've found, do you know, just the
thing one has ever heard of that you most resemble. You're the
Sleeping Beauty in the wood."

He still had no compunction when he heard her bewilderedly
sigh : " Oh, you're too delightfully droll ! "

" No, I only put things just as they are, and as I've also learned
a little, thank heaven, to see them — which isn't, I quite agree
with you, at all what anyone does. You're in the deep doze of
the spell that has held you for long years, and it would be a
sharne, a crime, to wake you up. Indeed I already feel, with a
thousand scruples, that I'm giving you the fatal shake. I say it
even though it makes me sound a little as if I thought myself the
fairy prince."

She gazed at him with her queerest, kindest look, which he was
getting used to, in spite of a faint fear, at the back of his head,
of the strange things that sometimes occurred when lonely ladies,
however mature, began to look at interesting young men from
over the seas as if the young men desired to flirt. "It's so
wonderful," she said, " that you should be so very odd and yet so
very good-natured." Well, it all came to the same thing — it was

Ii6 THE BETTER SORT

so wonderful that she should be so simple and yet so little of a
bore. He accepted with gratitude the theory of his languor —
which moreover was real enough and partly perhaps why he was
so sensitive ; he let himself go as a convalescent, let her insist on
the weakness that always remained after fever. It helped him to
gain time, to preserve the spell even while he talked of breaking
it ; saw him through slow strolls and soft sessions, long gossips,
fitful, hopeless questions — there was so much more to tell than,
by any contortion, she could — and explanations addressed gallantly
and patiently to her understanding, but not, by good fortune,
really reaching it. They were perfectly at cross-purposes, and it
was all the better, and they wandered together in the silver haze
with all communication blurred.

When they sat in the sun in her formal garden he was quite
aware that the tenderest consideration failed to disguise his
treating her as the most exquisite of curiosities. The term of
comparison most present to him was that of some obsolete
musical instrument. The old-time order of her mind and her
air had the stillness of a painted spinnet that was duly dusted,
gently rubbed, but never tuned nor played on. Her opinions
were like dried roseleaves ; her attitudes like British sculpture ;
her voice was what he imagined of the possible tone of the old
gilded, silver-stringed harp in one of the corners of the drawing-
room. The lonely little decencies and modest dignities of her
life, the fine grain of its conservatism, the innocence of its
ignorance, all its monotony of stupidity and salubrity, its cold
dulness and dim brightness, were there before him. Meanwhile,
within him, strange things took place. It was literally true that
his impression began again, after a lull, to make him nervous and
anxious, and for reasons peculiarly confused, almost grotesquely
mingled, or at least comically sharp. He was distinctly an
agitation and a new taste — that he could see ; and he saw quite
as much therefore the excitement she already drew from the
vision of Addie, an image intensified by the sense of closer
kinship and presented to her, clearly, with various erratic
enhancements, by her friend the doctor's daughter. At the end
of a few days he said to her : " Do you know she wants to come
without waiting any longer? She wants to come while I'm here.
I received this morning her letter proposing it, but I've been
thinking it over and have waited to speak to you. The thing is,
you see, that if she writes to you proposing it "

" Oh, I shall be so particularly glad ! "

FLICKERBRIDGE 117

THEY were, as usual, in the garden, and it had not yet been so
present to him that if he were only a happy cad there would be a
good way to protect her. As she wouldn't hear of his being yet
beyond precautions she had gone into the house for a particular
shawl that was just the thing for his knees, and, blinking in the
watery sunshine, had come back with it across the fine little lawn.
He was neither fatuous nor asinine, but he had almost to put it to
himself as a small task to resist the sense of his absurd advantage
with her. It filled him with horror and awkwardness, made him
think of he didn't know what, recalled something of Maupassant's
— the smitten " Miss Harriet " and her tragic fate. There was a
preposterous possibility — yes, he held the strings quite in his
hands — of keeping the treasure for himself. That was the art of
life — what the real artist would consistently do. He would close
the door on his impression, treat it as a private museum. He
would see that he could lounge and linger there, live with wonder-
ful things there, lie up there to rest and refit. For himself he was
sure that after a little he should be able to paint there — do things
in a key he had never thought of before. When she brought him
the rug he took it from her and made her sit down on the bench
and resume her knitting ; then, passing behind her with a laugh,
he placed it over her own shoulders ; after which he moved to and
fro before her, his hands in his pockets and his cigarette in his
teeth. He was ashamed of the cigarette — a villainous false note ;
but she allowed, liked, begged him to smoke, and what he said to
her on it, in one of the pleasantries she benevolently missed, was
that he did so for fear of doing worse. That only showed that
the end was really in sight. " I dare say it will strike you as
quite awful, what I'm going to say to you, but I can't help it. I
speak out of the depths of my respect for you. It will seem to
you horrid disloyalty to poor Addie. Yes — there we are ; there
/ am, at least, in my naked monstrosity." He stopped and
looked at her till she might have been almost frightened. " Don't
let her come. Tell her not to. I've tried to prevent it, but she
suspects."

The poor woman wondered. " Suspects ? "

"Well, I drew it, in writing to her, on reflection, as mild as I
could — having been visited, in the watches of the night, by the
instinct ot what might happen. Something told me to keep back
my first letter — in which, under the first impression, I myself
rashly * raved ' ; and I concocted instead of it an insincere and
guarded report. But guarded as I was I clearly didn't keep you

ii8 THE BETTER SORT

' down/ as we say, enough. The wonder of your colour — daub you
over with grey as I might — must have come through and told the
tale. She scents battle from afar — by which I mean she scents
' quaintness.' But keep her off. It's hideous, what I'm saying —
but I owe it to you. I owe it to the world. She'll kill you."

" You mean I shan't get on with her ? "

" Oh, fatally ! See how / have. She's intelligent, remarkably
pretty, remarkably good. And she'll adore you."

"Well then?"

" Why, that will be just how she'll do for you."

" Oh, I can hold my own ! " said Miss Wenham with the head-
shake of a horse making his sleigh-bells rattle in frosty air.

" Ah, but you can't hold hers ! She'll rave about you. She'll
write about you. You're Niagara before the first white traveller
— and you know, or rather you can't know, what Niagara became
after that gentleman. Addie will have discovered Niagara. She
will understand you in perfection ; she will feel you down to the
ground ; not a delicate shade of you will she lose or let anyone
else lose. You'll be too weird for words, but the words will
nevertheless come. You'll be too exactly the real thing and to
be left too utterly just as you are, and all Addie's friends and all
Addie's editors and contributors and readers will cross the
Atlantic and flock to Flickerbridge, so, unanimously, universally,
vociferously, to leave you. You'll be in the magazines with
illustrations; you'll be in the papers with headings; you'll be
everywhere with everything. You don't understand — you think
you do, but you don't. Heaven forbid you should understand !
That's just your beauty — your * sleeping' beauty. But you
needn't. You can take me on trust. Don't have her. Say, as a
pretext, as a reason, anything in the world you like. Lie to her
— scare her away. I'll go away and give you up — I'll sacrifice
everything myself." Granger pursued his exhortation, convincing
himself more and more. " If I saw my way out, my way com-
pletely through, / would pile up some fabric of fiction for her — I
should only want to be sure of its not tumbling down. One
would have, you see, to keep the thing up. But I would throw
dust in her eyes. I would tell her that you don't do at all — that
you're not, in fact, a desirable acquaintance. I'd tell her you're
vulgar, improper, scandalous; I'd tell her you're mercenary,
designing, dangerous ; I'd tell her the only safe course is im-
mediately to let you drop. I would thus surround you with an
impenetrable legend of conscientious misrepresentation, a circle
of pious fraud, and all the while privately keep you for myself."

She had listened to him as if he were a band of music and she

FLICKERBRIDGE 119

a small shy garden-party. " I shouldn't like you to go away. I
shouldn't in the least like you not to come again."

"Ah, there it is!" he replied. "How can I come again if
Addie ruins you ? "

" But how will she ruin me — even if she does what you say ?
I know I'm too old to change and really much too queer to please
in any of the extraordinary ways you speak of. If it's a question
of quizzing me I don't think my cousin, or anyone else, will have
quite the hand for it that you seem to have. So that if you
haven't ruined me ! "

" But I have— that's just the point ! " Granger insisted. " I've
undermined you at least. I've left, after all, terribly little for
Addie to do."

She laughed in clear tones. "Well, then, we'll admit that
you've done everything but frighten me."

He looked at her with surpassing gloom. " No — that again is
one of the most dreadful features. You'll positively like it —
what's to come. You'll be caught up in a chariot of fire like the
prophet — wasn't there, was there, one? — of old. That's exactly
why — if one could but have done it — you would have been to be
kept ignorant and helpless. There's something or other in Latin
that says that it's the finest things that change the most easily for
the worse. You already enjoy your dishonour and revel in your
shame. It's too late — you're lost ! "

VI

ALL this was as pleasant a manner of passing the time as any
other, for it didn't prevent his old-world corner from closing round
him more entirely, nor stand in the way of his making out, from
day to day, some new source, as well as some new effect, of its
virtue. He was really scared at moments at some of the liberties
he took in talk — at finding himself so familiar; for the great note
of the place was just that a certain modern ease had never crossed
its threshold, that quick intimacies and quick oblivions were a
stranger to its air. It had known, in all its days, no rude, no loud
invasion. Serenely unconscious of most contemporary things, it
had been so of nothing so much as of the diffused social practice
of running in and out. Granger held his breath, on occasions, to
think how Addie would run. There were moments when, for
some reason, more than at others, he heard her step on the stair-
case and her cry in the hall. If he played freely, none the less,
with the idea with which we have shown him as occupied, it was
not that in every measurable way he didn't sacrifice, to the utmost,

120 THE BETTER SORT

to stillness. He only hovered, ever so lightly, to take up again
his thread. She wouldn't hear of his leaving her, of his being in
the least fit again, as she said, to travel. She spoke of the
journey to London — which was in fact a matter of many hours —
as an experiment fraught with lurking complications. He added
then day to day, yet only hereby, as he reminded her, giving
other complications a larger chance to multiply. He kept it
before her, when there was nothing else to do, that she must
consider ; after which he had his times of fear that she perhaps
really would make for him this sacrifice.

He knew that she had written again to Paris, and knew that
he must himself again write — a situation abounding for each in
the elements of a quandary. If he stayed so long, why then
he wasn't better, and if he wasn't better Addie might take it

into her head ! They must make it clear that he was better,

so that, suspicious, alarmed at what was kept from her, she
shouldn't suddenly present herself to nurse him. If he was
better, however, why did he stay so long? If he stayed only
for the attraction the sense of the attraction might be contagious.
This was what finally grew clearest for him, so that he had for
his mild disciple hours of still sharper prophecy. It consorted
with his fancy to represent to her that their young friend had
been by this time unsparingly warned; but nothing could be
plainer than that this was ineffectual so long as he himself resisted
the ordeal. To plead that he remained because he was too weak
to move was only to throw themselves back on the other horn
of their dilemma. If he was too weak to move Addie would
bring him her strength — of which, when she got there, she
would give them specimens enough. One morning he broke
out at breakfast with an intimate conviction. They would see
that she was actually starting — they would receive a wire by
noon. They didn't receive it, but by his theory the portent
was only the stronger. It had, moreover, its grave as well as
its gay side, for Granger's paradox and pleasantry were only the
most convenient way for him of saying what he felt. He literally
heard the knell sound, and in expressing this to Miss Wenham
with the conversational freedom that seemed best to pay his way
he the more vividly faced the contingency. He could never
return, and though he announced it with a despair that did
what might be to make it pass as a joke, he saw that, whether
or no she at last understood, she quite at last believed him.
On this, to his knowledge, she wrote again to Addie, and the
contents of her letter excited his curiosity. But that sentiment,
though not assuaged, quite dropped when, the day after, in the

FLICKERBRIDGE 121

evening, she let him know that she had had, an hour before, a
telegram.

"She comes Thursday."

He showed not the least surprise. It was the deep calm of
the fatalist. It had to be. " I must leave you then to-morrow."

She looked, on this, as he had never seen her ; it would have
been hard to say whether what was in hejr face was the last
failure to follow or the first effort to meet. " And really not to
come back ? "

"Never, never, dear lady. Why should I come back? You
can never be again what you have been. I shall have seen the
last of you."

" Oh ! " she touchingly urged.

"Yes, for I should next find you simply brought to self-
consciousness. You'll be exactly what you are, I charitably
admit — nothing more or less, nothing different. But you'll be
it all in a different way. We live in an age of prodigious
machinery, all organised to a single end. That end is publicity
— a publicity as ferocious as the appetite of a cannibal. The
thing therefore is not to have any illusions — fondly to flatter
yourself, in a muddled moment, that the cannibal will spare you.
He spares nobody. He spares nothing. It will be all right.
You'll have a lovely time. You'll be only just a public char-
acter— blown about the world for all you are and proclaimed for
all you are on the housetops. It will be for that, mind, I quite
recognise — because Addie is superior — as well as for all you
aren't. So good-bye."

He remained, however, till the next day, and noted at intervals
the different stages of their friend's journey ; the hour, this time,
she would really have started, the hour she would reach Dover,
the hour she would get to town, where she would alight at
Mrs. Dunn's. Perhaps she would bring Mrs. Dunn, for Mrs.
Dunn would swell the chorus. At the last, on the morrow, as
if in anticipation of this, stillness settled between them; he
became as silent as his hostess. But before he went she brought
out, shyly and anxiously, as an appeal, the question that, for
hours, had clearly been giving her thought. " Do you meet her
then to-night in London ? "

" Dear, no. In what position am I, alas ! to do that ? When
can I ever meet her again ? " He had turned it all over. " If
I could meet Addie after this, you know, I could meet you. And
if I do meet Addie," he lucidly pursued, " what will happen, by
the same stroke, is that I shall meet you. And that's just what
I've explained to you that I dread."

122 THE BETTER SORT

" You mean that she and I will be inseparable ? "

He hesitated. "I mean that she'll tell me all about you.
I can hear her, and her ravings, now."

She gave again— and it was infinitely sad — her little whinnying
laugh. " Oh, but if what you say is true, you'll know."

" Ah, but Addie won't ! Won't, I mean, know that / know—
or at least won't believe it. Won't believe that anyone knows.
Such," he added, with a strange, smothered sigh, "is Addie.
Do you know," he wound up, "that what, after all, has most
definitely happened is that you've made me see her as I've never
done before ? "

She blinked and gasped, she wondered and despaired. " Oh,
no, it will be you. I've had nothing to do with it. Everything's
all you!"

But for all it mattered now ! " You'll see," he said, " that she's
charming. I shall go, for to-night, to Oxford. I shall almost
cross her on the way."

" Then, if she's charming, what am I to tell her from you in
explanation of such strange behaviour as your flying away just as
she arrives ? "

"Ah, you needn't mind about that — you needn't tell her
anything."

She fixed him as if as never again. "It's none of my
business, of course I feel; but isn't it a little cruel if you're
engaged ? "

Granger gave a laugh almost as odd as one of her own. " Oh,
you've cost me that ! " and he put out his hand to her.

She wondered while she took it. " Cost you ? "

" We're not engaged. Good-bye."

THE STORY IN IT

i

THE weather had turned so much worse that the rest of the
day was certainly lost. The wind had risen and the storm
gathered force ; they gave from time to time a thump at the firm
windows and dashed even against those protected by the verandah
their vicious splotches of rain. Beyond the lawn, beyond the
cliff, the great wet brush of the sky dipped deep into the sea.
But the lawn, already vivid with the touch of May, showed a
violence of watered green; the budding shrubs and trees re-
peated the note as they tossed their thick masses, and the cold,
troubled light, filling the pretty drawing-room, marked the spring
afternoon as sufficiently young. The two ladies seated there
in silence could pursue without difficulty — as well as, clearly,
without interruption — their respective tasks; a confidence ex-
pressed, when the noise of the wind allowed it to be heard, by
the sharp scratch of Mrs. Dyott's pen at the table where she was
busy with letters.

Her visitor, settled on a small sofa that, with a palm-tree, a
screen, a stool, a stand, a bowl of flowers and three photographs
in silver frames, had been arranged near the light wood -fire
as a choice "corner" — Maud Blessingbourne, her guest, turned
audibly, though at intervals neither brief nor regular, the leaves
of a book covered in lemon-coloured paper and not yet despoiled
of a certain fresh crispness. This effect of the volume, for the
eye, would have made it, as presumably the newest French
novel — and evidently, from the attitude of the reader, "good" —
consort happily with the special tone of the room, a consistent
air of selection and suppression, one of the finer aesthetic
evolutions. If Mrs. Dyott was fond of ancient French furniture,
and distinctly difficult about it, her inmates could be fond — with
whatever critical cocks of charming dark-braided heads over
slender sloping shoulders — of modern French authors. Nothing
had passed for half an hour — nothing, at least, to be exact, but
that each of the companions occasionally and covertly intermitted
her pursuit in such a manner as to ascertain the degree of absorp-

123

I24 THE BETTER SORT

tion of the other without turning round. What their silence was
charged with, therefore, was not only a sense of the weather, but
a sense, so to speak, of its 'own nature. Maud Blessingbourne,
when she lowered her book into her lap, closed her eyes with
a conscious patience that seemed to say she waited ; but it was
nevertheless she who at last made the movement representing
a snap of their tension. She got up and stood by the fire, into
which she looked a minute ; then came round and approached
the window as if to see what was really going on. At this Mrs.
Dyott wrote with refreshed intensity. Her little pile of letters had
grown, and if a look of determination was compatible with her
fair and slightly faded beauty, the habit of attending to her
business could always keep pace with any excursion of her
thought. Yet she was the first who spoke.

" I trust your book has been interesting."

"Well enough; a little mild."

A louder throb of the tempest had blurred the sound of the
words. "A little wild?"

" Dear, no — timid and tame ; unless I've quite lost my sense."

"Perhaps you have," Mrs. Dyott placidly suggested — "reading
so many."

Her companion made a motion of feigned despair. " Ah, you
take away my courage for going to my room, as I was just
meaning to, for another."

" Another French one ? "

" I'm afraid."

" Do you carry them by the dozen "

" Into innocent British homes ? " Maud tried to remember.
" I believe I brought three — seeing them in a shop window as
I passed through town. It never rains but it pours ! But I've
already read two."

" And are they the only ones you do read ? "

" French ones ? " Maud considered. " Oh, no. D'Annunzio."

" And what's that ? " Mrs. Dyott asked as she affixed a stamp.

" Oh, you dear thing ! " Her friend was amused, yet almost
showed pity. " I know you don't read," Maud went on ; " but
why should you ? You live ! "

"Yes — wretchedly enough," Mrs. Dyott returned, getting her
letters together. She left her place, holding them as a neat,
achieved handful, and came over to the fire, while Mrs. Blessing-
bourne turned once more to the window, where she was met
by another flurry.

Maud spoke then as if moved only by the elements. "Do
you expect him through all this ? "

THE STORY IN IT 125

Mrs. Dyott just waited, and it had the effect, indescribably,
of making everything that had gone before seem to have led up
to the question. This effect was even deepened by the way she
then said, " Whom do you mean ? "

"Why, I thought you mentioned at luncheon that Colonel
Voyt was to walk over. Surely he can't."

" Do you care very much ? " Mrs. Dyott asked.

Her friend now hesitated. " It depends on what you call
* much.' If you mean should I like to see him — then certainly."

" Well, my dear, I think he understands you're here."

" So that as he evidently isn't coming," Maud laughed, " it's
particularly flattering ! Or rather," she added, giving up the
prospect again, " it would be, I think, quite extraordinarily
flattering if he did. Except that, of course," she subjoined,
" he might come partly for you."

" * Partly ' is charming. Thank you for * partly.' If you are
going upstairs, will you kindly," Mrs. Dyott pursued, "put these
into the box as you pass ? "

The younger woman, taking the little pile of letters, con-
sidered them with envy. "Nine! You are good. You're
always a living reproach ! "

Mrs. Dyott gave a sigh. " I don't do it on purpose. The
only thing, this afternoon," she went on, reverting to the other
question, " would be their not having come down."

" And as to that you don't know."

" No — I don't know." But she caught even as she spoke
a rat-tat-tat of the knocker, which struck her as a sign. "Ah,
there ! "

" Then I go." And Maud whisked out.

Mrs. Dyott, left alone, moved with an air of selection to the
window, and it was as so stationed, gazing out at the wild
weather, that the visitor, whose delay to appear spoke of the
wiping of boots and the disposal of drenched mackintosh and
cap, finally found her. He was tall, lean, fine, with little in him,
on the whole, to confirm the titular in the " Colonel Voyt " by
which he was announced. But he had left the army, and his
reputation for gallantry mainly depended now on his fighting
Liberalism in the House of Commons. Even these facts, how-
ever, his aspect scantly matched ; partly, no doubt, because he
looked, as was usually said, un-English. His black hair,
cropped close, was lightly powdered with silver, and his dense
glossy beard, that of an emir or a caliph, and grown for civil
reasons, repeated its handsome colour and its somewhat foreign
effect. His nose had a strong and shapely arch, and the dark

126 THE BETTER SORT

grey of his eyes was tinted with blue. It had been said of him
— in relation to these signs — that he would have struck you as
a Jew had he not, in spite of his nose, struck you so much as an
Irishman. Neither responsibility could in fact have been fixed
upon him, and just now, at all events, he was only a pleasant,
weather-washed, wind-battered Briton, who brought in from
a struggle with the elements that he appeared quite to have
enjoyed a certain amount of unremoved mud and an unusual
quantity of easy expression. It was exactly the silence ensuing
on the retreat of the servant and the closed door that marked
between him and his hostess the degree of this ease. They met,
as it were, twice : the first time while the servant was there and
the second as soon as he was not. The difference was great
between the two encounters, though we must add in justice to
the second that its marks were at first mainly negative. This
communion consisted only in their having drawn each other
for a minute as close as possible — as possible, that is, with no
help but the full clasp of hands. Thus they were mutually held,
and the closeness was at any rate such that, for a little, though it
took account of dangers, it did without words. When words
presently came the pair were talking by the fire, and she had
rung for tea. He had by this time asked if the note he had
despatched to her after breakfast had been safely delivered.

"Yes, before luncheon. But I'm always in a state when —
except for some extraordinary reason — you send such things by
hand. I knew, without it, that you had come. It never fails.
I'm sure when you're there — I'm sure when you're not."

He wiped, before the glass, his wet moustache. " I see. But
this morning I had an impulse."

" It was beautiful. But they make me as uneasy, sometimes,
your impulses, as if they were calculations ; make me wonder
what you have in reserve."

"Because when small children are too awfully good they die?
Well, I am a small child compared to you — but I'm not dead yet.
I cling to life."

He had covered her with his smile, but she continued grave.
" I'm not half so much afraid when you're nasty."

" Thank you ! What then did you do," he asked, " with my
note?"

"You deserve that I should have spread it out on my
dressing-table — or left it, better still, in Maud Blessingbourne's
room."

He wondered while he laughed. "Oh, but what does she
deserve ? "

THE STORY IN IT 127

It was her gravity that continued to answer. " Yes— it would
probably kill her."

" She believes so in you ? "

" She believes so in you. So don't be too nice to her."

He was still looking, in the chimney-glass, at the state of his
beard — brushing from it, with his handkerchief, the traces of
wind and wet. " If she also then prefers me when I'm nasty,
it seems to me I ought to satisfy her. Shall I now, at any rate,
see her?"

" She's so like a pea on a pan over the possibility of it that
she's pulling herself together in her room."

"Oh then, we must try and keep her together. But why,
graceful, tender, pretty too — quite, or almost — as she is, doesn't
she remarry ? "

Mrs. Dyott appeared — and as if the first time — to look for the
reason. " Because she likes too many men."

It kept up his spirits. " And how many may a lady like ? "

" In order not to like any of them too much ? Ah, that, you
know, I never found out — and it's too late now. When," she
presently pursued, " did you last see her ? "

He really had to think. "Would it have been since last
November or so?— somewhere or other where we spent three
days."

"Oh, at Surredge? I know all about that. I thought you
also met afterwards."

He had again to recall. " So we did ! Wouldn't it have been
somewhere at Christmas ? But it wasn't by arrangement ! " he
laughed, giving with his forefinger a little pleasant nick to his
hostess's chin. Then as if something in the way she received
this attention put him back to his question of a moment before,
" Have you kept my note ? "

She held him with her pretty eyes. " Do you want it back ? "

"Ah, don't speak as if I did take things !"

She dropped her gaze to the fire. " No, you don't ; not even
the hard things a really generous nature often would." She
quitted, however, as if to forget that, the chimney-place. " I put
it there!"

" You've burnt it ? Good ! " It made him easier, but he
noticed the next moment on a table the lemon-coloured volume
left there by Mrs. Blessingbourne, and, taking it up for a look,
immediately put it down. " You might, while you were about it,
have burnt that too."

"You've read it?"

" Dear, yes. And you ? "

128 THE BETTER SORT

" No," said Mrs. Dyott ; " it wasn't for me Maud brought it."

It pulled her visitor up. " Mrs. Blessingbourne brought it? "

"For such a day as this." But she wondered. "How you
look ! Is it so awful ? "

" Oh, like his others." Something had occurred to him ; his
thought was already far. " Does she know ? "

"Know what?"

"Why, anything."

But the door opened too soon for Mrs. Dyott, who could only
murmur quickly —

" Take care ! "

II

IT was in fact Mrs. Blessingbourne, who had under her arm
the book she had gone up for — a pair of covers that this time
showed a pretty, a candid blue. She was followed next minute
by the servant, who brought in tea, the consumption of which,
with the passage of greetings, inquiries and other light civilities
between the two visitors, occupied a quarter of an hour. Mrs.
Dyott meanwhile, as a contribution to so much amenity, men-
tioned to Maud that her fellow -guest wished to scold her for
the books she read — a statement met by this friend with the
remark that he must first be sure about them. But as soon
as he had picked up the new volume he broke out into a frank
" Dear, dear ! "

" Have you read that too ? " Mrs. Dyott inquired. " How
much you'll have to talk over together ! The other one," she
explained to him, " Maud speaks of as terribly tame."

"Ah, I must have that out with her! You don't feel the
extraordinary force of the fellow ? " Voyt went on to Mrs.
Blessingbourne.

And so, round the hearth, they talked — talked soon, while
they warmed their toes, with zest enough to make it seem as
happy a chance as any of the quieter opportunities their im-
prisonment might have involved. Mrs. Blessingbourne did feel,
it then appeared, the force of the fellow, but she had her
reserves and reactions, in which Voyt was much interested.
Mrs. Dyott rather detached herself, mainly gazing, as she leaned
back, at the fire; she intervened, however, enough to relieve
Maud of the sense of being listened to. That sense, with Maud,
was too apt to convey that one was listened to for a fool. " Yes,
when I read a novel I mostly read a French one," she had said
to Voyt in answer to a question about her usual practice ; " for
I seem with it to get hold more of the real thing — to get more

THE STORY IN IT 129

life for my money. Only I'm not so infatuated with them
but that sometimes for months and months on end I don't
read any fiction at all."

The two books were now together beside them. " Then when
you begin again you read a mass ? "

" Dear, no. I only keep up with three or four authors."

He laughed at this over the cigarette he had been allowed
to light. " I like your ' keeping up,' and keeping up in particular
with * authors.' "

" One must keep up with somebody," Mrs. Dyott threw off.

" I dare say I'm ridiculous," Mrs. Blessingbourne conceded
without heeding it; "but that's the way we express ourselves
in my part of the country."

" I only alluded," said Voyt, " to the tremendous conscience
of your sex. It's more than mine can keep up with. You
take everything too hard. But if you can't read the novel
of British and American manufacture, heaven knows I'm at one
with you. It seems really to show our sense of life as the sense
of puppies and kittens."

"Well," Maud more patiently returned, "I'm told all sorts
of people are now doing wonderful things; but somehow I
remain outside."

"Ah, it's they, it's our poor twangers and twaddlers who
remain outside. They pick up a living in the street. And who
indeed would want them in ? "

Mrs. Blessingbourne seemed unable to say, and yet at the
same time to have her idea. The subject, in truth, she evidently
found, was not so easy to handle. " People lend me things, and
I try ; but at the end of fifty pages "

" There you are ! Yes — heaven help us ! "

" But what I mean," she went on, " isn't that I don't get wofully
weary of the eternal French thing. What's their sense of life ? "

"Ah, voila!" Mrs. Dyott softly sounded.

"Oh, but it is one; you can make it out," Voyt promptly
declared. " They do what they feel, and they feel more things
than we. They strike so many more notes, and with so different
a hand. When it comes to any account of a relation, say,
between a man and a woman — I mean an intimate or a curious
or a suggestive one — where are we compared to them? They
don't exhaust the subject, no doubt," he admitted ; " but we don't
touch it, don't even skim it. It's as if we denied its existence,
its possibility. You'll doubtless tell me, however," he went on,
" that as all such relations are for us, at the most, much simpler,
we can only have all round less to say about them."

130 THE BETTER SORT

She met this imputation with the quickest amusement. " I
beg your pardon. I don't think I shall tell you anything of the
sort. I don't know that I even agree with your premise."

"About such relations?" He looked agreeably surprised.
" You think we make them larger ? — or subtler ? "

Mrs. Blessingbourne leaned back, not looking, like Mrs. Dyott,
at the fire, but at the ceiling. " I don't know what I think."

"It's not that she doesn't know," Mrs. Dyott remarked. "It's
only that she doesn't say."

But Voyt had this time no eye for their hostess. For a
moment he watched Maud. " It sticks out of you, you know,
that you've yourself written something. Haven't you — and pub-
lished? I've a notion I could TQz&you"

"When I do publish," she said without moving, "you'll be
the last one I shall tell. I have" she went on, "a lovely subject,
but it would take an amount of treatment ! "

"Tell us then at least what it is."

At this she again met his eyes. "Oh, to tell it would be
to express it, and that's just what I can't do. What I meant
to say just now," she added, " was that the French, to my sense,
give us only again and again, for ever and ever, the same couple.
There they are once more, as one has had them to satiety, in
that yellow thing, and there I shall certainly again find them
in the blue."

"Then why do you keep reading about them?" Mrs. Dyott
demanded.

Maud hesitated. " I don't ! " she sighed. " At all events, I
sha'n't any more. I give it up."

"You've been looking for something, I judge," said Colonel
Voyt, "that you're not likely to find. It doesn't exist."

" What is it ? " Mrs. Dyott inquired.

"I never look," Maud remarked, "for anything but an interest."

"Naturally. But your interest," Voyt replied, "is in some-
thing different from life."

" Ah, not a bit ! I love life — in art, though I hate it anywhere
else. It's the poverty of the life those people show, and the
awful bounders, of both sexes, that they represent."

" Oh, now we have you ! " her interlocutor laughed. " To
me, when all's said and done, they seem to be — as near as art
can come — in the truth of the truth. It can only take what
life gives it, though it certainly may be a pity that that isn't
better. Your complaint of their monotony is a complaint of
their conditions. When you say we get always the same couple
what do you mean but that we get always the same passion?

THE STORY IN IT 131

Of course we do ! " Voyt declared. " If what you're looking
for is another, that's what you won't anywhere find."

Maud for a while said nothing, and Mrs. Dyott seemed to
wait. "Well, I suppose I'm looking, more than anything else,
for a decent woman."

"Oh then, you mustn't look for her in pictures of passion.
That's not her element nor her whereabouts."

Mrs. Blessingbourne weighed the objection. "Doesn't it
depend on what you mean by passion ? "

" I think one can mean only one thing : the enemy to
behaviour."

" Oh, I can imagine passions that are, on the contrary', friends
to it."

Her interlocutor thought. " Doesn't it depend perhaps on
what you mean by behaviour ? "

"Dear, no. Behaviour is just behaviour — the most definite
thing in the world."

"Then what do you mean by the 'interest' you just now
spoke of? The picture of that definite thing?"

" Yes — call it that. Women aren't always vicious, even when
they're "

" When they're what ? " Voyt asked.

" When they're unhappy. They can be unhappy and good."

"That one doesn't for a moment deny. But can they be
'good' and interesting?"

"That must be Maud's subject ! " Mrs. Dyott explained. " To
show a woman who is. I'm afraid, my dear," she continued,
"you could only show yourself."

"You'd show then the most beautiful specimen conceivable"
— and Voyt addressed himself to Maud. " But doesn't it prove
that life is, against your contention, more interesting than art?
Life you embellish and elevate; but art would find itself able
to do nothing with you, and, on such impossible terms, would
ruin you."

The colour in her faint consciousness gave beauty to her
stare. "'Ruin' me?"

"He means," Mrs. Dyott again indicated, "that you would
ruin 'art.'"

" Without, on the other hand "—Voyt seemed to assent—" its
giving at all a coherent impression of you."

" She wants her romance cheap ! " said Mrs. Dyott.

" Oh, no — I should be willing to pay for it. I don't see why
the romance — since you give it that name — should be all, as the
French inveterately make it, for the women who are bad."

132 THE BETTER SORT

" Oh, they pay for it ! " said Mrs. Dyott.

"£><?they?"

"So, at least"— Mrs. Dyott a little corrected herself— " one
has gathered (for I don't read your books, you know !) that
they're usually shown as doing."

Maud wondered, but looking at Voyt, "They're shown often,
no doubt, as paying for their badness. But are they shown as
paying for their romance ? "

" My dear lady," said Voyt, " their romance is their badness.
There isn't any other. It's a hard law, if you will, and a strange,
but goodness has to go without that luxury. Isn't to be good
just exactly, all round, to go without?" He put it before her
kindly and clearly — regretfully too, as if he were sorry the truth
should be so sad. He and she, his pleasant eyes seemed to
say, would, had they had the making of it, have made it better.
" One has heard it before — at least / have ; one has heard your
question put. But always, when put to a mind not merely
muddled, for an inevitable answer. 'Why don't you, cher
monsieur, give us the drama of virtue?' 'Because, chere
madame, the high privilege of virtue is precisely to avoid drama.'
The adventures of the honest lady? The honest lady hasn't
— can't possibly have adventures."

Mrs. Blessingbourne only met his eyes at first, smiling with a
certain intensity. " Doesn't it depend a little on what you call
adventures ? "

" My poor Maud," said Mrs. Dyott, as if in compassion for
sophistry so simple, " adventures are just adventures. That's all
you can make of them ! "

But her friend went on, for their companion, as if without
hearing. "Doesn't it depend a good deal on what you call
drama ? " Maud spoke as one who had already thought it out.
" Doesn't it depend on what you call romance ? "

Her listener gave these arguments his very best attention. " Of
course you may call things anything you like — speak of them as
one thing and mean quite another. But why should it depend
on anything? Behind these words we use — the adventure, the
novel, the drama, the romance, the situation, in short, as we most
comprehensively say — behind them all stands the same sharp
fact that they all, in their different ways, represent."

" Precisely ! " Mrs. Dyott was full of approval.

Maud, however, was full of vagueness. " What great fact ? "

" The fact of a relation. The adventure's a relation ; the
relation's an adventure. The romance, the novel, the drama are
the picture of one. The subject the novelist treats is the rise,

THE STORY IN IT 133

the formation, the development, the climax, and for the most part
the decline, of one. And what is the honest lady doing on that
side of the town ? "

Mrs. Dyott was more pointed. "She doesn't so much as form
a relation."

But Maud bore up. " Doesn't it depend, again, on what you
call a relation ? "

" Oh," said Mrs. Dyott, " if a gentleman picks up her pocket-
handkerchief "

"Ah, even that's one," their friend laughed, "if she has thrown
it to him. We can only deal with one that is one."

" Surely," Maud replied. " But if it's an innocent one ? "

" Doesn't it depend a good deal," Mrs. Dyott asked, " on what
you call innocent ? "

" You mean that the adventures of innocence have so often
been the material of fiction ? Yes," Voyt replied ; " that's exactly
what the bored reader complains of. He has asked for bread
and been given a stone. What is it but, with absolute directness,
a question of interest, or, as people say, of the story ? What's a
situation undeveloped but a subject lost ? If a relation stops,
where's the story? If it doesn't stop, where 's the innocence?
It seems to me you must choose. It would be very pretty if it
were otherwise, but that's how we flounder. Art is our flounder-
ings shown."

Mrs. Blessingbourne — and with an air of deference scarce
supported perhaps by its sketchiness — kept her deep eyes on this
definition. " But sometimes we flounder out."

It immediately touched in Colonel Voyt the spring of a genial
derision. " That's just where I expected you would ! One always
sees it come."

"He has, you notice," Mrs. Dyott parenthesised to Maud,
"seen it come so often; and he has always waited for it and
met it."

" Met it, dear lady, simply enough ! It's the old story, Mrs.
Blessingbourne. The relation is innocent that the heroine gets
out of. The book is innocent that's the story of her getting
out. But what the devil — in the name of innocence — was she
doing in ? "

Mrs. Dyott promptly echoed the question. " You have to be
in, you know, to get out. So there you are already with your
relation. It's the end of your goodness."

" And the beginning," said Voyt, " of your play ! "

" Aren't they all, for that matter, even the worst," Mrs. Dyott
pursued, "supposed some time or other to get out? But if,

134 THE BETTER SORT

meanwhile, they've been in, however briefly, long enough to
adorn a tale "

" They've been in long enough to point a moral. That is to
point ours ! " With which, and as if a sudden flush of warmer
light had moved him, Colonel Voyt got up. The veil of the
storm had parted over a great red sunset.

Mrs. Dyott also was on her feet, and they stood before his
charming antagonist, who, with eyes lowered and a somewhat
fixed smile, had not moved. "We've spoiled her subject ! " the
elder lady sighed.

" Well," said Voyt, " it's better to spoil an artist's subject than
to spoil his reputation. I mean," he explained to Maud with his
indulgent manner, " his appearance of knowing what he has got
hold of, for that, in the last resort, is his happiness."

She slowly rose at this, facing him with an aspect as hand-
somely mild as his own. " You can't spoil my happiness."

He held her hand an instant as he took leave. "I wish I
could add to it ! "

III

WHEN he had quitted them and Mrs. Dyott had candidly asked
if her friend had found him rude or crude, Maud replied —
though not immediately — that she had feared showing only
too much that she found him charming. But if Mrs. Dyott
took this, it was to weigh the sense. "How could you show
it too much?"

" Because I always feel that that's my only way of showing
anything. It's absurd, if you like," Mrs. Blessingbourne pursued,
"but I never know, in such intense discussions, what strange
impression I may give."

Her companion looked amused. "Was it intense?"

"/was," Maud frankly confessed.

"Then it's a pity you were so wrong. Colonel Voyt, you
know, is right." Mrs. Blessingbourne at this gave one of the
slow, soft, silent headshakes to which she often resorted and
which, mostly accompanied by the light of cheer, had somehow,
in spite of the small obstinacy that smiled in them, a special
grace. With this grace, for a moment, her friend, looking her up
and down, appeared impressed, yet not too much so to take, the
next minute, a decision. " Oh, my dear, I'm sorry to differ from
anyone so lovely — for you're awfully beautiful to-night, and your
frock's the very nicest I've ever seen you wear. But he's as right
as he can be."

Maud repeated her motion. " Not so right, at all events, as

THE STORY IN IT 135

he thinks he is. Or perhaps I can say," she went on, after an
instant, " that I'm not so wrong. I do know a little what I'm
talking about."

Mrs. Dyott continued to study her. " You are vexed. You
naturally don't like it — such destruction."

"Destruction?"

" Of your illusion."

"I have no illusion. If I had, moreover, it wouldn't be
destroyed. I have, on the whole, I think, my little decency."

Mrs. Dyott stared. "Let us grant it for argument. What,
then?"

" Well, I've also my little drama."

"An attachment?"

" An attachment."

"That you shouldn't have?"

" That I shouldn't have."

"A passion?"

" A passion."

"Shared?"

" Ah, thank goodness, no ! "

Mrs. Dyott continued to gaze. "The object's unaware ?"

"Utterly."

Mrs. Dyott turned it over. "Are you sure?"

" Sure."

" That's what you call your decency ? But isn't it," Mrs. Dyott
asked, " rather his?"

" Dear, no. It's only his good fortune."

Mrs. Dyott laughed. "But yours, darling — your good fortune:
where does that come in ? "

" Why, in my sense of the romance of it."

" The romance of what ? Of his not knowing ? "

"Of my not wanting him to. If I did" — Maud had touch-
ingly worked it out — " where would be my honesty ? "

The inquiry, for an instant, held her friend ; yet only, it
seemed, for a stupefaction that was almost amusement. "Can
you want or not want as you like ? Where in the world, if you
don't want, is your romance ? "

Mrs. Blessingbourne still wore her smile, and she now, with a
light gesture that matched it, just touched the region of her heart.
"There!"

Her companion admiringly marvelled. " A lovely place for it,
no doubt ! — but not quite a place, that I can see, to make the
sentiment a relation."

" Why not ? What more is required for a relation for me ? "

136 THE BETTER SORT

" Oh, all sorts of things, I should say ! And many more, added
to those, to make it one for the person you mention."

"Ah, that I don't pretend it either should be or can be. I
only speak for myself."

It was said in a manner that made Mrs. Dyott, with a visible
mixture of impressions, suddenly turn away. She indulged in a
vague movement or two, as if to look for something ; then again
found herself near her friend, on whom with the same abruptness,
in fact with a strange sharpness, she conferred a kiss that might
have represented either her tribute to exalted consistency or her
idea of a graceful close of the discussion. "You deserve that
one should speaker you ! "

Her companion looked cheerful and secure. " How can you,
without knowing ?"

" Oh, by guessing ! It's not ? "

But that was as far as Mrs. Dyott could get. " It's not," said
Maud, "anyone you've ever seen."

" Ah then, I give you up ! "

And Mrs. Dyott conformed, for the rest of Maud's stay, to
the spirit of this speech. It was made on a Saturday night, and
Mrs. Blessingbourne remained till the Wednesday following, an
interval during which, as the return of fine weather was confirmed
by the Sunday, the two ladies found a wider range of action.
There were drives to be taken, calls made, objects of interest
seen, at a distance ; with the effect of much easy talk and still
more easy silence. There had been a question of Colonel Voyt's
probable return on the Sunday, but the whole time passed with-
out a sign from him, and it was merely mentioned by Mrs. Dyott,
in explanation, that he must have been suddenly called, as he
was so liable to be, to town. That this in fact was what had
happened he made clear to her on Thursday afternoon, when,
walking over again late, he found her alone. The consequence of
his Sunday letters had been his taking, that day, the 4.15. Mrs.
Voyt had gone back on Thursday, and he now, to settle on the
spot the question of a piece of work begun at his place, had
rushed down for a few hours in anticipation of the usual col-
lective move for the week's end. He was to go up again by the
late train, and had to count a little — a fact accepted by his
hostess with the hard pliancy of practice — his present happy
moments. Too few as these were, however, he found time to
make of her an inquiry or two not directly bearing on their
situation. The first was a recall of the question for which Mrs.
Blessingbourne's entrance on the previous Saturday had arrested
her answer. Did that lady know of anything between them ?

THE STORY IN IT 137

"No. I'm sure. There's one thing she does know," Mrs.
Dyott went on; "but it's quite different and not so very
wonderful."

"What, then, is it?"

"Well, that she's herself in love."

Voyt showed his interest. " You mean she told you ? "

" I got it out of her."

He showed his amusement. " Poor thing ! And with whom ?"

"With you."

His surprise, if the distinction might be made, was less than
his wonder. "You got that out of her too?"

" No — it remains in. Which is much the best way for it. For
you to know it would be to end it."

He looked rather cheerfully at sea. " Is that then why you
tell me?"

" I mean for her to know you know it. Therefore it's in your
interest not to let her."

" I see," Voyt after a moment returned. " Your real calcula-
tion is that my interest will be sacrificed to my vanity — so that,
if your other idea is just, the flame will in fact, and thanks to
her morbid conscience, expire by her taking fright at seeing me
so pleased. But I promise you," he declared, " that she sha'n't see
it. So there you are ! " She kept her eyes on him and had
evidently to admit, after a little, that there she was. Distinct as
he had made the case, however, he was not yet quite satisfied.
" Why are you so sure that I'm the man ? "

" From the way she denies you."

"You put it to her?"

"Straight. If you hadn't been she would, of course, have
confessed to you — to keep me in the dark about the real one."

Poor Voyt laughed out again. " Oh, you dear souls ! "

" Besides," his companion pursued, " I was not in want of that
evidence."

" Then what other had you ? "

" Her state before you came — which was what made me ask
you how much you had seen her. And her state after it," Mrs.
Dyott added. "And her state," she wound up, "while you were
here."

" But her state while I was here was charming."

"Charming. That's just what I say."

She said it in a tone that placed the matter in its right light —
a light in which they appeared kindly, quite tenderly, to watch
Maud wander away into space with her lovely head bent under a
theory rather too big for it. Voyt's last word, however, was that

138 THE BETTER SORT

there was just enough in it — in the theory — for them to allow
that she had not shown herself, on the occasion of their talk,
wholly bereft of sense. Her consciousness, if they let it alone —
as they of course after this mercifully must — was, in the last
analysis, a kind of shy romance. Not a romance like their own,
a thing to make the fortune of any author up to the mark — one
who should have the invention or who could have the courage ;
but a small, scared, starved, subjective satisfaction that would do
her no harm and nobody else any good. Who but a duffer —
he stuck to his contention — would see the shadow of a " story "
in it?

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

i

WHAT determined the speech that startled him in the
course of their encounter scarcely matters, being prob-
ably but some words spoken by himself quite without intention
— spoken as they lingered and slowly moved together after their
renewal of acquaintance. He had been conveyed by friends, an
hour or two before, to the house at which she was staying ; the
part}- of visitors at the other house, of whom he was one, and
thanks to whom it was his theory, as always, that he was lost in
the crowd, had been invited over to luncheon. There had been
after luncheon much dispersal, all in the interest of the original
motive, a view of Weatherend itself and the fine things, intrinsic
features, pictures, heirlooms, treasures of all the arts, that made
the place almost famous ; and the great rooms were so numerous
that guests could wander at their will, hang back from the prin-
cipal group, and, in cases where they took such matters with the
last seriousness, give themselves up to mysterious appreciations
and measurements. There were persons to be observed, singly
or in couples, bending toward objects in out-of-the-way corners
with their hands on their knees and their heads nodding quite as
with the emphasis of an excited sense of smell. When they were
two they either mingled their sounds of ecstasy or melted into
silences of even deeper import, so that there were aspects of the
occasion that gave it for Marcher much the air of the "look
round," previous to a sale highly advertised, that excites or
quenches, as may be, the dream of acquisition. The dream of
acquisition at Weatherend would have had to be wild indeed,
and John Marcher found himself, among such suggestions, dis-
concerted almost equally by the presence of those who knew too
much and by that of those who knew nothing. The great rooms
caused so much poetry and history to press upon him that he
needed to wander apart to feel in a proper relation with them,
though his doing so was not, as happened, like the gloating of
some of his companions, to be compared to the movements of a

140 THE BETTER SORT

dog sniffing a cupboard. It had an issue promptly enough in a
direction that was not to have been calculated.

It led, in short, in the course of the October afternoon, to his
closer meeting with May Bartram, whose face, a reminder, yet not
quite a remembrance, as they sat, much separated, at a very long
table, had begun merely by troubling him rather pleasantly. It
affected him as the sequel of something of which he had lost the
beginning. He knew it, and for the time quite welcomed it,
as a continuation, but didn't know what it continued, which
was an interest, or an amusement, the greater as he was also
somehow aware — yet without a direct sign from her — that the
young woman herself had not lost the thread. She had not lost
it, but she wouldn't give it back to him, he saw, without some
putting forth of his hand for it; and he not only saw that, but
saw several things more, things odd enough in the light of the
fact that at the moment some accident of grouping brought them
face to face he was still merely fumbling with the idea that any
contact between them in the past would have had no importance.
If it had had no importance he scarcely knew why his actual
impression of her should so seem to have so much ; the answer to
which, however, was that in such a life as they all appeared to be
leading for the moment one could but take things as they came.
He was satisfied, without in the least being able to say why, that
this young lady might roughly have ranked in the house as a poor
relation ; satisfied also that she was not there on a brief visit, but
was more or less a part of the establishment — almost a working,
a remunerated part. Didn't she enjoy at periods a protection
that she paid for by helping, among other services, to show the
place and explain it, deal with the tiresome people, answer ques-
tions about the dates of the buildings, the styles of the furniture,
the authorship of the pictures, the favourite haunts of the
ghost ? It wasn't that she looked as if you could have given
her shillings — it was impossible to look less so. Yet when she
finally drifted toward him, distinctly handsome, though ever so
much older — older than when he had seen her before — it might
have been as an effect of her guessing that he had, within the
couple of hours, devoted more imagination to her than to all the
others put together, and had thereby penetrated to a kind of
truth that the others were too stupid for. She was there on
harder terms than anyone; she was there as a consequence of
things suffered, in one way and another, in the interval of years ;
and she remembered him very much as she was remembered —
only a good deal better.

By the time they at last thus came to speech they were alone in

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 141

one of the rooms — remarkable for a fine portrait over the chimney-
place — 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 sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old
wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour. It was most of all
perhaps in the way she came to him as if, since she had been
turned on to deal with the simpler sort, he might, should he
choose to keep the whole thing down, just take her mild attention
for a part of her general business. As soon as he heard her
voice, however, the gap was filled up and the missing link
supplied; the slight irony he divined in her attitude lost its
advantage. He almost jumped at it to get there before her. " I
met you years and years ago in Rome. I remember all about
it." She confessed to disappointment — she had been so sure he
didn't ; and to prove how well he did he began to pour forth the
particular recollections that popped up as he called for them.
Her face and her voice, all at his service now, worked the miracle
— the impression operating like the torch of a lamplighter who
touches into flame, one by one, a long row of gas jets. Marcher
flattered himself that the illumination was brilliant, yet he was
really still more pleased on her showing him, with amusement,
that in his haste to make everything right he had got most things
rather wrong. It hadn't been at Rome — it had been at Naples ;
and it hadn't been seven years before — it had been more nearly
ten. She hadn't been either with her uncle and aunt, but with
her mother and her brother ; in addition to which it was not with
the Pembles that he had been, but with the Boyers, coming down
in their company from Rome — a point on which she insisted,
a little to his confusion, and as to which she had her evidence in
hand. The Boyers she had known, but she didn't know the
Pembles, though she had heard of them, and it was the people he
was with who had made them acquainted. The incident of the
thunderstorm that had raged round them with such violence as to
drive them for refuge into an excavation — this incident had not
occurred at the Palace of the Caesars, but at Pompeii, on an
occasion when they had been present there at an important find.
He accepted her amendments, he enjoyed her corrections,
though the moral of them was, she pointed out, that he really
didn't remember the least thing about her ; and he only Jelt it as

142 THE BETTER SORT

a drawback that when all was made conformable to the truth there
didn't appear much of anything left. They lingered together
still, she neglecting her office — for from the moment he was so
clever she had no proper right to him — and both neglecting the
house, just waiting as to see if a memory or two more wouldn't
again breathe upon them. It had not taken them many minutes,
after all, to put down on the table, like the cards of a pack, those
that constituted their respective hands ; only what came out was
that the pack was unfortunately not perfect — that the past,
invoked, invited, encouraged, could give them, naturally, no more
than it had. It had made them meet — her at twenty, him at
twenty-five ; but nothing was so strange, they seemed to say to each
other, as that, while so occupied, it hadn't done a little more for
them. They looked at each other as with the feeling of an
occasion missed; the present one would have been so much
better if the other, in the far distance, in the foreign land, hadn't
been so stupidly meagre. There weren't, apparently, all counted,
more than a dozen little old things that had succeeded in coming
to pass between them ; trivialities of youth, simplicities of fresh-
ness, stupidities of ignorance, small possible germs, but too
deeply buried — too deeply (didn't it seem?) to sprout after so
many years. Marcher said to himself that he ought to have
rendered her some service — saved her from a capsized boat in the
Bay, or at least recovered her dressing-bag, filched from her cab,
in the streets of Naples, by a lazzarone with a stiletto. Or it
would have been nice if he could have been taken with fever,
alone, at his hotel, and she could have come to look after him, to
write to his people, to drive him out in convalescence. Then
they would be in possession of the something or other that their
actual show seemed to lack. It yet somehow presented itself,
this show, as too good to be spoiled ; so that they were reduced
for a few minutes more to wondering a little helplessly why —
since they seemed to know a certain number of the same people
— their reunion had been so long averted. They didn't use that
name for it, but their delay from minute to minute to join the
others was a kind of confession that they didn't quite want it to
be a failure. Their attempted supposition of reasons for their not
having met but showed how little they knew of each other.
There came in fact a moment when Marcher felt a positive pang.
It was vain to pretend she was an old friend, for all the com-
munities were wanting, in spite of which it was as an old friend that
he saw she would have suited him. He had new ones enough —
was surrounded with them, for instance, at that hour at the other
house ; as a new one he probably wouldn't have so much as

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 143'

noticed her. He would have liked to invent something, get her
to make-believe with him that some passage of a romantic or
critical kind had originally occurred. He was really almost reach-
ing out in imagination — as against time — for something that
would do, and saying to himself that if it didn't come this new
incident would simply and rather awkwardly close. They would
separate, and now for no second or for no third chance. They
would have tried and not succeeded. Then it was, just at the
turn, as he afterwards made it out to himself, that, everything else
failing, she herself decided to take up the case and, as it were,
save the situation. He felt as soon as she spoke that she had
been consciously keeping back what she said and hoping to get
on without it; a scruple in her that immensely touched him when,
by the end of three or four minutes more, he was able to measure
it. What she brought out, at any rate, quite cleared the air and
supplied the link — the link it was such a mystery he should
frivolously have managed to lose.

" You know you told me something that I've never for-
gotten and that again and again has made me think of you since;
it was that tremendously hot day when we went to Sorrento,
across the bay, for the breeze. What I allude to was what you
said to me, on the way back, as we sat, under the awning of the
boat, enjoying the cool. Have you forgotten ? "

He had forgotten, and he was even more surprised than
ashamed. But the great thing was that he saw it was no vulgar
reminder of any "sweet" speech. The vanity of women had
long memories, but she was making no claim on him of a com-
pliment or a mistake. With another woman, a totally different
one, he might have feared the recall possibly even some imbecile
"offer." So, in having to say that he had indeed forgotten, he
was conscious rather of a loss than of a gain ; he already saw an
interest in the matter of her reference. " I try to think — but I
give it up. Yet I remember the Sorrento day."

"I'm not very sure you do," May Bartram after a moment
said; "and I'm not very sure I ought to want you to. It's
dreadful to bring a person back, at any time, to what he was ten
years before. If you've lived away from it," she smiled, "so
much the better."

" Ah, if you haven't why should I ? " he asked.

" Lived away, you mean, from what I myself was ? "

" From what / was. I was of course an ass," Marcher went
on ; " but I would rather know from you just the sort of ass I
was than — from the moment you have something in your mind
— not know anything."

144 THE BETTER SORT

Still, however, she hesitated. " But if you've completely
ceased to be that sort ?"

" Why, I can then just so all the more bear to know. Besides,
perhaps I haven't."

" Perhaps. Yet if you haven't," she added, " I should suppose
you would remember. Not indeed that / in the least connect
with my impression the invidious name you use. If I had only
thought you foolish," she explained, "the thing I speak of
wouldn't so have remained with me. It was about yourself."
She waited, as if it might come to him ; but as, only meeting her
eyes in wonder, he gave no sign, she burnt her ships. " Has it
ever happened ? "

Then it was that, while he continued to stare, a light broke
for him and the blood slowly came to his face, which began to

burn with recognition. " Do you mean I told you ? " But

he faltered, lest what came to him shouldn't be right, lest he
should only give himself away.

"It was something about yourself that it was natural one
shouldn't forget — that is if one remembered you at all. That's
why I ask you," she smiled, " if the thing you then spoke of has
ever come to pass ? "

Oh, then he saw, but he was lost in wonder and found himself
embarrassed. This, he also saw, made her sorry for him, as if
her allusion had been a mistake. It took him but a moment,
however, to feel that it had not been, much as it had been a
surprise. After the first little shock of it her knowledge on the
contrary began, even if rather strangely, to taste sweet to him.
She was the only other person in the world then who would
have it, and she had had it all these years, while the fact of his
having so breathed his secret had unaccountably faded from him.
No wonder they couldn't have met as if nothing had happened.
" I judge," he finally said, " that I know what you mean. Only
I had strangely enough lost the consciousness of having taken
you so far into my confidence."

" Is it because you've taken so many others as well ? "

" I've taken nobody. Not a creature since then."

" So that I'm the only person who knows ? "

"The only person in the world."

"Well," she quickly replied, "I myself have never spoken.
I've never, never repeated of you what you told me." She looked
at him so that he perfectly believed her. Their eyes met over it
in such a way that he was without a doubt. " And I never will."

She spoke with an earnestness that, as if almost excessive, put
him at ease about her possible derision. Somehow the whole

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 145

question was a new luxury to him — that is, from the moment
she was in possession. If she didn't take the ironic view she
clearly took the sympathetic, and that was what he had had, in
all the long time, from no one whomsoever. What he felt was
that he couldn't at present have begun to tell her and yet could
profit perhaps exquisitely by the accident of having done so of
old. " Please don't then. We're just right as it is."

" Oh, I am," she laughed, " if you are ! " To which she added :
" Then you do still feel in the same way ? "

It was impossible to him not to take to himself that she was
really interested, and it all kept coming as a sort of revelation.
He had thought of himself so long as abominably alone, and,
lo, he wasn't alone a bit. He hadn't been, it appeared, for an
hour — since those moments on the Sorrento boat. It was she
who had been, he seemed to see as he looked at her — she who
had been made so by the graceless fact of his lapse of fidelity.
To tell her what he had told her — what had it been but to ask
something of her? something that she had given, in her charity,
without his having, by a remembrance, by a return of the spirit,
failing another encounter, so much as thanked her. What he had
asked of her had been simply at first not to laugh at him. She
had beautifully not done so for ten years, and she was not doing
so now. So he had endless gratitude to make up. Only for that
he must see just how he had figured to her. " What, exactly, was
the account I gave ? "

" Of the way you did feel ? Well, it was very simple. You said
you had had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within
you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange,
possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to
happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and
the conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you."

" Do you call that very simple ? " John Marcher asked.

She thought a moment. " It was perhaps because I seemed,
as you spoke, to understand it."

" You do understand it ? " he eagerly asked.

Again she kept her kind eyes on him. "You still have the
belief?"

" Oh ! " he exclaimed helplessly. There was too much to say.

"Whatever it is to be," she clearly made out, "it hasn't yet
come."

He shook his head in complete surrender now. " It hasn't yet
come. Only, you know, it isn't anything I'm to do, to achieve in
the world, to be distinguished or admired for. I'm not such an
ass as that. It would be much better, no doubt, if I were."

146 THE BETTER SORT

" It's to be something you're merely to suffer ? "

"Well, say to wait for — to have to meet, to face, to see
suddenly break out in my life; possibly destroying all further
consciousness, possibly annihilating me ; possibly, on the other
hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all my
world and leaving me to the consequences, however they shape
themselves."

She took this in, but the light in her eyes continued for him
not to be that of mockery. " Isn't what you describe perhaps
but the expectation — or, at any rate, the sense of danger, familiar
to so many people — of falling in love ? "

John Marcher thought. " Did you ask me that before ? "

"No — I wasn't so free-and-easy then. But it's what strikes
me now."

"Of course," he said after a moment, "it strikes you. Of
course it strikes me. Of course what's in store for me may be
no more than that. The only thing is," he went on, " that I
think that if it had been that, I should by this time know."

" Do you mean because you've been in love ? " And then as
he but looked at her in silence : " You've been in love, and it
hasn't meant such a cataclysm, hasn't proved the great affair ? "

" Here I am, you see. It hasn't been overwhelming."

"Then it hasn't been love," said May Bartram.

"Well, I at least thought it was. I took it for that— I've
taken it till now. It was agreeable, it was delightful, it was
miserable," he explained. "But it wasn't strange. It wasn't
what my affair's to be."

"You want something all to yourself — something that nobody
else knows or has known ? "

"It isn't a question of what I 'want' — God knows I don't
want anything. It's only a question of the apprehension that
haunts me — that I live with day by day."

He said this so lucidly and consistently that, visibly, it further
imposed itself. If she had not been interested before she would
have been interested now. " Is it a sense of coming violence ? "

Evidently now too, again, he liked to talk of it. " I don't
think of it as — when it does come — necessarily violent. I only
think of it as natural and as of course, above all, unmistakeable.
I think of it simply as the thing. The thing will of itself appear
natural."

"Then how will it appear strange?"

Marcher bethought himself. " It won't — to me"

" To whom then ? "

" Well," he replied, smiling at last, " say to you."

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 147

" Oh then, I'm to be present ? "

" Why, you are present — since you know."

" I see." She turned it over. " But I mean at the
catastrophe.'*

At this, for a minute, their lightness gave way to their gravity ;
it was as if the long look they exchanged held them together.
" It will only depend on yourself — if you'll watch with me."

" Are you afraid ? " she asked.

" Don't leave me now" he went on.

" Are you afraid ? " she repeated.

" Do you think me simply out of my mind ? " he pursued in-
stead of answering. "Do I merely strike you as a harmless
lunatic ? "

"No," said MayUartram. " I understand you. I believe you."

"You mean you feel how my obsession — poor old thing! — may
correspond to some possible reality ? "

" To some possible reality."

" Then you will watch with me ? "

She hesitated, then for the third time put her question. " Are
you afraid ? "

" Did I tell you I was— at Naples ? "

" No, you said nothing about it."

" Then I don't know. And I should like to know," said John
Marcher. " You'll tell me yourself whether you think so. If
you'll watch with me you'll see."

"Very good then." They had been moving by this time
across the room, and at the door, before passing out, they paused
as if for the full wind-up of their understanding. " I'll watch
with you," said May Bartram.

II

THE fact that she " knew " — knew and yet neither chaffed him
nor betrayed him — had in a short time begun to constitute
between them a sensible bond, which became more marked
when, within the year that followed their afternoon at Weather-
end, the opportunities for meeting multiplied. The event that
thus promoted these occasions was the death of the ancient lady,
her great-aunt, under whose wing, since losing her mother, she
had to such an extent found shelter, and who, though but the
widowed mother of the new successor to the property, had
succeeded — thanks to a high tone and a high temper — in not
forfeiting the supreme position at the great house. The de-
position of this personage arrived but with her death, which,

148 THE BETTER SORT

followed by many changes, made in particular a difference for
the young woman in whom Marcher's expert attention had
recognised from the first a dependent with a pride that might
ache though it didn't bristle. Nothing for a long time had
made him easier than the thought that the aching must have
been much soothed by Miss Bartram's now finding herself able
to set up a small home in London. She had acquired property,
to an amount that made that luxury just possible, under her
aunt's extremely complicated will, and when the whole matter
began to be straightened out, which indeed took time, she
let him know that the happy issue was at last in view. He had
seen her again before that day, both because she had more
than once accompanied the ancient lady to town and because
he had paid another visit to the friends who so conveniently
made of Weatherend one of the charms of their own hospitality.
These friends had taken him back there ; he had achieved there
again with Miss Bartram some quiet detachment; and he had
in London succeeded in persuading her to more than one brief
absence from her aunt. They went together, on these latter
occasions, to the National Gallery and the South Kensington
Museum, where, among vivid reminders, they talked of Italy
at large — not now attempting to recover, as at first, the taste
of their youth and their ignorance. That recovery, the first day
at Weatherend, had served its purpose well, had given them
quite enough ; so that they were, to Marcher's sense, no longer
hovering about the head-waters of their stream, but had felt their
boat pushed sharply off and down the current.

They were literally afloat together ; for our gentleman this was
marked, quite as marked as that the fortunate cause of it was
just the buried treasure of her knowledge. He had with his own
hands dug up this little hoard, brought to light — that is to within
reach of the dim day constituted by their discretions and privacies
— the object of value the hiding-place of which he had, after
putting it into the ground himself, so strangely, so long forgotten.
The exquisite luck of having again just stumbled on the spot
made him indifferent to any other question ; he would doubtless
have devoted more time to the odd accident of his lapse of
memory if he had not been moved to devote so much to the
sweetness, the comfort, as he felt, for the future, that this accident
itself had helped to keep fresh. It had never entered into his
plan that anyone should "know," and mainly for the reason
that it was not in him to tell anyone. That would have been
impossible, since nothing but the amusement of a cold world
would have waited on it. Since, however, a mysterious fate had

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 149

opened his mouth in youth, in spite of him, he would count
that a compensation and profit by it to the utmost. That the
right person should know tempered the asperity of his secret
more even than his shyness had permitted him to imagine ; and
May Bartram was clearly right, because — well, because there she
was. Her knowledge simply settled it ; he would have been sure
enough by this time had she been wrong. There was that in his
situation, no doubt, that disposed him too much to see her as
a mere confidant, taking all her light for him from the fact — the
fact only — of her interest in his predicament, from her mercy,
sympathy, seriousness, her consent not to regard him as the
funniest of the funny. Aware, in fine, that her price for him was
just in her giving him this constant sense of his being admirably
spared, he was careful to remember that she had, after all, also
a life of her own, with things that might happen to her^ things
that in friendship one should likewise take account of. Some-
thing fairly remarkable came to pass with him, for that matter,
in this connection — something represented by a certain passage
of his consciousness, in the suddenest way, from one extreme
to the other.

He had thought himself, so long as nobody knew, the most
disinterested person in the world, carrying his concentrated
burden, his perpetual suspense, ever so quietly, holding his
tongue about it, giving others no glimpse of it nor of its effect
upon his life, asking of them no allowance and only making
on his side all those that were asked. He had disturbed nobody
with the queerness of having to know a haunted man, though he
had had moments of rather special temptation on hearing people
say that they were " unsettled." If they were as unsettled as he
was — he who had never been settled for an hour in his life — they
would know what it meant. Yet it wasn't, all the same, for him
to make them, and he listened to them civilly enough. This
was why he had such good — though possibly such rather colour-
less— manners ; this was why, above all, he could regard himself,
in a greedy world, as decently — as, in fact, perhaps even a little
sublimely — unselfish. Our point is accordingly that he valued
this character quite sufficiently to measure his present danger
of letting it lapse, against which he promised himself to be much
on his guard. He was quite ready, none the less, to be selfish
just a little, since, surely, no more charming occasion for it
had come to him. "Just a little," in a word, was just as much as
Miss Bartram, taking one day with another, would let him. He
never would be in the least coercive, and he would keep well
before him the lines on which consideration for her — the very

150 THE BETTER SORT

highest — ought to proceed. He would thoroughly establish the
heads under which her affairs, her requirements, her peculiarities
— he went so far as to give them the latitude of that name —
would come into their intercourse. All this naturally was a sign
of how much he took the intercourse itself for granted. There
was nothing more to be done about that. It simply existed ; had
sprung into being with her first penetrating question to him
in the autumn light there at Weatherend. The real form it
should have taken on the basis that stood out large was the form
of their marrying. But the devil in this was that the very basis
itself put marrying out of the question. His conviction, his
apprehension, his obsession, in short, was not a condition he
could invite a woman to share ; and that consequence of it was
precisely what was the matter with him. Something or other lay
in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and
the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle. It signified little
whether the crouching beast were destined to slay him or to
be slain. The definite point was the inevitable spring of the
creature; and the definite lesson from that was that a man
of feeling didn't cause himself to be accompanied by a lady
on a tiger-hunt. Such was the image under which he had ended
by figuring his life.

They had at first, none the less, in the scattered hours spent
together, made no allusion to that view of it ; which was a sign
he was handsomely ready to give that he didn't expect, that he
in fact didn't care always to be talking about it. Such a feature
in one's outlook was really like a hump on one's back. The
difference it made every minute of the day existed quite in-
dependently of discussion. One discussed, of course, like a
hunchback, for there was always, if nothing else, the hunchback
face. That remained, and she was watching him ; but people
watched best, as a general thing, in silence, so that such would
be predominantly the manner of their vigil. Yet he didn't want,
at the same time, to be solemn ; solemn was what he imagined
he too much tended to be with other people. The thing to
be, with the one person who knew, was easy and natural — to make
the reference rather than be seeming to avoid it, to avoid it rather
than be seeming to make it, and to keep it, in any case, familiar,
facetious even, rather than pedantic and portentous. Some such
consideration as the latter was doubtless in his mind, for instance,
when he wrote pleasantly to Miss Bartram that perhaps the great
thing he had so long felt as in the lap of the gods was no more
than this circumstance, which touched him so nearly, of her
acquiring a house in London. It was the first allusion they had

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 151

yet again made, needing any other hitherto so little ; but when she
replied, after having given him the news, that she was by no
means satisfied with such a trifle, as the climax to so special
a suspense, she almost set him wondering if she hadn't even
a larger conception of singularity for him than he had for himself.
He was at all events destined to become aware little by little, as
time went by, that she was all the while looking at his life,
judging it, measuring it, in the light of the thing she knew, which
grew to be at last, with the consecration of the years, never
mentioned between them save as " the real truth " about him.
That had always been his own form of reference to it, but she
adopted the form so quietly that, looking back at the end of a
period, he knew there was no moment at which it was traceable
that she had, as he might say, got inside his condition, or ex-
changed the attitude of beautifully indulging for that of still
more beautifully believing him.

It was always open to him to accuse her of seeing him but as
the most harmless of maniacs, and this, in the long run — since
it covered so much ground — was his easiest description of their
friendship. He had a screw loose for her, but she liked him
in spite of it, and was practically, against the rest of the world,
his kind, wise keeper, unremunerated, but fairly amused and, in
the absence of other near ties, not disreputably occupied. The
rest of the world of course thought him queer, but she, she only,
knew how, and above all why, queer ; which was precisely what
enabled her to dispose the concealing veil in the right folds.
She took his gaiety from him — since it had to pass with them
for gaiety — as she took everything else \ but she certainly so far
justified by her unerring touch his finer sense of the degree to
which he had ended by convincing her. She at least never spoke
of the secret of his life except as " the real truth about you,"
and she had in fact a wonderful way of making it seem, as such,
the secret of her own life too. That was in fine how he so
constantly felt her as allowing for him ; he couldn't on the whole
call it anything else. He allowed for himself, but she, exactly,
allowed still more; partly because, better placed for a sight of
the matter, she traced his unhappy perversion through portions
of its course into which he could scarce follow it. He knew
how he felt, but, besides knowing that, she knew how he looked
as well ; he knew each of the things of importance he was in-
sidiously kept from doing, but she could add up the amount
they made, understand how much, with a lighter weight on his
spirit, he might have done, and thereby establish how, clever as
he was, he fell short. Above all she was in the secret of the

152 THE BETTER SORT

difference between the forms he went through — those of his
little office under Government, those of caring for his modest
patrimony, for his library, for his garden in the country, for the
people in London whose invitations he accepted and repaid —
and the detachment that reigned beneath them and that made
of all behaviour, all that could in the least be called behaviour,
a long act of dissimulation. What it had come to was that he
wore a mask painted with the social simper, out of the eye-holes
of which there looked eyes of an expression not in the least
matching the other features. This the stupid world, even after
years, had never more than half discovered. It was only May
Bartram who had, and she achieved, by an art indescribable, the
feat of at once — or perhaps it was only alternately — meeting the
eyes from in front and mingling her own vision, as from over his
shoulder, with their peep through the apertures.

So, while they grew older together, she did watch with him,
and so she let this association give shape and colour to her own
existence. Beneath her forms as well detachment had learned to
sit, and behaviour had become for her, in the social sense, a false
account of herself. There was but one account of her that
would have been true all the while, and that she could give,
directly, to nobody, least of all to John Marcher. Her whole
attitude was a virtual statement, but the perception of that only
seemed destined to take its place for him as one of the many
things necessarily crowded out of his consciousness. If she
had, moreover, like himself, to make sacrifices to their real truth,
it was to be granted that her compensation might have affected
her as more prompt and more natural. They had long periods,
in this London time, during which, when they were together,
a stranger might have listened to them without in the least
pricking up his ears; on the other hand, the real truth was
equally liable at any moment to rise to the surface, and the
auditor would then have wondered indeed what they were talking
about. They had from an early time made up their mind that
society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the margin that this gave
them had fairly become one of their commonplaces. Yet there
were still moments when the situation turned almost fresh —
usually under the effect of some expression drawn from herself.
Her expressions doubtless repeated themselves, but her intervals
were generous. "What saves us, you know, is that we answer
so completely to so usual an appearance : that of the man and
woman whose friendship has become such a daily habit, or
almost, as to be at last indispensable." That, for instance, was
a remark she had frequently enough had occasion to make,

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 153

though she had given it at different times different developments.
What we are especially concerned with is the turn it happened
to take from her one afternoon when he had come to see her
in honour of her birthday. This anniversary had fallen on
a Sunday, at a season of thick fog and general outward gloom ;
but he had brought her his customary offering, having known
her now long enough to have established a hundred little
customs. It was one of his proofs to himself, the present he
made her on her birthday, that he had not sunk into real
selfishness. It was mostly nothing more than a small trinket,
but it was always fine of its kind, and he was regularly careful
to pay for it more than he thought he could afford. "Our
habit saves you, at least, don't you see ? because it makes you,
after all, for the vulgar, indistinguishable from other men.
What's the most inveterate mark of men in general? Why, the
capacity to spend endless time with dull women — to spend it,
I won't say without being bored, but without minding that they
are, without being driven off at a tangent by it ; which comes to
the same thing. I'm your dull woman, a part of the daily bread
for which you pray at church. That covers your tracks more
than anything."

"And what covers yours?" asked Marcher, whom his dull
woman could mostly to this extent amuse. " I see of course
what you mean by your saving me, in one way and another, so
far as other people are concerned — I've seen it all along. Only,
what is it that saves you ? I often think, you know, of that."

She looked as if she sometimes thought of that too, but in
rather a different way. "Where other people, you mean, are
concerned ? "

"Well, you're really so in with me, you know — as a sort of
result of my being so in with yourself. I mean of my having
such an immense regard for you, being so tremendously grateful
for all you've done for me. I sometimes ask myself if it's quite
fair. Fair I mean to have so involved and — since one may say it
— interested you. I almost feel as if you hadn't really had time
to do anything else."

"Anything else but be interested?" she asked. "Ah, what
else does one ever want to be ? If I've been ' watching ' with
you, as we long ago agreed that I was to do, watching is always
in itself an absorption."

" Oh, certainly," John Marcher said, " if you hadn't had your

curiosity ! Only, doesn't it sometimes come to you, as time

goes on, that your curiosity is not being particularly repaid ? "

May Bartram had a pause. " Do you ask that, by any chance,

154 THE BETTER SORT

because you feel at all that yours isn't? I mean because you
have to wait so long."

Oh, he understood what she meant. "For the thing to
happen that never does happen? For the beast to jump out?
No, I'm just where I was about it. It isn't a matter as to which
I can choose^ I can decide for a change. It isn't one as to which
there can be a change. It's in the lap of the gods. One's in
the hands of one's law — there one is. As to the form the law
will take, the way it will operate, that's its own affair."

"Yes," Miss Bartram replied; "of course one's fate is coming,
of course it has come, in its own form and its own way, all the
while. Only, you know, the form and the way in your case were
to have been — well, something so exceptional and, as one may
say, so particularly your own."

Something in this made him look at her with suspicion. "You
say 'were to have been,' as if in your heart you had begun to
doubt."

" Oh ! " she vaguely protested.

"As if you believed," he went on, "that nothing will now
take place."

She shook her head slowly, but rather inscrutably. "You're
far from my thought."

He continued to look at her. " What then is the matter with
you?"

"Well," she said after another wait, "the matter with me is
simply that I'm more sure than ever my curiosity, as you call it,
will be but too well repaid."

They were frankly grave now; he had got up from his seat,
had turned once more about the little drawing-room to which,
year after year, he brought his inevitable topic ; in which he had,
as he might have said, tasted their intimate community with
every sauce, where every object was as familiar to him as the
things of his own house and the very carpets were worn with his
fitful walk very much as the desks in old counting-houses are
worn by the elbows of generations of clerks. The generations
of his nervous moods had been at work there, and the place was
the written history of his whole middle life. Under the impres-
sion of what his friend had just said he knew himself, for some
reason, more aware of these things, which made him, after a
moment, stop again before her. "Is it, possibly, that you've
grown afraid?"

"Afraid?" He thought, as she repeated the word, that his
question had made her, a little, change colour ; so that, lest he
should have touched on a truth, he explained very kindly, "You

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 155

remember that that was what you asked me long ago — that first
day at Weatherend."

"Oh yes, and you told me you didn't know — that I was to
see for myself. We've said little about it since, even in so long
a time."

"Precisely," Marcher interposed — "quite as if it were too
delicate a matter for us to make free with. Quite as if we might
find, on pressure, that I am afraid. For then," he said, "we
shouldn't, should we? quite know what to do."

She had for the time no answer to this question. "There
have been days when I thought you were. Only, of course,"
she added, " there have been days when we have thought almost
anything."

" Everything. Oh ! " Marcher softly groaned as with a gasp,
half spent, at the face, more uncovered just then than it had
been for a long while, of the imagination always with them. It
had always had its incalculable moments of glaring out, quite as
with the very eyes of the very Beast, and, used as he was to
them, they could still draw from him the tribute of a sigh that
rose from the depths of his being. All that they had thought,
first and last, rolled over him ; the past seemed to have been re-
duced to mere barren speculation. This in fact was what the
place had just struck him as so full of — the simplification of
everything but the state of suspense That remained only by
seeming to hang in the void surrounding it. Even his original
fear, if fear it had been, had lost itself in the desert. " I judge,
however," he continued, "that you see I'm not afraid now."

"What I see is, as I make it out, that you've achieved some-
thing almost unprecedented in the way of getting used to danger.
Living with it so long and so closely, you've lost your sense of it ;
you know it's there, but you're indifferent, and you cease even, as
of old, to have to whistle in the dark. Considering what the
danger is," May Bartram wound up, "I'm bound to say that
I don't think your attitude could well be surpassed."

John Marcher faintly smiled. " It's heroic ? "

" Certainly— call it that."

He considered. " I am, then, a man of courage ? "

" That's what you were to show me."

He still, however, wondered. " But doesn't the man of
courage know what he's afraid of — or not afraid of? I don't
know that, you see. I don't focus it. I can't name it. I only
know I'm exposed."

"Yes, but exposed — how shall I say? — so directly. So inti-
mately. That's surely enough."

156 THE BETTER SORT

" Enough to make you feel, then— as what we may call the
end of our watch — that I'm not afraid ? "

"You're not afraid. But it isn't," she said, "the end of our
watch. That is it isn't the end of yours. You've everything
still to see."

" Then why haven't you ? " he asked. He had had, all along,
to-day, the sense of her keeping something back, and he still had
it. As this was his first impression of that, it made a kind of
date. The case was the more marked as she didn't at first
answer; which in turn made him go on. "You know some-
thing I don't." Then his voice, for that of a man of courage,
trembled a little. " You know what's to happen." Her silence,
with the face she showed, was almost a confession — it made him
sure. "You know, and you're afraid to tell me. It's so bad
that you're afraid I'll find out."

All this might be true, for she did look as if, unexpectedly to
her, he had crossed some mystic line that she had secretly
drawn round her. Yet she might, after all, not have worried ;
and the real upshot was that he himself, at all events, needn't.
"You'll never find out."

Ill

IT was all to have made, none the less, as I have said, a date ; as
came out in the fact that again and again, even after long
intervals, other things that passed between them wore, in relation
to this hour, but the character of recalls and results. Its
immediate effect had been indeed rather to lighten insistence —
almost to provoke a reaction ; as if their topic had dropped by
its own weight and as if moreover, for that matter, Marcher had
been visited by one of his occasional warnings against egotism.
He had kept up, he felt, and very decently on the whole, his
consciousness of the importance of not being selfish, and it was
true that he had never sinned in that direction without promptly
enough trying to press the scales the other way. He often
repaired his fault, the season permitting, by inviting his friend to
accompany him to the opera; and it not infrequently thus
happened that, to show he didn't wish her to have but one sort
of food for her mind, he was the cause of her appearing there
with him a dozen nights in the month. It even happened that,
seeing her home at such times, he occasionally went in with her
to finish, as he called it, the evening, and, the better to make his
point, sat down to the frugal but always careful little supper that
awaited his pleasure. His point was made, he thought, by his

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 157

not eternally insisting with Tier on himself; made for instance,
at such hours, when it befell that, her piano at hand and each of
them familiar with it, they went over passages of the opera
together. It chanced to be on one of these occasions, however,
that he reminded her of her not having answered a certain ques-
tion he had put to her during the talk that had taken place
between them on her last birthday. "What is it that saves
you ? " — saved her, he meant, from that appearance of variation
from the usual human type. If he had practically escaped
remark, as she pretended, by doing, in the most important
particular, what most men do — find the answer to life in patching
up an alliance of a sort with a woman no better than himself —
how had she escaped it, and how could the alliance, such as it
was, since they must suppose it had been more or less noticed,
have failed to make her rather positively talked about ?

"I never said," May Bartram replied, "that it hadn't made
me talked about."

" Ah well then, you're not ' saved.' "

"It has not been a question for me. If you've had your
woman, I've had," she said, " my man."

" And you mean that makes you all right ? "

She hesitated. "I don't know why it shouldn't make me —
humanly, which is what we're speaking of — as right as it makes
you."

" I see," Marcher returned. " ' Humanly/ no doubt, as show-
ing that you're living for something. Not, that is, just for me
and my secret."

May Bartram smiled. " I don't pretend it exactly shows that
I'm not living for you. It's my intimacy with you that's in
question."

He laughed as he saw what she meant. "Yes, but since, as
you say, I'm only, so far as people make out, ordinary, you're —
aren't you? — no more than ordinary either. You help me to
pass for a man like another. So if I am, as I understand you,
you're not compromised. Is that it ? "

She had another hesitation, but she spoke clearly enough.
" That's it. It's all that concerns me — to help you to pass for
a man like another."

He was careful to acknowledge the remark handsomely.
" How kind, how beautiful, you are to me ! How shall I ever
repay you ? "

She had her last grave pause, as if there might be a choice of
ways. But she chose. " By going on as you are."

It was into this going on as he was that they relapsed, and

158 THE BETTER SORT

really for so long a time that the day inevitably came for a
further sounding of their depths. It was as if these depths,
constantly bridged over by a structure that was firm enough
in spite of its lightness and of its occasional oscillation in the
somewhat vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the interest of
their nerves, a dropping of the plummet and a measurement
of the abyss. A difference had been made moreover, once for
all, by the fact that she had, all the while, not appeared to feel
the need of rebutting his charge of an idea within her that she
didn't dare to express, uttered just before one of the fullest of
their later discussions ended. It had come up for him then
that she " knew " something and that what she knew was bad —
too bad to tell him. When he had spoken of it as visibly so
bad that she was afraid he might find it out, her reply had left
the matter too equivocal to be let alone and yet, for Marcher's
special sensibility, almost too formidable again to touch. He
circled about it at a distance that alternately narrowed and
widened and that yet was not much affected by the consciousness
in him that there was nothing she could " know," after all, any
better than he did. She had no source of knowledge that he
hadn't equally — except of course that she might have finer
nerves. That was what women had where they were interested ;
they made out things, where people were concerned, that the
people often couldn't have made out for themselves. Their
nerves, their sensibility, their imagination, were conductors and
revealers, and the beauty of May Bartram was in particular that
she had given herself so to his case. He felt in these days what,
oddly enough, he had never felt before, the growth of a dread of
losing her by some catastrophe — some catastrophe that yet
wouldn't at all be the catastrophe : partly because she had,
almost of a sudden, begun to strike him as useful to him as
never yet, and partly by reason of an appearance of uncertainty
in her health, coincident and equally new. It was characteristic
of the inner detachment he had hitherto so successfully culti-
vated and to which our whole account of him is a reference, it
was characteristic that his complications, such as they were, had
never yet seemed so as at this crisis to thicken about him, even
to the point of making him ask himself if he were, by any
chance, of a truth, within sight or sound, within touch or reach,
within the immediate jurisdiction of the thing that waited.

When the day came, as come it had to, that his friend con-
fessed to him her fear of a deep disorder in her blood, he felt
somehow the shadow of a change and the chill of a shock.
He immediately began to imagine aggravations and disasters,

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 159

and above all to think of her peril as the direct menace for
himself of personal privation. This indeed gave him one of
those partial recoveries of equanimity that were agreeable to
him — it showed him that what was still first in his mind was the
loss she herself might suffer. "What if she should have to

die before knowing, before seeing ?" It would have been

brutal, in the early stages of her trouble, to put that question
to her; but it had immediately sounded for him to his own
concern, and the possibility was what most made him sorry
for her. If she did "know," moreover, in the sense of her
having had some — what should he think ? — mystical, irresistible
light, this would make the matter not better, but worse, inasmuch
as her original adoption of his own curiosity had quite become
the basis of her life. She had been living to see what would
be to be seen, and it would be cruel to her to have to give
up before the accomplishment of the vision. These reflections,
as I say, refreshed his generosity; yet, make them as he might,
he saw himself, with the lapse of the period, more and more
disconcerted. It lapsed for him with a strange, steady sweep,
and the oddest oddity was that it gave him, independently of
the threat of much inconvenience, almost the only positive
surprise his career, if career it could be called, had yet offered
him. She kept the house as she had never done; he had to
go to her to see her — she could meet him nowhere now, though
there was scarce a corner of their loved old London in which
she had not in the past, at one time or another, done so ; and
he found her always seated by her fire in the deep, old-fashioned
chair she was less and less able to leave. He had been struck
one day, after an absence exceeding his usual measure, with
her suddenly looking much older to him than he had ever
thought of her being; then he recognised that the suddenness
was all on his side — he had just been suddenly struck. She
looked older because inevitably, after so many years, she was
old, or almost ; which was of course true in still greater measure
of her companion. If she was old, or almost, John Marcher
assuredly was, and yet it was her showing of the lesson, not his
own, that brought the truth home to him. His surprises began
here; when once they had begun they multiplied; they came
rather with a rush : it was as if, in the oddest way in the world,
they had all been kept back, sown in a thick cluster, for the
late afternoon of life, the time at which, for people in general,
the unexpected has died out.

One of them was that he should have caught himself — for
he had so done — really wondering if the great accident would

i6o THE BETTER SORT

take form now as nothing more than his being condemned to
see this charming woman, this admirable friend, pass away from
him. He had never so unreservedly qualified her as while
confronted in thought with such a possibility ; in spite of which
there was small doubt for him that as an answer to his long
riddle the mere effacement of even so fine a feature of his
situation would be an abject anticlimax. It would represent,
as connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity under the
shadow of which his existence could only become the most
grotesque of failures. He had been far from holding it a failure
— long as he had waited for the appearance that was to make
it a success. He had waited for a quite other thing, not for
such a one as that. The breath of his good faith came short,
however, as he recognised how long he had waited, or how
long, at least, his companion had. That she, at all events,
might be recorded as having waited in vain — this affected him
sharply, and all the more because of his at first having done
little more than amuse himself with the idea. It grew more
grave as the gravity of her condition grew, and the state of mind
it produced in him, which he ended by watching, himself, as if
it had been some definite disfigurement of his outer person, may
pass for another of his surprises. This conjoined itself still with
another, the really stupefying consciousness of a question that
he would have allowed to shape itself had he dared. What did
everything mean — what, that is, did she mean, she and her vain
waiting and her probable death and the soundless admonition
of it all — unless that, at this time of day, it was simply, it was
overwhelmingly too late? He had never, at any stage of his
queer consciousness, admitted the whisper of such a correction ;
he had never, till within these last few months, been so false
to his conviction as not to hold that what was to come to him
had time, whether he struck himself as having it or not. That
at last, at last, he certainly hadn't it, to speak of, or had it but
in the scantiest measure — such, soon enough, as things went
with him, became the inference with which his old obsession
had to reckon : and this it was not helped to do by the more and
more confirmed appearance that the great vagueness casting
the long shadow in which he had lived had, to attest itself,
almost no margin left. Since it was in Time that he was to
have met his fate, so it was in Time that his fate was to have
acted; and as he waked up to the sense of no longer being
young, which was exactly the sense of being stale, just as that,
in turn, was the sense of being weak, he waked up to another
matter beside. It all hung together ; they were subject, he and the

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 161

great vagueness, to an equal and indivisible law. When the possi-
bilities themselves had, accordingly, turned stale, when the secret
of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated,
that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn't have been failure
to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged ; it was failure not
to be anything. And so, in the dark valley into which his path
had taken its unlooked-for twist, he wondered not a little as
he groped. He didn't care what awful crash might overtake
him, with what ignominy or what monstrosity he might yet be
associated — since he wasn't, after all, too utterly old to suffer —
if it would only be decently proportionate to the posture he
had kept, all his life, in the promised presence of it. He had
but one desire left — that he shouldn't have been " sold."

IV

THEN it was that one afternoon, while the spring of the year was
young and new, she met, all in her own way, his frankest betrayal
of these alarms. He had gone in late to see her, but evening
had not settled, and she was presented to him in that long,
fresh light of waning April days which affects us often with a
sadness sharper than the greyest hours of autumn. The week
had been warm, the spring was supposed to have begun early,
and May Bartram sat, for the first time in the year, without a fire,
a fact that, to Marcher's sense, gave the scene of which she
formed part a smooth and ultimate look, an air of knowing, in
its immaculate order and its cold, meaningless cheer, that it would
never see a fire again. Her own aspect — he could scarce have
said why — intensified this note. Almost as white as wax, with
the marks and signs in her face as numerous and as fine as if
they had been etched by a needle, with soft white draperies
relieved by a faded green scarf, the delicate tone of which had
been consecrated by the years, she was the picture of a serene,
exquisite, but impenetrable sphinx, whose head, or indeed all
whose person, might have been powdered with silver. She was
a sphinx, yet with her white petals and green fronds she might
have been a lily too — only an artificial lily, wonderfully imitated
and constantly kept, without dust or stain, though not exempt
from a slight droop and a complexity of faint creases, under some
clear glass bell. The perfection of household care, of high
polish and finish, always reigned in her rooms, but they especially
looked to Marcher at present as if everything had been wound
up, tucked in, put away, so that she might sit with folded hands
and with nothing more to do. She was " out of it," to his vision ;

162 THE BETTER SORT

her work was over ; she communicated with him as across some
gulf, or from some island of rest that she had already reached,
and it made him feel strangely abandoned. Was it — or, rather,
wasn't it — that if for so long she had been watching with him the
answer to their question had swum into her ken and taken on its
name, so that her occupation was verily gone ? He had as much
as charged her with this in saying to her, many months before,
that she even then knew something she was keeping from him.
It was a point he had never since ventured to press, vaguely
fearing, as he did, that it might become a difference, perhaps
a disagreement, between them. He had in short, in this later
time, turned nervous, which was what, in all the other years, he
had never been ; and the oddity was that his nervousness should
have waited till he had begun to doubt, should have held off so
long as he was sure. There was something, it seemed to him,
that the wrong word would bring down on his head, something
that would so at least put an end to his suspense. But he wanted
not to speak the wrong word ; that would make everything ugly.
He wanted the knowledge he lacked to drop on him, if drop it
could, by its own august weight. If she was to forsake him it
was surely for her to take leave. This was why he didn't ask her
again, directly, what she knew ; but it was also why, approaching
the matter from another side, he said to her in the course of his
visit : " What do you regard as the very worst that, at this time of
day, can happen to me ? "

He had asked her that in the past often enough; they had,
with the odd, irregular rhythm of their intensities and avoidances,
exchanged ideas about it and then had seen the ideas washed
away by cool intervals, washed like figures traced in sea-sand. It
had ever been the mark of their talk that the oldest allusions in
it required but a little dismissal and reaction to come out again,
sounding for the hour as new. She could thus at present meet
his inquiry quite freshly and patiently. " Oh yes, I've repeatedly
thought, only it always seemed to me of old that I couldn't
quite make up my mind. I thought of dreadful things, between
which it was difficult to choose ; and so must you have done."

" Rather ! I feel now as if I had scarce done anything else.
I appear to myself to have spent my life in thinking of nothing
but dreadful things. A great many of them I've at different
times named to you, but there were others I couldn't name."

" They were too, too dreadful ? "

" Too, too dreadful — some of them."

She looked at him a minute, and there came to him as he
met it an inconsequent sense that her eyes, when one got their

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 163

full clearness, were still as beautiful as they had been in youth,
only beautiful with a strange, cold light — a light that somehow
was a part of the effect, if it wasn't rather a part of the cause, of
the pale, hard sweetness of the season and the hour. "And
yet," she said at last, " there are horrors we have mentioned."

It deepened the strangeness to see her, as such a figure in such
a picture, talk of " horrors," but she was to do, in a few minutes,
something stranger yet — though even of this he was to take the
full measure but afterwards — and the note of it was already in
the air. It was, for the matter of that, one of the signs that her
eyes were having again such a high flicker of their prime. He
had to admit, however, what she said. "Oh yes, there were
times when we did go far." He caught himself in the act of speak-
ing as if it all were over. Well, he wished it were; and the
consummation depended, for him, clearly, more and more on his
companion.

But she had now a soft smile. " Oh, far ! "

It was oddly ironic. " Do you mean you're prepared to go
further?"

She was frail and ancient and charming as she continued to
look at him, yet it was rather as if she had lost the thread. " Do
you consider that we went so far ? "

" Why, I thought it the point you were just making — that we
had looked most things in the face."

" Including each other ? " She still smiled. " But you're quite
right. We've had together great imaginations, often great fears ;
but some of them have been unspoken."

"Then the worst — we haven't faced that. I could face it, I
believe, if I knew what you think it. I feel," he explained, " as
if I had lost my power to conceive such things." And he
wondered if he looked as blank as he sounded. " It's spent."

" Then why do you assume," she asked, " that mine isn't ? "

"Because you've given me signs to the contrary. It isn't
a question for you of conceiving, imagining, comparing. It
isn't a question now of choosing." At last he came out with it.
"You know something that I don't You've shown me that
before."

These last words affected her, he could see in a moment,
remarkably, and she spoke with firmness. " I've shown you, my
dear, nothing."

He shook his head. " You can't hide it."

"Oh, oh!" May Bartram murmured over what she couldn't
hide. It was almost a smothered groan.

"You admitted it months ago, when I spoke of it to you as

1 64 THE BETTER SORT

of something you were afraid I would find out. Your answer
was that I couldn't, that I wouldn't, and I don't pretend I have.
But you had something therefore in mind, and I see now that
it must have been, that it still is, the possibility that, of all
possibilities, has settled itself for you as the worst. This," he
went on, "is why I appeal to you. I'm only afraid of ignorance
now — I'm not afraid of knowledge." And then as for a while
she said nothing : " What makes me sure is that I see in your
face and feel here, in this air and amid these appearances, that
you're out of it. You've done. You've had your experience.
You leave me to my fate."

Well, she listened, motionless and white in her chair, as if she
had in fact a decision to make, so that her whole manner was a
virtual confession, though still with a small, fine, inner stiffness,
an imperfect surrender. " It would be the worst," she finally
let herself say. " I mean the thing that I've never said."

It hushed him a moment. " More monstrous than all the
monstrosities we've named ? "

" More monstrous. Isn't that what you sufficiently express,"
she asked, " in calling it the worst ? "

Marcher thought. " Assuredly — if you mean, as I do, some-
thing that includes all the loss and all the shame that are
thinkable."

" It would if it should happen," said May Bartram. " What
we're speaking of, remember, is only my idea."

" It's your belief," Marcher returned. " That's enough for me.
I feel your beliefs are right. Therefore if, having this one, you
give me no more light on it, you abandon me."

"No, no !" she repeated. " I'm with you — don't you see? —
still." And as if to make it more vivid to him she rose from her
chair — a movement she seldom made in these days — and showed
herself, all draped and all soft, in her fairness and slimness. " I
haven't forsaken you."

It was really, in its effort against weakness, a generous assur-
ance, and had the success of the impulse not, happily, been great,
it would have touched him to pain more than to pleasure. But
the cold charm in her eyes had spread, as she hovered before
him, to all the rest of her person, so that it was, for the minute,
almost like a recovery of youth. He couldn't pity her for that ;
he could only take her as she showed — as capable still of helping
him. It was as if, at the same time, her light might at any
instant go out ; wherefore he must make the most of it. There
passed before him with intensity the three or four things he
wanted most to know ; but the question that came of itself to his

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 165

lips really covered the others. " Then tell me if I shall con-
sciously suffer."

She promptly shook her head. " Never ! "

It confirmed the authority he imputed to her, and it produced
on him an extraordinary effect. "Well, what's better than that?
Do you call that the worst ? "

" You think nothing is better ? " she asked.

She seemed to mean something so special that he again sharply
wondered, though still with the dawn of a prospect of relief.
" Why not, if one doesn't know ? " After which, as their eyes,
over his question, met in a silence, the dawn deepened and
something to his purpose came, prodigiously, out of her very
face. His own, as he took it in, suddenly flushed to the forehead,
and he gasped with the force of a perception to which, on the
instant, everything fitted. The sound of his gasp filled the air ;
then he became articulate. " I see — if I don't suffer ! "

In her own look, however, was doubt. " You see what ? "

" Why, what you mean — what you've always meant."

She again shook her head. "What I mean isn't what I've
always meant. It's different."

" It's something new?"

She hesitated. " Something new. It's not what you think.
I see what you think."

His divination drew breath then ; only her correction might be
wrong. " It isn't that I am a donkey ? " he asked between faint-
ness and grimness. " It isn't that it's all a mistake? "

" A mistake ? " she pityingly echoed. That possibility, for her,
he saw, would be monstrous ; and if she guaranteed him the im-
munity from pain it would accordingly not be what she had in
mind. "Oh, no," she declared; "it's nothing of that sort.
You've been right."

Yet he couldn't help asking himself if she weren't, thus
pressed, speaking but to save him. It seemed to him he should
be most lost if his history should prove all a platitude. " Are
you telling me the truth, so that I sha'n't have been a bigger
idiot than I can bear to know? I haven't lived with a vain
imagination, in the most besotted illusion ? I haven't waited but
to see the door shut in my face ? "

She shook her head again. "However the case stands that
isn't the truth. Whatever the reality, it is a reality. The door
isn't shut. The door's open," said May Bartram.

" Then something's to come ? "

She waited once again, always with her cold, sweet eyes on
him. " It's never too late." She had, with her gliding step,

i66 THE BETTER SORT

diminished the distance between them, and she stood nearer to
him, close to him, a minute, as if still full of the unspoken.
Her movement might have been for some finer emphasis of what
she was at once hesitating and deciding to say. He had been
standing by the chimney-piece, fireless and sparely adorned, a
small, perfect old French clock and two morsels of rosy
Dresden constituting all its furniture ; and her hand grasped the
shelf while she kept him waiting, grasped it a little as for support
and encouragement. She only kept him waiting, however ; that
is he only waited. It had become suddenly, from her move-
ment and attitude, beautiful and vivid to him that she had some-
thing more to give him ; her wasted face delicately shone with it,
and it glittered, almost as with the white lustre of silver, in her
expression. She was right, incontestably, for what he saw in her
face was the truth, and strangely, without consequence, while
their talk of it as dreadful was still in the air, she appeared to
present it as inordinately soft. This, prompting bewilderment,
made him but gape the more gratefully for her revelation, so that
they continued for some minutes silent, her face shining at him,
her contact imponderably pressing, and his stare all kind, but all
expectant. The end, none the less, was that what he had ex-
pected failed to sound. Something else took place instead,
which seemed to consist at first in the mere closing of her eyes.
She gave way at the same instant to a slow, fine shudder, and
though he remained staring — though he stared, in fact, but the
harder — she turned off and regained her chair. It was the end
of what she had been intending, but it left him thinking only of
that.

"Well, you don't say ?"

She had touched in her passage a bell near the chimney and
had sunk back, strangely pale. " I'm afraid I'm too ill."

" Too ill to tell me ? " It sprang up sharp to him, and almost
to his lips, the fear that she would die without giving him light.
He checked himself in time from so expressing his question, but
she answered as if she had heard the words.

"Don't you know — now?"

"'Now' ?" She had spoken as if something that had

made a difference had come up within the moment. But her
maid, quickly obedient to her bell, was already with them. " I
know nothing." And he was afterwards to say to himself that
he must have spoken with odious impatience, such an impatience
as to show that, supremely disconcerted, he washed his hands of
the whole question.

" Oh! "said May Bartram.

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 167

" Are you in pain ? " he asked, as the woman went to her.

" No," said May Bartram.

Her maid, who had put an arm round her as if to take her to
her room, fixed on him eyes that appealingly contradicted her ;
in spite of which, however, he showed once more his mystifica-
tion. " What then has happened ? "

She was once more, with her companion's help, on her feet,
and, feeling withdrawal imposed on him, he had found, blankly,
his hat and gloves and had reached the door. Yet he waited
for her answer. " What was to," she said.

HE came back the next day, but she was then unable to see him,
and as it was literally the first time this had occurred in the long
stretch of their acquaintance he turned away, defeated and sore,
almost angry — or feeling at least that such a break in their custom
was really the beginning of the end — and wandered alone with
his thoughts, especially with one of them that he was unable to
keep down. She was dying, and he would lose her; she was
dying, and his life would end. He stopped in the park, into
which he had passed, and stared before him at his recurrent
doubt. Away from her the doubt pressed again ; in her presence
he had believed her, but as he felt his forlornness he threw himself
into the explanation that, nearest at hand, had most of a miserable
warmth for him and least of a cold torment. She had deceived
him to save him — to put him off with something in which he
should be able to rest. What could the thing that was to happen
to him be, after all, but just this thing that had begun to happen?
Her dying, her death, his consequent solitude — that was what
he had figured as the beast in the jungle, that was what had been
in the lap of the gods. He had had her word for it as he left
her ; for what else, on earth, could she have meant ? It wasn't
a thing of a monstrous order ; not a fate rare and distinguished ;
not a stroke of fortune that overwhelmed and immortalised ; it
had only the stamp of the common doom. But poor Marcher, at
this hour, judged the common doom sufficient. It would serve his
turn, and even as the consummation of infinite waiting he would
bend his pride to accept it. He sat down on a bench in the
twilight. He hadn't been a fool. Something had been, as she
had said, to come. Before he rose indeed it had quite struck
him that the final fact really matched with the long avenue
through which he had had to reach it. As sharing his suspense,
and as giving herself all, giving her life, to bring it to an end, she

168 THE BETTER SORT

had come with him every step of the way. He had lived by her
aid, and to leave her behind would be cruelly, damnably to miss
her. What could be more overwhelming than that ?

Well, he was to know within the week, for though she kept him
a while at bay, left him restless and wretched during a series of
days on each of which he asked about her only again to have to
turn away, she ended his trial by receiving him where she had
always received him. Yet she had been brought out at some
hazard into the presence of so many of the things that were,
consciously, vainly, half their past, and there was scant service
left in the gentleness of her mere desire, all too visible, to check
his obsession and wind up his long trouble. That was clearly
what she wanted ; the one thing more, for her own peace, while
she could still put out her hand. He was so affected by her state
that, once seated by her chair, he was moved to let everything
go ; it was she herself therefore who brought him back, took up
again, before she dismissed him, her last word of the other time.
She showed how she wished to leave their affair in order. " I'm
not sure you understood. You've nothing to wait for more. It
has come."

Oh, how he looked at her ! " Really ? "

"Really."

"The thing that, as you said, was to ?"

" The thing that we began in our youth to watch for."

Face to face with her once more he believed her; it was a
claim to which he had so abjectly little to oppose. "You mean
that it has come as a positive, definite occurrence, with a name
and a date ? "

"Positive. Definite. I don't know about the 'name,' but,
oh, with a date ! "

He found himself again too helplessly at sea. " But come in
the night — come and passed me by ? "

May Bartram had her strange, faint smile. " Oh no, it hasn't
passed you by ! "

"But if I haven't been aware of it, and it hasn't touched
me ?"

" Ah, your not being aware of it," and she seemed to hesitate
an instant to deal with this — " your not being aware of it is the
strangeness in the strangeness. It's the wonder of the wonder."
She spoke as with the softness almost of a sick child, yet now at
last, at the end of all, with the perfect straightness of a sibyl.
She visibly knew that she knew, and the effect on him was of
something co-ordinate, in its high character, with the law that had
ruled him. It was the true voice of the law ; so on her lips would

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 169

the law itself have sounded. " It has touched you," she went on.
" It has done its office. It has made you all its own."

"So utterly without my knowing it? "

" So utterly without your knowing it." His hand, as he leaned
to her, was on the arm of her chair, and, dimly smiling always
now, she placed her own on it. "It's enough if /know it."

" Oh ! " he confusedly sounded, as she herself of late so often
had done.

" What I long ago said is true. You'll never know now, and
I think you ought to be content. You've had it," said May
Bartram.

"But had what?"

" Why, what was to have marked you out. The proof of your
law. It has acted. I'm too glad," she then bravely added, "to
have been able to see what it's not"

He continued to attach his eyes to her, and with the sense that
it was all beyond him, and that she was too, he would still have
sharply challenged her, had he not felt it an abuse of her weak-
ness to do more than take devoutly what she gave him, take it as
hushed as to a revelation. If he did speak, it was out of the
foreknowledge of his loneliness to come. " If you're glad of what
it's ' not/ it might then have been worse ? "

She turned her eyes away, she looked straight before her with
which, after a moment : "Well, you know our fears."

He wondered. " It's something then we never feared ? '

On this, slowly, she turned to him. "Did we ever dream, with
all our dreams, that we should sit and talk of it thus ? "

He tried for a little to make out if they had ; but it was as if
their dreams, numberless enough, were in solution in some thick,
cold mist, in which thought lost itself. " It might have been that
we couldn't talk ? "

"Well"— she did her best for him— "not from this side. This,
you see," she said, "is the other side."

" I think," poor Marcher returned, " that all sides are the same
to me." Then, however, as she softly shook her head in correc-
tion : " We mightn't, as it were, have got across ? "

"To where we are — no. We're here" — she made her weak
emphasis.

" And much good does it do us ! " was her friend's frank
comment.

" It does us the good it can. It does us the good that it isn't

here. It's past. It's behind," said May Bartram. " Before "

but her voice dropped.

He had got up, not to tire her, but it was hard to combat his

i;o THE BETTER SORT

yearning. She after all told him nothing but that his light had

failed — which he knew well enough without her. " Before ? "

he blankly echoed.

" Before, you see, it was always to come. That kept it present."

" Oh, I don't care what comes now ! Besides," Marcher added,
"it seems to me I liked it better present, as you say, than I
can like it absent with your absence."

" Oh, mine ! " — and her pale hands made light of it.

" With the absence of everything." He had a dreadful sense
of standing there before her for — so far as anything but this
proved, this bottomless drop was concerned — the last time of their
life. It rested on him with a weight he felt he could scarce bear,
and this weight it apparently was that still pressed out what
remained in him of speakable protest. " I believe you ; but I
can't begin to pretend I understand. Nothing, for me, is past ;
nothing will pass until I pass myself, which I pray my stars may
be as soon as possible. Say, however," he added, "that I've
eaten my cake, as you contend, to the last crumb — how can the
thing I've never felt at all be the thing I was marked out
to feel?"

She met him, perhaps, less directly, but she met him un-
perturbed. " You take your * feelings ' for granted. You were to
suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it."

" How in the world — when what is such knowledge but
suffering ? "

She looked up at him a while, in silence. "No — you don't
understand."

" I suffer," said John Marcher.

" Don't, don't ! "

"How can I help at least tkatV*

"Don't/" May Bartram repeated.

She spoke it in a tone so special, in spite of her weakness, that
he stared an instant — stared as if some light, hitherto hidden,
had shimmered across his vision. Darkness again closed over it,
but the gleam had already become for him an idea. " Because
I haven't the right ? "

" Don't know — when you needn't," she mercifully urged. " You
needn't — for we shouldn't."

" Shouldn't ? " If he could but know what she meant !

" No— it's too much."

"Too much?" he still asked — but with a mystification that
was the next moment, of a sudden, to give way. Her words, if
they meant something, affected him in this light — the light also
of her wasted face—as meaning all, and the sense of what know-

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 171

ledge had been for herself came over him with a rush which
broke through into a question. "Is it of that, then, you're
dying?"

She but watched him, gravely at first, as if to see, with this,
where he was, and she might have seen something, or feared
something, that moved her sympathy. " I would live for you still
— if I could." Her eyes closed for a little, as if, withdrawn into
herself, she were, for a last time, trying. " But I can't ! " she said
as she raised them again to take leave of him.

She couldn't indeed, as but too promptly and sharply appeared,
and he had no vision of her after this that was anything but
darkness and doom. They had parted forever in that strange
talk ; access to her chamber of pain, rigidly guarded, was almost
wholly forbidden him ; he was feeling now moreover, in the face
of doctors, nurses, the two or three relatives attracted doubtless
by the presumption of what she had to " leave," how few were
the rights, as they were called in such cases, that he had to put
forward, and how odd it might even seem that their intimacy
shouldn't have given him more of them. The stupidest fourth
cousin had more, even though she had been nothing in such a
person's life. She had been a feature of features in his, for what
else was it to have been so indispensable? Strange beyond
saying were the ways of existence, baffling for him the anomaly
of his lack, as he felt it to be, of producible claim. A woman
might have been, as it were, everything to him, and it might yet
present him in no connection that anyone appeared obliged to
recognise. If this was the case in these closing weeks it was the
case more sharply on the occasion of the last offices rendered, in
the great grey London cemetery, to what had been mortal, to
what had been precious, in his friend. The concourse at her
grave was not numerous, but he saw himself treated as scarce
more nearly concerned with it than if there had been a thousand
others. He was in short from this moment face to face with the
fact that he was to profit extraordinarily little by the interest May
Bartram had taken in him. He couldn't quite have said what he
expected, but he had somehow not expected this approach to a
double privation. Not only had her interest failed him, but he
seemed to feel himself unattended — and for a reason he couldn't
sound — by the distinction, the dignity, the propriety, if nothing
else, of the man markedly bereaved. It was as if, in the view of
society, he had not been markedly bereaved, as if there still failed
some sign or proof of it, and as if, none the less, his character
could never be affirmed, nor the deficiency ever made up. There
were moments, as the weeks went by, when he would have liked,

i;2 THE BETTER SORT

by some almost aggressive act, to take his stand on the intimacy
of his loss, in order that it might be questioned and his retort, to
the relief of his spirit, so recorded ; but the moments of an irri-
tation more helpless followed fast on these, the moments during
which, turning things over with a good conscience but with a
bare horizon, he found himself wondering if he oughtn't to have
begun, so to speak, further back.

He found himself wondering indeed at many things, and this
last speculation had others to keep it company. What could he
have done, after all, in her lifetime, without giving them both, as
it were, away ? He couldn't have made it known she was watch-
ing him, for that would have published the superstition of the
Beast. This was what closed his mouth now — now that the
Jungle had been threshed to vacancy and that the Beast had
stolen away. It sounded too foolish and too flat ; the difference
for him in this particular, the extinction in his life of the element
of suspense, was such in fact as to surprise him. He could
scarce have said what the effect resembled ; the abrupt cessation,
the positive prohibition, of music perhaps, more than anything
else, in some place all adjusted and all accustomed to sonority
and to attention. If he could at any rate have conceived lifting
the veil from his image at some moment of the past (what had
he done, after all, if not lift it to her?), so to do this to-day, to talk
to people at large of the jungle cleared and confide to them that
he now felt it as safe, would have been not only to see them
listen as to a goodwife's tale, but really to hear himself tell one.
What it presently came to in truth was that poor Marcher waded
through his beaten grass, where no life stirred, where no breath
sounded, where no evil eye seemed to gleam from a possible lair,
very much as if vaguely looking for the Beast, and still more as
if missing it. He walked about in an existence that had grown
strangely more spacious, and, stopping fitfully in places where the
undergrowth of life struck him as closer, asked himself yearn-
ingly, wondered secretly and sorely, if it would have lurked
here or there. It would have at all events sprung ; what was at
least complete was his belief in the truth itself of the assurance
given him. The change from his old sense to his new was abso-
lute and final : what was to happen had so absolutely and finally
happened that he was as little able to know a fear for his future
as to know a hope ; so absent in short was any question of any-
thing still to come. He was to live entirely with the other
question, that of his unidentified past, that of his having to see
his fortune impenetrably muffled and masked.

The torment of this vision became then his occupation; he

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 173

couldn't perhaps have consented to live but for the possibility
of guessing. She had told him, his friend, not to guess ; she
had forbidden him, so far as he might, to know, and she had
even in a sort denied the power in him to learn : which were so
many things, precisely, to deprive him of rest. It wasn't that he
wanted, he argued for fairness, that anything that had happened
to him should happen over again ; it was only that he shouldn't,
as an anticlimax, have been taken sleeping so sound as not to be
able to win back by an effort of thought the lost stuff of con-
sciousness. He declared to himself at moments that he would
either win it back or have done with consciousness for ever ; he
made this idea his one motive, in fine, made it so much his
passion that none other, to compare with it, seemed ever to have
touched him. The lost stuff of consciousness became thus for
him as a strayed or stolen child to an unappeasable father ; he
hunted it up and down very much as if he were knocking at
doors and inquiring of the police. This was the spirit in which,
inevitably, he set himself to travel ; he started on a journey that
was to be as long as he could make it; it danced before him
that, as the other side of the globe couldn't possibly have less to
say to him, it might, by a possibility of suggestion, have more.
Before he quitted London, however, he made a pilgrimage to
May Bartram's grave, took his way to it through the endless
avenues of the grim suburban necropolis, sought it out in the
wilderness of tombs, and, though he had come but for the
renewal of the act of farewell, found himself, when he had at last
stood by it, beguiled into long intensities. He stood for an
hour, powerless to turn away and yet powerless to penetrate the
darkness of death ; fixing with his eyes her inscribed name and
date, beating his forehead against the fact of the secret they kept,
drawing his breath, while he waited as if, in pity of him, some
sense would rise from the stones. He kneeled on the stones,
however, in vain ; they kept what they concealed ; and if the
face of the tomb did become a face for him it was because her
two names were like a pair of eyes that didn't know him. He
gave them a last long look, but no palest light broke.

174 THE BETTER SORT

VI

HE stayed away, after this, for a year ; he visited the depths of
Asia, spending himself on scenes of romantic interest, of super-
lative sanctity \ but what was present to him everywhere was that
for a man who had known what he had known the world was
vulgar and vain. The state of mind in which he had lived for so
many years shone out to him, in reflection, as a light that
coloured and refined, a light beside which the glow of the East
was garish, cheap and thin. The terrible truth was that he had
lost — with everything else — a distinction as well ; the things he
saw couldn't help being common when he had become common
to look at them. He was simply now one of them himself — he
was in the dust, without a peg for the sense of difference ; and
there were hours when, before the temples of gods and the
sepulchres of kings, his spirit turned, for nobleness of associa-
tion, to the barely discriminated slab in the London suburb.
That had become for him, and more intensely with time and
distance, his one witness of a past glory. It was all that was left
to him for proof or pride, yet the past glories of Pharaohs were
nothing to him as he thought of it. Small wonder then that he
came back to it on the morrow of his return. He was drawn
there this time as irresistibly as the other, yet with a confidence,
almost, that was doubtless the effect of the many months that
had elapsed. He had lived, in spite of himself, into his change
of feeling, and in wandering over the earth had wandered, as
might be said, from the circumference to the centre of his desert.
He had settled to his safety and accepted perforce his extinction ;
figuring to himself, with some colour, in the likeness of certain
little old men he remembered to have seen, of whom, all meagre
and wizened as they might look, it was related that they had in
their time fought twenty duels or been loved by ten princesses.
They indeed had been wondrous for others, while he was but
wondrous for himself; which, however, was exactly the cause of
his haste to renew the wonder by getting back, as he might put
it, into his own presence. That had quickened his steps and
checked his delay. If his visit was prompt it was because he had
been separated so long from the part of himself that alone he
now valued.

It is accordingly not false to say that he reached his goal with
a certain elation and stood there again with a certain assurance.
The creature beneath the sod knew of his rare experience, so
that, strangely now, the place had lost for him its mere blankness
of expression. It met him in mildness — not, as before, in

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 175

mockery ; it wore for him the air of conscious greeting that we
find, after absence, in things that have closely belonged to us
and which seem to confess of themselves to the connection. The
plot of ground, the graven tablet, the tended flowers affected him
so as belonging to him that he quite felt for the hour like a
contented landlord reviewing a piece of property. Whatever had
happened — well, had happened. He had not come back this
time with the vanity of that question, his former worrying, " What,
what ? " now practically so spent. Yet he would, none the less,
never again so cut himself off from the spot ; he would come
back to it every month, for if he did nothing else by its aid he
at least held up his head. It thus grew for him, in the oddest
way, a positive resource ; he carried out his idea of periodical
returns, which took their place at last among the most inveterate
of his habits. What it all amounted to, oddly enough, was that,
in his now so simplified world, this garden of death gave him the
few square feet of earth on which he could still most live. It
was as if, being nothing anywhere else for anyone, nothing even
for himself, he were just everything here, and if not for a crowd
of witnesses, or indeed for any witness but John Marcher, then
by clear right of the register that he could scan like an open page.
The open page was the tomb of his friend, and there were the
facts of the past, there the truth of his life, there the backward
reaches in which he could lose himself. He did this, from time
to time, with such effect that he seemed to wander through the
old years with his hand in the arm of a companion who was, in
the most extraordinary manner, his other, his younger self ; and
to wander, which was more extraordinary yet, round and round
a third presence — not wandering she, but stationary, still, whose
eyes, turning with his revolution, never ceased to follow him, and
whose seat was his point, so to speak, of orientation. Thus in
short he settled to live — feeding only on the sense that he once
had lived, and dependent on it not only for a support but for an
identity.

It sufficed him, in its way, for months, and the year elapsed ; it
would doubtless even have carried him further but for an accident,
superficially slight, which moved him, in a quite other direction,
with a force beyond any of his impressions of Egypt or of India.
It was a thing of the merest chance — the turn, as he afterwards
felt, of a hair, though he was indeed to live to believe that if light
hadn't come to him in this particular fashion it would still have
come in another. He was to live to believe this, I say, though
he was not to live, I may not less definitely mention, to do much
else. We allow him at any rate the benefit of the conviction,

i;6 THE BETTER SORT

struggling up for him at the end, that, whatever might have
happened or not happened, he would have come round of him-
self to the light. The incident of an autumn day had put the
match to the train laid from of old by his misery. With the light
before him he knew that even of late his ache had only been
smothered. It was strangely drugged, but it throbbed ; at the
touch it began to bleed. And the touch, in the event, was the
face of a fellow-mortal. This face, one grey afternoon when the
leaves were thick in the alleys, looked into Marcher's own, at the
cemetery, with an expression like the cut of a blade. He felt it,
that is, so deep down that he winced at the steady thrust. The
person who so mutely assaulted him was a figure he had noticed,
on reaching his own goal, absorbed by a grave a short distance
away, a grave apparently fresh, so that the emotion of the visitor
would probably match it for frankness. This fact alone forbade
further attention, though during the time he stayed he remained
vaguely conscious of his neighbour, a middle-aged man apparently,
in mourning, whose bowed back, among the clustered monuments
and mortuary yews, was constantly presented. Marcher's theory
that these were elements in contact with which he himself revived,
had suffered, on this occasion, it may be granted, a sensible
though inscrutable check. The autumn day was dire for him as
none had recently been, and he rested with a heaviness he had
not yet known on the low stone table that bore May Bartram's
name. He rested without power to move, as if some spring in
him, some spell vouchsafed, had suddenly been broken forever.
If he could have done that moment as he wanted he would
simply have stretched himself on the slab that was ready to take
him, treating it as a place prepared to receive his last sleep.
What in all the wide world had he now to keep awake for ? He
stared before him with the question, and it was then that, as
one of the cemetery walks passed near him, he caught the shock
of the face.

His neighbour at the other grave had withdrawn, as he himself,
with force in him to move, would have done by now, and was
advancing along the path on his way to one of the gates. This
brought him near, and his pace was slow, so that — and all the
more as there was a kind of hunger in his look — the two men were
for a minute directly confronted. Marcher felt him on the spot
as one of the deeply stricken — a perception so sharp that nothing
else in the picture lived for it, neither his dress, his age, nor his
presumable character and class; nothing lived but the deep
ravage of the features that he showed. He showed them — that
was the point ; he was moved, as he passed, by some impulse that

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 177

was either a signal for sympathy or, more possibly, a challenge to
another sorrow. He might already have been aware of our friend,
might, at some previous hour, have noticed in him the smooth
habit of the scene, with which the state of his own senses so
scantly consorted, and might thereby have been stirred as by a
kind of overt discord. What Marcher was at all events conscious
of was, in the first place, that the imaged of scarred passion pre-
sented to him was concious too — of something that profaned the
air; and, in the second, that, roused, startled, shocked, he was
yet the next moment looking after it, as it went, with envy. The
most extraordinary thing that had happened to him — though he
had given that name to other matters as well — took place, after his
immediate vague stare, as a consequence of this impression. The
stranger passed, but the raw glare of his grief remained, making
our friend wonder in pity what wrong, what wound it expressed,
what injury not to be healed. What had the man had to make
him, by the loss of it, so bleed and yet live?

Something — and this reached him with a pang — that he, John
Marcher, hadn't ; the proof of which was precisely John Marcher's
arid end. No passion had ever touched him, for this was what
passion meant ; he had survived and maundered and pined, but
where had been his deep ravage? The extraordinary thing we
speak of was the sudden rush of the result of this question. The
sight that had just met his eyes named to him, as in letters of
quick flame, something he had utterly, insanely missed, and what
he had missed made these things a train of fire, made them mark
themselves in an anguish of inward throbs. He had seen outside
of his life, not learned it within, the way a woman was mourned
when she had been loved for herself; such was the force of his
conviction of the meaning of the stranger's face, which still flared
for him like a smoky torch. It had not come to him, the know-
ledge, on the wings of experience ; it had brushed him, jostled
him, upset him, with the disrespect of chance, the insolence of
an accident. Now that the illumination had begun, however, it
blazed to the zenith, and what he presently stood there gazing at
was the sounded void of his life. He gazed, he drew breath, in
pain ; he turned in his dismay, and, turning, he had before him in
sharper incision than ever the open page of his story. The name
on the table smote him as the passage of his neighbour had done,
and what it said to him, full in the face, was that she was what he
had missed. This was the awful thought, the answer to all the
past, the vision at the dread clearness of which he turned as cold
as the stone beneath him. Everything fell together, confessed,
explained, overwhelmed ; leaving him most of all stupefied at the
N

THE BETTER SORT

blindness he had cherished. The fate he had been marked for he
had met with a vengeance — he had emptied the cup to the lees ;
he had been the man of his time, the man, to whom nothing on
earth was to have happened. That was the rare stroke — that was
his visitation. So he saw it, as we say, in pale horror, while the
pieces fitted and fitted. So she had seen it, while he didn't, and so
she served at this hour to drive the truth home. It was the truth,
vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had waited the wait was
itself his portion. This the companion of his vigil had at a
given moment perceived, and she had then offered him the
chance to baffle his doom. One's doom, however, was never
baffled, and on the day she had told him that his own had come
down she had seen him but stupidly stare at the escape she
offered him.

The escape would have been to love her ; then, then he would
have lived. She had lived — who could say now with what
passion ? — since she had loved him for himself; whereas he had
never thought of her (ah, how it hugely glared at him !) but in the
chill of his egotism and the light of her use. Her spoken words
came back to him, and the chain stretched and stretched. The
beast had lurked indeed, and the beast, at its hour, had sprung ;
it had sprung in that twilight of the cold April when, pale, ill,
wasted, but all beautiful, and perhaps even then recoverable, she
had risen from her chair to stand before him and let him imagin-
ably guess. It had sprung as he didn't guess ; it had sprung as
she hopelessly turned from him, and the mark, by the time he left
her, had fallen where it was to fall. He had justified his fear and
achieved his fate ; he had failed, with the last exactitude, of all he
was to fail of; and a moan now rose to his lips as he remembered
she had prayed he mightn't know. This horror of waking — this
was knowledge, knowledge under the breath of which the very
tears in his eyes seemed to freeze. Through them, none the less,
he tried to fix it and hold it ; he kept it there before him so that
he might feel the pain. That at least, belated and bitter, had
something of the taste of life. But the bitterness suddenly
sickened him, and it was as if, horribly, he saw, in the truth, in
the cruelty of his image, what had been appointed and done.
He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast ; then,
while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and
hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened
— it was close ; and, instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to
avoid it, he flung himself, on his face, on the tomb.

THE BIRTHPLACE

IT seemed to them at first, the offer, too good to be true, and
their friend's letter, addressed to them to feel, as he said, the
ground, to sound them as to inclinations and possibilities, had
almost the effect of a brave joke at their expense. Their friend,
Mr. Grant- Jackson, a highly preponderant, pushing person, great
in discussion and arrangement, abrupt in overture, unexpected, if
not perverse, in attitude, and almost equally acclaimed and
objected to in the wide midland region to which he had taught,
as the phrase was, the size of his foot — their friend had launched
his bolt quite out of the blue and had thereby so shaken them as
to make them fear almost more than hope. The place had fallen
vacant by the death of one of the two ladies, mother and
daughter, who had discharged its duties for fifteen years; the
daughter was staying on alone, to accommodate, but had found,
though extremely mature, an opportunity of marriage that involved
retirement, and the question of the new incumbents was not a
little pressing. The want thus determined was of a united couple
of some sort, of the right sort, a pair of educated and competent
sisters possibly preferred, but a married pair having its advantages
if other qualifications were marked. Applicants, candidates,
besiegers of the door of everyone supposed to have a voice in the
matter, were already beyond counting, and Mr. Grant-Jackson,
who was in his way diplomatic and whose voice, though not
perhaps of the loudest, possessed notes of insistence, had found
his preference fixing itself on some person or brace of persons
who had been decent and dumb. The Gedges appeared to have
struck him as waiting in silence — though absolutely, as happened,
no busybody had brought them, far away in the north, a hint
either of bliss or of danger ; and the happy spell, for the rest, had
obviously been wrought in him by a remembrance which, though
now scarcely fresh, had never before borne any such fruit.

Morris Gedge had for a few years, as a young man, carried on
a small private school of the order known as preparatory, and
had happened then to receive under his roof the small son of the

179

1 80 THE BETTER SORT

great man, who was not at that time so great. The little boy,
during an absence of his parents from England, had been
dangerously ill, so dangerously that they had been recalled in
haste, though with inevitable delays, from a far country — they had
gone to America, with the whole continent and the great sea to
cross again — and had got back to find the child saved, but saved,
as couldn't help coming to light, by the extreme devotion and
perfect judgment of Mrs. Gedge. Without children of her own,
she had particularly attached herself to this tiniest and tenderest
of her husband's pupils, and they had both dreaded as a dire
disaster the injury to their little enterprise that would be caused by
their losing him. Nervous, anxious, sensitive persons, with a pride
— as they were for that matter well aware — above their position,
never, at the best, to be anything but dingy, they had nursed him
in terror and had brought him through in exhaustion. Exhaustion,
as befell, had thus overtaken them early and had for one reason
and another managed to assert itself as their permanent portion.
The little boy's death would, as they said, have done for them,
yet his recovery hadn't saved them ; with which it was doubtless
also part of a shy but stiff candour in them that they didn't
regard themselves as having in a more indirect manner laid up
treasure. Treasure was not to be, in any form whatever, of
their dreams or of their waking sense; and the years that
followed had limped under their weight, had now and then
rather grievously stumbled, had even barely escaped laying
them in the dust. The school had not prospered, had but
dwindled to a close. Gedge's health had failed, and, still more,
every sign in him of a capacity to publish himself as practical.
He had tried several things, he had tried many, but the final
appearance was of their having tried him not less. They mostly,
at the time I speak of, were trying his successors, while he found
himself, with an effect of dull felicity that had come in this case
from the mere postponement of change, in charge of the grey
town-library of Blackport-on-Dwindle, all granite, fog and female
fiction. This was a situation in which his general intelligence —
acknowledged as his strong point — was doubtless conceived,
around him, as feeling less of a strain than that mastery of
particulars in which he was recognised as weak.

It was at Blackport-on-Dwindle that the silver shaft reached and
pierced him ; it was as an alternative to dispensing dog's-eared
volumes the very titles of which, on the lips of innumerable glib
girls, were a challenge to his temper, that the wardenship of so
different a temple presented itself. The stipend named differed
little from the slim wage at present paid him, but even had it

THE BIRTHPLACE 181

been less the interest and the honour would have struck him as
determinant. The shrine at which he was to preside — though
he had always lacked occasion to approach it — figured to him
as the most sacred known to the steps of men, the early home
of the supreme poet, the Mecca of the English-speaking race.
The tears came into his eyes sooner still than into his wife's while
he looked about with her at their actual narrow prison, so grim
with enlightenment, so ugly with industry, so turned away from
any dream, so intolerable to any taste. He felt as if a window
had opened into a great green woodland, a woodland that had
a name, glorious, immortal, that was peopled with vivid figures,
each of them renowned, and that gave out a murmur, deep as
the sound of the sea, which was the rustle in forest shade of all
the poetry, the beauty, the colour of life. It would be prodigious
that of this transfigured world he should keep the key. No — he
couldn't believe it, not even when Isabel, at sight of his face,
came and helpfully kissed him. He shook his head with a strange
smile. " We shan't get it. Why should we? It's perfect."

" If we don't he'll simply have been cruel ; which is impossible
when he has waited all this time to be kind." Mrs. Gedge did
believe — she would; since the wide doors of the world of poetry
had suddenly pushed back for them it was in the form of poetic
justice that they were first to know it. She had her faith in their
patron; it was sudden, but it was now complete. "He re-
members— that's all ; and that's our strength."

"And what's his?" Gedge asked. " He may want to put us
through, but that's a different thing from being able. What are
our special advantages ? "

" Well, that we're just the thing." Her knowledge of the needs
of the case was, as yet, thanks to scant information, of the
vaguest, and she had never, more than her husband, stood on
the sacred spot ; but she saw herself waving a nicely-gloved hand
over a collection of remarkable objects and saying to a compact
crowd of gaping, awe-struck persons : " And now, please, this
way." She even heard herself meeting with promptness and
decision an occasional inquiry from a visitor in whom audacity
had prevailed over awe. She had been once, with a cousin,
years before, to a great northern castle, and that was the way the
housekeeper had taken them round. And it was not moreover,
either, that she thought of herself as a housekeeper ; she was
well above that, and the wave of her hand, wouldn't fail to be
such as to show it. This, and much-. «lse,' she summed up as
she answered her mate. " Out special advantages are that you're
a gentleman.," .^4 ,w .«,/ * '

•

182 THE BETTER SORT

" Oh ! " said Gedge, as if he had never thought of it, and yet
as if too it were scarce worth thinking of.

" I see it all," she went on ; " they've had\hz vulgar — they find
they don't do. We're poor and we're modest, but anyone can
see what we are."

Gedge wondered. " Do you mean ? " More modest than

she, he didn't know quite what she meant.

" We're refined. We know how to speak."

" Do we ? " — he still, suddenly, wondered.

But she was, from the first, surer of everything than he ; so that
when a few weeks more had elapsed and the shade of uncertainty
— though it was only a shade — had grown almost to sicken him,
her triumph was to come with the news that they were fairly
named. " We're on poor pay, though we manage " — she had on
the present occasion insisted on her point. " But we're highly
cultivated, and for them to get that, don't you see? without
getting too much with it in the way of pretensions and demands,
must be precisely their dream. We've no social position, but we
don't mind that we haven't, do we ? a bit ; which is because we
know the difference between realities and shams. We hold to
reality, and that gives us common sense, which the vulgar have
less than anything, and which yet must be wanted there, after all,
as well as anywhere else."

Her companion followed her, but musingly, as if his horizon
had within a few moments grown so great that he was almost lost
in it and required a new orientation. The shining spaces sur-
rounded him ; the association alone gave a nobler arch to the sky.
"Allow that we hold also a little to the romance, It seems to
me that that's the beauty. We've missed it all our life, and now
it's come. We shall be at head-quarters for it. We shall have
our fill of it."

She looked at his face, at the effect in it of these prospects,
and her own lighted as if he had suddenly grown handsome.
" Certainly — we shall live as in a fairy-tale. But what I mean is
that we shall give, in a way — and so gladly — quite as much as we
get. With all the rest of it we're, for instance, neat." Their letter
had come to them at breakfast, and she picked a fly out of the
butter-dish. "It's the way we'll keep the place" — with which she
removed from the sofa to the top of the cottage-piano a tin of
biscuits that had refused to squeeze into the cupboard. At
Blackport they were in lodgings — of the lowest description, she
had been known, with a freedom felt by Blackport to be slightly
invidious, to declare. The Birthplace — and that itself, after such
a life, was exaltation — wouldn't be lodgings, since a house close

THE BIRTHPLACE 183

beside it was set apart for the warden, a house joining on to it as
a sweet old parsonage is often annexed to a quaint old church.
It would all together be their home, and such a home as would
make a little world that they would never want to leave. She
dwelt on the gain, for that matter, to their income ; as, obviously,
though the salary was not a change for the better, the house,
given them, would make all the difference. He assented to this,
but absently, and she was almost impatient at the range of his
thoughts. It was as if something, for him — the very swarm
of them — veiled the view ; and he presently, of ihimself, showed
what it was.

"What I can't get over is its being such a man !" He

almost, from inward emotion, broke down.

"Such a man ?"

" Him, him, HIM ! " It was too much.

" Grant- Jackson ? Yes, it's a surprise, but one sees how he
has been meaning, all the while, the right thing by us."

" I mean Him" Gedge returned more coldly ; " our becoming
familiar and intimate — for that's what it will come to. We shall
just live with Him."

" Of course — it is the beauty." And she added quite gaily :
" The more we do the more we shall love Him."

" No doubt — but it's rather awful. The more we know Him,"
Gedge reflected, " the more we shall love Him. We don't as yet,
you see, know Him so very tremendously."

"We do so quite as well, I imagine, as the sort of people
they've had. And that probably isn't — unless you care, as we
do — so awfully necessary. For there are the facts."

"Yes— there are the facts."

" I mean the principal ones. They're all that the people — the
people who come — want."

" Yes— they must be all they want."

"So that they're all that those who've been in charge have
needed to know."

" Ah," he said as if it were a question of honour, " we must
know everything."

She cheerfully acceded : she had the merit, he felt, of keeping
the case within bounds. "Everything. But about him personally,"
she added, "there isn't, is there? so very, very much."

" More, I believe, than there used to be. They've made
discoveries."

It was a grand thought. " Perhaps we shall make some ! "

" Oh, I shall be content to be a little better up in what has
been done." And his eyes rested on a shelf of books, half of

1 84 THE BETTER SORT

which, little worn but much faded, were of the florid " gift " order
and belonged to the house. Of those among them that were his own
most were common specimens of the reference sort, not excluding
an old Bradshaw and a catalogue of the town -library. "We've
not even a Set of our own. Of the Works," he explained in quick
repudiation of the sense, perhaps more obvious, in which she
might have taken it.

As a proof of their scant range of possessions this sounded
almost abject, till the painful flush with which they met on the
admission melted presently into a different glow. It was just for
that kind of poorness that their new situation was, by its intrinsic
charm, to console them. And Mrs. Gedge had a happy thought.
" Wouldn't the Library more or less have them ? "

" Oh no, we've nothing of that sort : for what do you take
us ? " This, however, was but the play of Gedge's high spirits :
the form both depression and exhilaration most frequently took
with him being a bitterness on the subject of the literary taste of
Blackport. No one was so deeply acquainted with it. It acted
with him in fact as so lurid a sign of the future that the charm of
the thought of removal was sharply enhanced by the prospect of
escape from it. The institution he served didn't of course
deserve the particular reproach into which his irony had flowered;
and indeed if the several Sets in which the Works were present
were a trifle dusty, the dust was a little his own fault. To make
up for that now he had the vision of immediately giving his time
to the study of them; he saw himself indeed, inflamed with a
new passion, earnestly commenting and collating. Mrs. Gedge,
who had suggested that they ought, till their move should come,
to read Him regularly of an evening — certain as they were to do
it still more when in closer quarters with Him — Mrs. Gedge felt
also, in her degree, the spell ; so that the very happiest time of
their anxious life was perhaps to have been the series of lamplight
hours, after supper, in which, alternately taking the book, they
declaimed, they almost performed, their beneficent author. He
became speedily more than their author — their personal friend,
their universal light, their final authority and divinity. Where in
the world, they were already asking themselves, would they have
been without him? By the time their appointment arrived in
form their relation to him had immensely developed. It was
amusing to Morris Gedge that he had so lately blushed for his
ignorance, and he made this remark to his wife during the last
hour they were able to give to their study, before proceeding,
across half the country, to the scene of their romantic future. It
was as if, in deep, close throbs, in cool after-waves that broke of

THE BIRTHPLACE 185

a sudden and bathed his mind, all possession and comprehension
and sympathy, all the truth and the life and the story, had come
to him, and come, as the newspapers said, to stay. " It's
absurd," he didn't hesitate to say, "to talk of our not 'knowing.'
So far as we don't it's because we're donkeys. He's in the thing,
over His ears, and the more we get into it the more we're with
Him. I seem to myself at any rate," he declared, " to see Him
in it as if He were painted on the wall."

"Oh, doesrit one rather, the dear thing? And don't you feel
where it is?" Mrs. Gedge finely asked. "We see Him because
we love Him — that's what we do. How can we not, the old
darling — with what He's doing for us ? There's no light " — she
had a sententious turn — "like true affection."

"Yes, I suppose that's it. And yet," her husband mused, "I
see, confound me, the faults."

"That's because you're so critical. You see them, but you
don't mind them. You see them, but you forgive them. You
mustn't mention them there. We shan't, you know, be there for
that."

" Dear no ! " he laughed : " we'll chuck out anyone who hints
at them."

II

IF the sweetness of the preliminary months had been great,
great too, though almost excessive as agitation, was the wonder
of fairly being housed with Him, of treading day and night in
the footsteps He had worn, of touching the objects, or at all
events the surfaces, the substances, over which His hands had
played, which his arms, his shoulders had rubbed, of breathing
the air — or something not too unlike it — in which His voice
had sounded. They had had a little at first their bewilderments,
their disconcertedness ; the place was both humbler and grander
than they had exactly prefigured, more at once of a cottage and
of a museum, a little more archaically bare and yet a little more
richly official. But the sense was strong with them that the
point of view, for the inevitable ease of the connection, patiently,
indulgently awaited them; in addition to which, from the first
evening, after closing -hour, when the last blank pilgrim had
gone, the mere spell, the mystic presence — as if they had had it
quite to themselves — were all they could have desired. They
had received, by Grant- Jackson's care and in addition to a table
of instructions and admonitions by the number, and in some
particulars by the nature, of which they found themselves
slightly depressed, various little guides, handbooks, travellers'

1 86 THE BETTER SORT

tributes, literary memorials and other catch-penny publications,
which, however, were to be for the moment swallowed up in the
interesting episode of the induction or initiation appointed for
them in advance at the hands of several persons whose con-
nection with the establishment was, as superior to their own,
still more official, and at those in especial of one of the ladies
who had for so many years borne the brunt. About the instruc-
tions from above, about the shilling books and the well-known
facts and the full-blown legend, the supervision, the subjection,
the submission, the view as of a cage in which he should circu-
late and a groove in which he should slide, Gedge had preserved
a certain play of mind; but all power of reaction appeared
suddenly to desert him in the presence of his so visibly compe-
tent predecessor and as an effect of her good offices. He had
not the resource, enjoyed by his wife, of seeing himself, with
impatience, attired in black silk of a make characterised by just
the right shade of austerity ; so that this firm, smooth, expert and
consummately respectable middle-aged person had him somehow,
on the whole ground, completely at her mercy.

It was evidently something of a rueful moment when, as a
lesson — she being for the day or two still in the field — he accepted
Miss Putchin's suggestion of " going round " with her and with
the successive squads of visitors she was there to deal with. He
appreciated her method — he saw there had to be one ; he admired
her as succinct and definite ; for there were the facts, as his wife
had said at Blackport, and they were to be disposed of in the
time ; yet he felt like a very little boy as he dangled, more than
once, with Mrs. Gedge, at the tail of the human comet. The idea
had been that they should, by this attendance, more fully embrace
the possible accidents and incidents, as it were, of the relation to
the great public in which they were to find themselves ; and the
poor man's excited perception of the great public rapidly became
such as to resist any diversion meaner than that of the admirable
manner of their guide. It wandered from his gaping companions
to that of the priestess in black silk, whom he kept asking him-
self if either he or Isabel could hope by any possibility ever
remotely to resemble ; then it bounded restlessly back to the
numerous persons who revealed to him, as it had never yet been
revealed, the happy power of the simple to hang upon the lips of
the wise. The great thing seemed to be — and quite surprisingly
— that the business was easy and the strain, which as a strain
they had feared, moderate ; so that he might have been puzzled,
had he fairly caught himself in the act, by his recognising as the
last effect of the impression an odd absence of the ability to rest

THE BIRTHPLACE 187

in it, an agitation deep within him that vaguely threatened to
grow. " It isn't, you see, so very complicated," the black silk
lady seemed to throw off, with everything else, in her neat, crisp,
cheerful way ; in spite of which he already, the very first time —
that is after several parties had been in and out and up and
down — went so far as to wonder if there weren't more in it than
she imagined. She was, so to speak, kindness itself — was all
encouragement and reassurance ; but it was just her slightly
coarse redolence of these very things that, on repetition, before
they parted, dimmed a little, as he felt, the light of his acknow-
ledging smile. That, again, she took for a symptom of some
pleading weakness in him — he could never be as brave as she ;
so that she wound up with a few pleasant words from the very
depth of her experience. " You'll get into it, never fear — it will
come ; and then you'll feel as if you had never done anything
else." He was afterwards to know that, on the spot, at this
moment, he must have begun to wince a little at such a menace ;
that he might come to feel as if he had never done anything but
what Miss Putchin did loomed for him, in germ, as a penalty to
pay. The support she offered, none the less, continued to strike
him ; she put the whole thing on so sound a basis when she said :
" You see they're so nice about it — they take such an interest.
And they never do a thing they shouldn't. That was always
everything to mother and me." "They," Gedge had already
noticed, referred constantly and hugely, in the good woman's
talk, to the millions who shuffled through the house ; the pronoun
in question was forever on her lips, the hordes it represented
filled her consciousness, the addition of their numbers ministered
to her glory. Mrs. Gedge promptly met her. " It must be
indeed delightful to see the effect on so many, and to feel that
one may perhaps do something to make it — well, permanent."
But he was kept silent by his becoming more sharply aware
that this was a new view, for him, of the reference made, that
he had never thought of the quality of the place as derived
from Them, but from Somebody Else, and that They, in short,
seemed to have got into the way of crowding out Him. He
found himself even a little resenting this for Him, which per-
haps had something to do with the slightly invidious cast of
his next inquiry.

" And are They always, as one might say — a — stupid ? "
" Stupid ! " She stared, looking as if no one could be such a
thing in such a connection. No one had ever been anything but
neat and cheerful and fluent, except to be attentive and unobjec-
tionable and, so far as was possible, American.

1 88 THE BETTER SORT

" What I mean is," he explained, " is there any perceptible
proportion that take an interest in Him ? "

His wife stepped on his toe j she deprecated irony. But his
mistake fortunately was lost on their friend. " That's just why
they come, that they take such an interest. I sometimes think
they take more than about anything else in the world." With
which Miss Putchin looked about at the place. " It is pretty,
don't you think, the way they've got it now ? " This, Gedge saw,
was a different " They " ; it applied to the powers that were — the
people who had appointed him, the governing, visiting Body, in
respect to which he was afterwards to remark to Mrs. Gedge that
a fellow — it was the difficulty — didn't know "where to have her."
His wife, at a loss, questioned at that moment the necessity of
having her anywhere, and he said, good-humouredly, " Of course ;
it's all right." He was in fact content enough with the last
touches their friend had given the picture. "There are many
who know all about it when they come, and the Americans often
are tremendously up. Mother and me really enjoyed " — it was
her only slip — " the interest of the Americans. We've sometimes
had ninety a day, and all wanting to see and hear everything.
But you'll work them off; you'll see the way — it's all experi-
ence." She came back, for his comfort, to that. She came back
also to other things : she did justice to the considerable class
who arrived positive and primed. " There are those who know
more about it than you do. But that only comes from their
interest."

" Who know more about what ? " Gedge inquired.

" Why, about the place. I mean they have their ideas — of
what everything is, and where it is, and what it isn't, and where
it should be. They do ask questions," she said, yet not so much
in warning as in the complacency of being seasoned and sound ;
" and they're down on you when they think you go wrong. As if
you ever could ! You know too much," she sagaciously smiled ;
" or you will"

" Oh, you mustn't know too much, must you ? " And Gedge
now smiled as well. He knew, he thought, what he meant.

" Well, you must know as much as anybody else. I claim, at
any rate, that I do," Miss Putchin declared. "They never really
caught me."

" I'm very sure of that? Mrs. Gedge said with an elation almost
personal.

"Certainly," he added, "I don't want to be caught." She
rejoined that, in such a case, he would have Them down on him,
and he saw that this time she meant the powers above. It

THE BIRTHPLACE 189

quickened his sense of all the elements that were to reckon with,
yet he felt at the same time that the powers above were not what
he should most fear. " I'm glad," he observed, " that they ever
ask questions ; but I happened to notice, you know, that no one
did to-day."

" Then you missed several — and no loss. There were three or
four put to me too silly to remember. But of course they mostly
are silly.'

" You mean the questions ? "

She laughed with all her cheer. " Yes, sir ; I don't mean the
answers."

Whereupon, for a moment snubbed and silent, he felt like one
of the crowd. Then it made him slightly vicious. " I didn't
know but you meant the people in general — till I remembered
that I'm to understand from you that they're wise, only occasionally
breaking down."

It was not really till then, he thought, that she lost patience ;
and he had had, much more than he meant no doubt, a cross-
questioning air. " You'll see for yourself." Of which he was
sure enough. He was in fact so ready to take this that she
came round to full accommodation, put it frankly that every now
and then they broke out — not the silly, oh no, the intensely
inquiring. " We've had quite lively discussions, don't you know,
about well-known points. They want it all their way, and I
know the sort that are going to as soon as I see them. That's
one of the things you do — you get to know the sorts. And if
it's what you're afraid of — their taking you up," she was further
gracious enough to say, "you needn't mind a bit. What do
they know, after all, when for us it's our life ? I've never moved
an inch, because, you see, I shouldn't have been here if I didn't
know where I was. No more will you be a year hence — you
know what I mean, putting it impossibly — if you don't. I
expect you do, in spite of your fancies." And she dropped
once more to bed-rock. " There are the facts. Otherwise where
would any of us be? That's all you've got to go upon. A
person, however cheeky, can't have them his way just because
he takes it into his head. There can only be one way, and,"
she gaily added as she took leave of them, " I'm sure it's quite
enough ! "

190 THE BETTER SORT

III

GEDGE not only assented eagerly — one way was quite enough if
it were the right one — but repeated it, after this conversation, at
odd moments, several times over to his wife. " There can only
be one way, one way," he continued to remark — though indeed
much as if it were a joke ; till she asked him how many more he
supposed she wanted. He failed to answer this question, but
resorted to another repetition, "There are the facts, the facts,"
which, perhaps, however, he kept a little more to himself, sound-
ing it at intervals in different parts of the house. Mrs. Gedge
was full of comment on their clever introductress, though not
restrictively save in the matter of her speech, " Me and mother,"
and a general tone — which certainly was not their sort of thing.
" I don't know," he said, " perhaps it comes with the place, since
speaking in immortal verse doesn't seem to come. It must be,
one seems to see, one thing or the other. I dare say that in a
few months I shall also be at it — ' me and the wife.' "

" Why not me and the missus at once ? " Mrs. Gedge resent-
fully inquired. " I don't think," she observed at another time,
" that I quite know what's the matter with you."

" It's only that I'm excited, awfully excited — as I don't see
how one can not be. You wouldn't have a fellow drop into this
berth as into an appointment at the Post Office. Here on the
spot it goes to my head ; how can that be helped ? But we shall
live into it, and perhaps," he said with an implication of the
other possibility that was doubtless but part of his fine ecstasy,
"we shall live through it." The place acted on his imagination
— how, surely, shouldn't it? And his imagination acted on his
nerves, and these things together, with the general vividness and
the new and complete immersion, made rest for him almost im-
possible, so that he could scarce go to bed at night and even
during the first week more than once rose in the small hours to
move about, up and down, with his lamp, standing, sitting, listen-
ing, wondering, in the stillness, as if positively to recover some
echo, to surprise some secret, of the genius loci. He couldn't
have explained it — and didn't in fact need to explain it, at least
to himself, since the impulse simply held him and shook him ;
but the time after closing, the time above all after the people —
Them, as he felt himself on the way to think of them, pre-
dominant, insistent, all in the foreground — brought him, or ought
to have brought him, he seemed to see, nearer to the enshrined
Presence, enlarged the opportunity for communion and intensified
the sense of it. These nightly prowls, as he called them, were

THE BIRTHPLACE 191

disquieting to his wife, who had no disposition to share in them,
speaking with decision of the whole place as just the place to be
forbidding after dark. She rejoiced in the distinctness, con-
tiguous though it was, of their own little residence, where she
trimmed the lamp and stirred the fire and heard the kettle sing,
repairing the while the omissions of the small domestic who
slept out; she foresaw herself with some promptness, drawing
rather sharply the line between her own precinct and that in
which the great spirit might walk. It would be with them, the
great spirit, all day — even if indeed on her making that remark,
and in just that form, to her husband, he replied with a queer
" But will he though ? " And she vaguely imaged the develop-
ment of a domestic antidote after a while, precisely, in the shape
of curtains more markedly drawn and everything most modern
and lively, tea, "patterns," the newspapers, the female fiction
itself that they had reacted against at Blackport, quite defiantly
cultivated.

These possibilities, however, were all right, as her companion
said it was, all the first autumn — they had arrived at summer's
end ; as if he were more than content with a special set of his own
that he had access to from behind, passing out of their low door
for the few steps between it and the Birthplace. With his lamp
ever so carefully guarded, and his nursed keys that made him
free of treasures, he crossed the dusky interval so often that she
began to qualify it as a habit that "grew." She spoke of it
almost as if he had taken to drink, and he humoured that
view of it by confessing that the cup was strong. This had been
in truth, altogether, his immediate sense of it ; strange and deep
for him the spell of silent sessions before familiarity and, to
some small extent, disappointment had set in. The exhibitional
side of the establishment had struck him, even on arrival, as
qualifying too much its character ; he scarce knew what he might
best have looked for, but the three or four rooms bristled over-
much, in the garish light of day, with busts and relics, not even
ostensibly always His, old prints and old editions, old objects
fashioned in His likeness, furniture "of the time" and auto-
graphs of celebrated worshippers. In the quiet hours and the
deep dusk, none the less, under the play of the shifted lamp and
that of his own emotion, these things too recovered their advan-
tage, ministered to the mystery, or at all events to the impression,
seemed consciously to offer themselves as personal to the poet.
Not one of them was really or unchallengeably so, but they had
somehow, through long association, got, as Gedge always phrased
it, into the secret, and it was about the secret he asked them

192 THE BETTER SORT

while he restlessly wandered. It was not till months had elapsed
that he found how little they had to tell him, and he was quite
at his ease with them when he knew they were by no means
where his sensibility had first placed them. They were as out
of it as he ; only, to do them justice, they had made him im-
mensely feel. And still, too, it was not they who had done
that most, since his sentiment had gradually cleared itself to
deep, to deeper refinements.

The Holy of Holies of the Birthplace was the low, the sub-
lime Chamber of Birth, sublime because, as the Americans
usually said — unlike the natives they mostly found words — it was
so pathetic; and pathetic because it was — well, really nothing
else in the world that one could name, number or measure. It
was as empty as a shell of which the kernel has withered, and
contained neither busts nor prints nor early copies ; it contained
only the Fact — the Fact itself — which, as he stood sentient there
at midnight, our friend, holding his breath, allowed to sink into
him. He had to take it as the place where the spirit would most
walk and where he would therefore be most to be met, with
possibilities of recognition and reciprocity. He hadn't, most
probably — He hadn't — much inhabited the room, as men weren't
apt, as a rule, to convert to their later use and involve in their
wider fortune the scene itself of their nativity. But as there
were moments when, in the conflict of theories, the sole
certainty surviving for the critic threatened to be that He had
not — unlike other successful men — not been born, so Gedge,
though little of a critic, clung to the square feet of space that
connected themselves, however feebly, with the positive appear-
ance. He was little of a critic — he was nothing of one; he
hadn't pretended to the character before coming, nor come to
pretend to it; also, luckily for him, he was seeing day by day
how little use he could possibly have for it. It would be to him,
the attitude of a high expert, distinctly a stumbling-block, and
that he rejoiced, as the winter waned, in his ignorance, was one
of the propositions he betook himself, in his odd manner, to
enunciating to his wife. She denied it, for hadn't she, in the first
place, been present, wasn't she still present, at his pious, his tire-
less study of everything connected with the subject ? — so present
that she had herself learned more about it than had ever seemed
likely. Then, in the second place, he was not to proclaim on
the housetops any point at which he might be weak, for who
knew, if it should get abroad that they were ignorant, what effect
might be produced ?

" On the attraction "—he took her up—" of the Show ? "

THE BIRTHPLACE 193

He had fallen into the harmless habit of speaking of the
place as the " Show " ; but she didn't mind this so much as to be
diverted by it. " No ; on the attitude of the Body. You know
they're pleased with us, and I don't see why you should want to
spoil it. We got in by a tight squeeze — you know we've had
evidence of that, and that it was about as much as our backers
could manage. But we're proving a comfort to them, and it's
absurd of you to question your suitability to people who were
content with the Putchins."

"I don't, my dear," he returned, "question anything; but
if I should do so it would be precisely because of the greater
advantage constituted for the Putchins by the simplicity of their
spirit. They were kept straight by the quality of their ignorance
— which was denser even than mine. It was a mistake in us,
from the first, to have attempted to correct or to disguise ours.
We should have waited simply to become good parrots, to learn
our lesson — all on the spot here, so little of it is wanted — and
squawk it off."

"Ah, 'squawk,' love — what a word to use about Him !"

" It isn't about Him — nothing's about Him. None of Them
care tuppence about Him. The only thing They care about
is this empty shell — or rather, for it isn't empty, the extraneous,
preposterous stuffing of it."

" Preposterous ? " — he made her stare with this as he had not
yet done.

At sight of her look, however — the gleam, as it might have
been, of a queer suspicion — he bent to her kindly and tapped
her cheek. "Oh, it's all right. We must fall back on the
Putchins. Do you remember what she said? — 'They've made
it so pretty now.' They have made it pretty, and it's a first-rate
show. It's a first-rate show and a first-rate billet, and He was
a first-rate poet, and you're a first-rate woman — to put up so
sweetly, I mean, with my nonsense."

She appreciated his domestic charm and she justified that
part of his tribute which concerned herself. " I don't care how
much of your nonsense you talk to me, so long as you keep
it all for me and don't treat Them to it."

"The pilgrims? No," he conceded — "it isn't fair to Them.
They mean well."

" What complaint have we, after all, to make of Them so long
as They don't break off bits — as They used, Miss Putchin told us,
so awfully — to conceal about Their Persons ? She broke them at
least of that."

" Yes," Gedge mused again ; " I wish awfully she hadn't ! "

194 THE BETTER SORT

"You would like the relics destroyed, removed? That's all
that's wanted ! "

" There are no relics."

" There won't be any soon, unless you take care." But he
was already laughing, and the talk was not dropped without his
having patted her once more. An impression or two, however,
remained with her from it, as he saw from a question she asked
him on the morrow. "What did you mean yesterday about
Miss Putchin's simplicity — its keeping her 'straight'? Do you
mean mentally?"

Her " mentally " was rather portentous, but he practically con-
fessed. " Well, it kept her up. I mean," he amended, laughing,
"it kept her down."

It was really as if she had been a little uneasy. " You consider
there's a danger of your being affected? You know what I
mean. Of its going to your head. You do know," she insisted
as he said nothing. " Through your caring for him so. You'd
certainly be right in that case about its having been a mistake for
you to plunge so deep." And then as his listening without reply,
though with his look a little sad for her, might have denoted that,
allowing for extravagance of statement, he saw there was some-
thing in it : " Give up your prowls. Keep it for daylight. Keep
it for Them."

" Ah," he smiled, " if one could ! My prowls," he added, " are
what I most enjoy. They're the only time, as I've told you
before, that I'm really with Him. Then I don't see the place.
He isn't the place."

"I don't care for what you 'don't' see," she replied with
vivacity ; " the question is of what you do see."

Well, if it was, he waited before meeting it. " Do you know
what I sometimes do?" And then as she waited too: "In the
Birthroom there, when I look in late, I often put out my light.
That makes it better."

" Makes what ? "

" Everything."

" What is it then you see in the dark ? "

"Nothing !" said Morris Gedge.

"And what's the pleasure of that?"

" Well, what the American ladies say. It's so fascinating."

THE BIRTHPLACE 195

IV

THE autumn was brisk, as Miss Putchin had told them it would
be, but business naturally fell off with the winter months and the
short days. There was rarely an hour indeed without a call of
some sort, and they were never allowed to forget that they kept
the shop in all the world, as they might say, where custom was
least fluctuating. The seasons told on it, as they tell upon travel,
but no other influence, consideration or convulsion to which the
population of the globe is exposed. This population, never
exactly in simultaneous hordes, but in a full, swift and steady
stream, passed through the smoothly-working mill and went, in its
variety of degrees duly impressed and edified, on its artless way.
Gedge gave himself up, with much ingenuity of spirit, to trying to
keep in relation with it ; having even at moments, in the early
time, glimpses of the chance that the impressions gathered from
so rare an opportunity for contact with the general mind might
prove as interesting as anything else in the connection. Types,
classes, nationalities, manners, diversities of behaviour, modes of
seeing, feeling, of expression, would pass before him and become
for him, after a fashion, the experience of an untravelled man.
His journeys had been short and saving, but poetic justice again
seemed inclined to work for him in placing him just at the point
in all Europe perhaps where the confluence of races was thickest.
The theory, at any rate, carried him on, operating helpfully for
the term of his anxious beginnings and gilding in a manner — it
was the way he characterised the case to his wife — the somewhat
stodgy gingerbread of their daily routine. They had not known
many people, and their visiting-list was small — which made it
again poetic justice that they should be visited on such a scale.
They dressed and were at home, they were under arms and
received, and except for the offer of refreshment — and Gedge had
his view that there would eventually be a buffet farmed out to a
great firm — their hospitality would have made them princely if mere
hospitality ever did. Thus they were launched, and it was
interesting, and from having been ready to drop, originally, with
fatigue, they emerged even-winded and strong in the legs, as if
they had had an Alpine holiday. This experience, Gedge opined,
also represented, as a gain, a like seasoning of the spirit — by which
he meant a certain command of impenetrable patience.

The patience was needed for the particular feature of the ordeal
that, by the time the lively season was with them again, had dis-
engaged itself as the sharpest — the immense assumption of
veracities and sanctities, of the general soundness of the legend

196 THE BETTER SORT

with which everyone arrived. He was well provided, certainly,
for meeting it, and he gave all he had, yet he had sometimes the
sense of a vague resentment on the part of his pilgrims at his not
ladling out their fare with a bigger spoon. An irritation had
begun to grumble in him during the comparatively idle months of
winter when a pilgrim would turn up singly. The pious in-
dividual, entertained for the half-hour, had occasionally seemed to
offer him the promise of beguilement or the semblance of a
personal relation ; it came back again to the few pleasant calls he
had received in the course of a life almost void of social amenity.
Sometimes he liked the person, the face, the speech : an educated
man, a gentleman, not one of the herd ; a graceful woman, vague,
accidental, unconscious of him, but making him wonder, while he
hovered, who she was. These chances represented for him light
yearnings and faint flutters ; they acted indeed, within him, in a
special, an extraordinary way. He would have liked to talk with
such stray companions, to talk with them really ', to talk with them
as he might have talked if he had met them where he couldn't meet
them — at dinner, in the "world," on a visit at a country-house.
Then he could have said — and about the shrine and the idol
always — things he couldn't say now. The form in which his
irritation first came to him was that of his feeling obliged to say
to them — to the single visitor, even when sympathetic, quite as to
the gaping group — the particular things, a dreadful dozen or so,
that they expected. If he had thus arrived at characterising these
things as dreadful the reason touches the very point that, for
a while turning everything over, he kept dodging, not facing,
trying to ignore. The point was that he was on his way to
become two quite different persons, the public and the private,
and yet that it would somehow have to be managed that these
persons should live together. He was splitting into halves, unmis-
takeably — he who, whatever else he had been, had at least always
been so entire and, in his way, so solid. One of the halves, or
perhaps even, since the split promised to be rather unequal, one
of the quarters, was the keeper, the showman, the priest of the
idol ; the other piece was the poor unsuccessful honest man he
had always been.

There are moments when he recognised this primary character
as he had never done before ; when he in fact quite shook in his
shoes at the idea that it perhaps had in reserve some supreme
assertion of its identity. It was honest, verily, just by reason of
the possibility. It was poor and unsuccessful because here it was
just on the verge of quarrelling with its bread and butter. Salva-
tion would be of course — the salvation of the showman — rigidly

THE BIRTHPLACE 197

to keep it on the verge ; not to let it, in other words, overpass by
an inch. He might count on this, he said to himself, if there
weren't any public — if there weren't thousands of people demand-
ing of him what he was paid for. He saw the approach of the
stage at which they would affect him, the thousands of people —
and perhaps even more the earnest individual — as coming really to
see if he were earning his wage. Wouldn't he soon begin to fancy
them in league with the Body, practically deputed by it — given, no
doubt, a kindled suspicion — to look in and report observations ?
It was the way he broke down with the lonely pilgrim that led to
his first heart-searchings — broke down as to the courage required
for damping an uncritical faith. What they all most wanted was
to feel that everything was "just as it was"; only the shock of
having to part with that vision was greater than any individual
could bear unsupported. The bad moments were upstairs in the
Birthroom, for here the forces pressing on the very edge assumed
a dire intensity. The mere expression of eye, all-credulous,
omnivorous and fairly moistening in the act, with which many
persons gazed about, might eventually make it difficult for him to
remain fairly civil. Often they came in pairs — sometimes one
had come before — and then they explained to each other. He
never in that case corrected ; he listened, for the lesson of listen-
ing : after which he would remark to his wife that there was no end
to what he was learning. He saw that if he should really ever
break down it would be with her he would begin. He had given
her hints and digs enough, but she was so inflamed with apprecia-
tion that she either didn't feel them or pretended not to under-
stand.

This was the greater complication that, with the return of the
spring and the increase of the public, her services were more
required. She took the field with him, from an early hour ; she
was present with the party above while he kept an eye, and still
more an ear, on the party below ; and how could he know, he asked
himself, what she might say to them and what she might suffer
Them to say — or in other words, poor wretches, to believe — while
removed from his control? Some day or other, and before too
long, he couldn't but think, he must have the matter out with her
— the matter, namely, of the morality of their position. The
morality of women was special — he was getting lights on that.
Isabel's conception of her office was to cherish and enrich the
legend. It was already, the legend, very taking, but what was she
there for but to make it more so ? She certainly wasn't there to
chill any natural piety. If it was all in the air— all in their " eye,"
as the vulgar might say— that He had been born in the Birth-

i98 THE BETTER SORT

room, where was the value of the sixpences they took ? where the
equivalent they had engaged to supply? "Oh dear, yes — just
about here "; and she must tap the place with her foot. " Altered?
Oh dear, no — save in a few trifling particulars ; you see the place
— and isn't that just the charm of it ? — quite as He saw it. Very
poor and homely, no doubt; but that's just what's so wonderful."
He didn't want to hear her, and yet he didn't want to give her
her head ; he didn't want to make difficulties or to snatch the
bread from her mouth. But he must none the less give her a
warning before they had gone too far. That was the way, one
evening in June, he put it to her ; the affluence, with the finest
weather, having lately been of the largest, and the crowd, all day,
fairly gorged with the story. " We mustn't, you know, go too far."

The odd thing was that she had now ceased to be even
conscious of what troubled him — she was so launched in her own
career. " Too far for what ? "

"To save our immortal souls. We mustn't, love, tell too
many lies."

She looked at him with dire reproach. " Ah now, are you
going to begin again ? "

" I never have begun ; I haven't wanted to worry you. But,
you know, we don't know anything about it." And then as she
stared, flushing: "About His having been born up there. About
anything, really. Not the least little scrap that would weigh, in
any other connection, as evidence. So don't rub it in so."

"Rub it in how?"

" That He was born " But at sight of her face he only

sighed. " Oh dear, oh dear ! "

" Don't you think," she replied cuttingly, " that He was born
anywhere ? "

He hesitated — it was such an edifice to shake. "Well, we
don't know. There's very little to know. He covered His tracks
as no other human being has ever done."

She was still in her public costume and had not taken off the
gloves that she made a point of wearing as a part of that uniform ;
she remembered how the rustling housekeeper in the Border
castle, on whom she had begun by modelling herself, had worn
them. She seemed official and slightly distant. " To cover His
tracks. He must have had to exist. Have we got to give that up?"

" No, I don't ask you to give it up yet. But there's very little
to go upon."

" And is that what I'm to tell Them in return for everything ? "

Gedge waited — he walked about. The place was doubly still
after the bustle of the day, and the summer evening rested on

THE BIRTHPLACE 199

it as a blessing, making it, in its small state and ancientry,
mellow and sweet. It was good to be there, and it would be
good to stay. At the same time there was something incalculable
in the effect on one's nerves of the great gregarious density.
That was an attitude that had nothing to do with degrees and
shades, the attitude of wanting all or nothing. And you couldn't
talk things over with it. You could only do this with friends, and
then but in cases where you were sure the friends wouldn't betray
you. " Couldn't you adopt," he replied at last, " a slightly more
discreet method? What we can say is that things have been
said; that's all we have to do with. ' And is this really ' — when
they jam their umbrellas into the floor — ' the very spot where He
was born ? ' c So it has, from a long time back, been described
as being.' Couldn't one meet Them, to be decent a little, in
some such way as that ? "

She looked at him very hard. " Is that the way you meet
them?"

" No ; I've kept on lying — without scruple, without shame."

" Then why do you haul me up ? "

" Because it has seemed to me that we might, like true com-
panions, work it out a little together."

This was not strong, he felt, as, pausing with his hands in his
pockets, he stood before her ; and he knew it as weaker still
after she had looked at him a minute. " Morris Gedge, I propose
to be your true companion, and I've come here to stay. That's
all I've got to say." It was not, however, for " You had better
try yourself and see," she presently added. " Give the place,
give the story away, by so much as a look, and — well, I'd allow
you about nine days. Then you'd see."

He feigned, to gain time, an innocence. "They'd take it
so ill ? " And then, as she said nothing : " They'd turn and rend
me ? They'd tear me to pieces ? "

But she wouldn't make a joke of it. "They wouldn't have it,
simply."

" No — they wouldn't. That's what I say. They won't."

"You had better," she went on, "begin with Grant- Jackson.
But even that isn't necessary. It would get to him, it would get
to the Body, like wildfire."

"I see," said poor Gedge. And indeed for the moment he
did see, while his companion followed up what she believed her
advantage.

" Do you consider it's all a fraud ? "

" Well, I grant you there was somebody. But the details are
naught. The links are missing. The evidence — in particular

200 THE BETTER SORT

about that room upstairs, in itself our Casa Santa — is nil. It
was so awfully long ago." Which he knew again sounded weak.

"Of course it was awfully long ago — that's just the beauty
and the interest. Tell Them, ^//Thern," she continued, " that the
evidence is nil, and I'll tell them something else." She spoke it
with such meaning that his face seemed to show a question, to
which she was on the spot of replying " I'll tell them that you're

a " She stopped, however, changing it. " I'll them exactly

the opposite. And I'll find out what you say — it won't take
long — to do it. If we tell different stories, that possibly may
save us."

" I see what you mean. It would perhaps, as an oddity, have
a success of curiosity. It might become a draw. Still, they but
want broad masses." And he looked at her sadly. "You're
no more than one of Them."

"If it's being no more than one of them to love it," she
answered, " then I certainly am. And I am not ashamed of my
company."

"To love what?" said Morris Gedge.

" To love to think He was born there."

" You think too much. It's bad for you." He turned away
with his chronic moan. But it was without losing what she called
after him.

" I decline to let the place down." And what was there indeed
to say ? They were there to keep it up.

HE kept it up through the summer, but with the queerest con-
sciousness, at times, of the want of proportion between his secret
rage and the spirit of those from whom the friction came. He
said to himself — so sore as his sensibility had grown — that They
were gregariously ferocious at the very time he was seeing Them
as individually mild. He said to himself that They were mild
only because he was — he flattered himself that he was divinely
so, considering what he might be; and that he should, as his
wife had warned him, soon enough have news of it were he to
deflect by a hair's breadth from the line traced for him. That
was the collective fatuity — that it was capable of turning, on the
instant, both to a general and to a particular resentment. Since
the least breath of discrimination would get him the sack with-
out mercy, it was absurd, he reflected, to speak of his dis-
comfort as light. He was gagged, he was goaded, as in om-
nivorous companies he doubtless sometimes showed by a strange

THE BIRTHPLACE 201

silent glare. They would get him the sack for that as well, if he
didn't look out ; therefore wasn't it in effect ferocity when you
mightn't even hold your tongue? They wouldn't let you off
with silence — They insisted on your committing yourself. It was
the pound of flesh — They would have it ; so under his coat he
bled. But a wondrous peace, by exception, dropped on him one
afternoon at the end of August. The pressure had, as usual,
been high, but it had diminished with the fall of day, and the
place was empty before the hour for closing. Then it was that,
within a few minutes of this hour, there presented themselves
a pair of pilgrims to whom in the ordinary course he would have
remarked that they were, to his regret, too late. He was to
wonder afterwards why the course had, at sight of the visitors —
a gentleman and a lady, appealing and fairly young — shown for
him as other than ordinary; the consequence sprang doubtless
from something rather fine and unnameable, something, for
instance, in the tone of the young man, or in the light of his eye,
after hearing the statement on the subject of the hour. " Yes,
we know it's late ; but it's just, I'm afraid, because of that We've
had rather a notion of escaping the crowd — as, I suppose, you
mostly have one now ; and it was really on the chance of finding

you alone ! "

These things the young man said before being quite admitted,
and they were words that any one might have spoken who had
not taken the trouble to be punctual or who desired, a little
ingratiatingly, to force the door. Gedge even guessed at the
sense that might lurk in them, the hint of a special tip if the
point were stretched. There were no tips, he had often thanked
his stars, at the Birthplace ; there was the charged fee and
nothing more ; everything else was out of order, to the relief of
a palm not formed by nature for a scoop. Yet in spite of every-
thing, in spite especially of the almost audible chink of the
gentleman's sovereigns, which might in another case exactly have
put him out, he presently found himself, in the Birthroom, access
to which he had gracefully enough granted, almost treating the
visit as personal and private. The reason — well, the reason
would have been, if anywhere, in something naturally persuasive
on the part of the couple, unless it had been, rather, again, in the
way the young man, once he was in the place, met the caretaker's
expression of face, held it a moment and seemed to wish to
sound it. That they were Americans was promptly clear, and
Gedge could very nearly have told what kind ; he had arrived at
the point of distinguishing kinds, though the difficulty might
have been with him now that the case before him was rare. He

202 THE BETTER SORT

saw it, in fact, suddenly, in the light of the golden midland
evening, which reached them through low old windows, saw
it with a rush of feeling, unexpected and smothered, that made
him wish for a moment to keep it before him as a case of in-
ordinate happiness. It made him feel old, shabby, poor, but he
watched it no less intensely for its doing so. They were children
of fortune, of the greatest, as it might seem to Morris Gedge,
and they were of course lately married ; the husband, smooth-
faced and soft, but resolute and fine, several years older than the
wife, and the wife vaguely, delicately, irregularly, but mercilessly
pretty. Somehow, the world was theirs; they gave the person
who took the sixpences at the Birthplace such a sense of the
high luxury of freedom as he had never had. The thing was
that the world was theirs not simply because they had money —
he had seen rich people enough — but because they could in
a supreme degree think and feel and say what they liked. They
had a nature and a culture, a tradition, a facility of some sort —
and all producing in them an effect of positive beauty — that
gave a light to their liberty and an ease to their tone. These
things moreover suffered nothing from the fact that they
happened to be in mourning ; this was probably worn for some
lately-deceased opulent father, or some delicate mother who
would be sure to have been a part of the source of the beauty,
and it affected Gedge, in the gathered twilight and at his odd
crisis, as the very uniform of their distinction.

He couldn't quite have said afterwards by what steps the point
had been reached, but it had become at the end of five minutes
a part of their presence in the Birthroom, a part of the young
man's look, a part of the charm of the moment, and a part,
above all, of a strange sense within him of " Now or never ! "
that Gedge had suddenly, thrillingly, let himself go. He had
not been definitely conscious of drifting to it ; he had been, for
that, too conscious merely of thinking how different, in all their
range, were such a united couple from another united couple that
he knew. They were everything he and his wife were not ; this
was more than anything else the lesson at first of their talk.
Thousands of couples of whom the same was true certainly had
passed before him, but none of whom it was true with just that
engaging intensity. This was because of their transcendent free-
dom ; that was what, at the end of five minutes, he saw it all
come back to. The husband had been there at some earlier
time, and he had his impression, which he wished now to make
his wife share. But he already, Gedge could see, had not
concealed it from her. A pleasant irony, in fine, our friend

THE BIRTHPLACE 203

seemed to taste in the air — he who had not yet felt free to taste
his own.

" I think you weren't here four years ago " — that was what the
young man had almost begun by remarking. Gedge liked his
remembering it, liked his frankly speaking to him ; all the more
that he had given him, as it were, no opening. He had let them
look about below, and then had taken them up, but without
words, without the usual showman's song, of which he would
have been afraid. The visitors didn't ask for it ; the young man
had taken the matter out of his hands by himself dropping for
the benefit of the young woman a few detached remarks. What
Gedge felt, oddly, was that these remarks were not inconsiderate
of him ; he had heard others, both of the priggish order and the
crude, that might have been called so. And as the young man
had not been aided to this cognition of him as new, it already
began to make for them a certain common ground. The ground
became immense when the visitor presently added with a smile :
"There was a good lady, I recollect, who had a great deal to
say."

It was the gentleman's smile that had done it ; the irony was
there. "Ah, there has been a great deal said." And Gedge's
look at his interlocutor doubtless showed his sense of being
sounded. It was extraordinary of course that a perfect stranger
should have guessed the travail of his spirit, should have caught
the gleam of his inner commentary. That probably, in spite of
him, leaked out of his poor old eyes. "Much of it, in such
places as this," he heard himself adding, " is of course said very
irresponsibly." Such places as this ! — he winced at the words as
soon as he had uttered them.

There was no wincing, however, on the part of his pleasant
companions. "Exactly so; the whole thing becomes a sort of
stiff, smug convention, like a dressed-up sacred doll in a Spanish
church — which you're a monster if you touch." [

" A monster," said Gedge, meeting his eyes.

The young man smiled, but he thought he looked at him a
little harder. " A blasphemer."

"A blasphemer."

It seemed to do his visitor good — he certainly was looking at
him harder. Detached as he was he was interested — he was at
least amused. " Then you don't claim, or at any rate you don't
insist ? I mean you personally."

He had an identity for him, Gedge felt, that he couldn't have
had for a Briton, and the impulse was quick in our friend to
testify to this perception. " I don't insist to you"

204 THE BETTER SORT

The young man laughed. " It really — I assure you if I may —
wouldn't do any good. I'm too awfully interested."

"Do you mean," his wife lightly inquired, "in — a — pulling it
down ? That is in what you've said to me."

"Has he said to you," Gedge intervened, though quaking a
little, " that he would like to pull it down ? "

She met, in her free sweetness, this directness with such a
charm ! " Oh, perhaps not quite the house / "

" Good. You see we live on it — I mean we people."

The husband had laughed, but had now so completely ceased
to look about him that there seemed nothing left for him but
to talk avowedly with the caretaker. "I'm interested," he ex-
plained, "in what, I think, is the interesting thing— or at all
events the eternally tormenting one. The fact of the abyssmally
little that, in proportion, we know."

" In proportion to what ? " his companion asked.

" Well, to what there must have been — to what in fact there
is — to wonder about. That's the interest; its immense. He
escapes us like a thief -at night, carrying off — well, carrying off
everything. And people pretend to catch Him like a flown
canary, over whom you can close your hand and put Him back.
He won't go back ; he won't come back. He's not " — the young
man laughed — " such a fool ! It makes Him the happiest of all
great men."

He had begun by speaking to his wife, but had ended, with
his friendly, his easy, his indescribable competence, for Gedge —
poor Gedge who quite held his breath and who felt, in the most
unexpected way, that he had somehow never been in such good
society. The young wife, who for herself meanwhile had con-
tinued to look about, sighed out, smiled out — Gedge couldn't
have told which — her little answer to these remarks. " It's rather
a pity, you know, that He isn't here. I mean as Goethe's at
Weimar. For Goethe is at Weimar."

"Yes, my dear; that's Goethe's bad luck. There he sticks.
This man isn't anywhere. I defy you to catch Him."

" Why not say, beautifully," the young woman laughed, "that,
like the wind, He's everywhere ? "

It wasn't of course the tone of discussion, it was the tone of
joking, though of better joking, Gedge seemed to feel, and more
within his own appreciation, than he had ever listened to ; and
this was precisely why the young man could go on without the
effect of irritation, answering his wife but still with eyes for their
companion. " I'll be hanged if He's here I "

It was almost as if he were taken — that is, struck and rather

THE BIRTHPLACE 205

held — by their companion's unruffled state, which they hadn't
meant to ruffle, but which suddenly presented its interest, perhaps
even projected its light. The gentleman didn't know, Gedge
was afterwards to say to himself, how that hypocrite was inwardly
all of a tremble, how it seemed to him that his fate was being
literally pulled down on his head. He was trembling for the
moment certainly too much to speak ; abject he might be, but
he didn't want his voice to have the absurdity of a quaver. And
the young woman — charming creature ! — still had another word.
It was for the guardian of the spot, and she made it, in her way,
delightful. They had remained in the Holy of Holies, and she
had been looking for a minute, with a ruefulness just marked
enough to be pretty, at the queer old floor. "Then if you say
it wasn't in this room He was born — well, what's the use ? "

"What's the use of what?" her husband asked. "The use,
you mean, of our coming here ? Why, the place is charming in
itself. And it's also interesting," he added to Gedge, " to know
how you get on."

Gedge looked at him a moment in silence, but he answered the
young woman first. If poor Isabel, he was thinking, could only
have been like that! — not as to youth, beauty, arrangement of
hair or picturesque grace of hat — these things he didn't mind;
but as to sympathy, facility, light perceptive, and yet not cheap,
detachment ! "I don't say it wasn't — but I don't say it was"

"Ah, but doesn't that," she returned, "come very much to the
same thing ? And don't They want also to see where He had His
dinner and where He had His tea ? "

" They want everything," said Morris Gedge. " They want to
see where He hung up His hat and where He kept His boots and
where His mother boiled her pot."

" But if you don't show them ? "

" They show me. It's in all their little books."

"You mean," the husband asked, "that you've only to hold
your tongue ? "

" I try to," said Gedge.

" Well," his visitor smiled, " I see you can.19

Gedge hesitated. " I can't."

" Oh, well," said his friend, " what does it matter ? "

" I do speak," he continued. " I can't sometimes not."

" Then how do you get on ? "

Gedge looked at him more abjectly, to his own sense, than he
had ever looked at anyone — even at Isabel when she frightened
him. " I don't get on. I speak," he said, " since I've spoken to
you."

206 THE BETTER SORT

" Oh, we shan't hurt you ! " the young man reassuringly
laughed.

The twilight meanwhile had sensibly thickened ; the end of the
visit was indicated. They turned together out of the upper room,
and came down the narrow stair. The words just exchanged
might have been felt as producing an awkwardness which the
young woman gracefully felt the impulse to dissipate. "You
must rather wonder why we've come." And it was the first
note, for Gedge, of a further awkwardness — as if he had definitely
heard it make the husband's hand, in a full pocket, begin to
fumble.

It was even a little awkwardly that the husband still held off.
" Oh, we like it as it is. There's always something? With which
they had approached the door of egress.

" What is there, please ? " asked Morris Gedge, not yet open-
ing the door, as he would fain have kept the pair on, and con-
scious only for a moment after he had spoken that his question
was just having, for the young man, too dreadfully wrong a sound.
This personage wondered, yet feared, had evidently for some
minutes been asking himself; so that, with his preoccupation, the
caretaker's words had represented to him, inevitably, "What is
there, please, for me 1 " Gedge already knew, with it, moreover,
that he wasn't stopping him in time. He had put his question,
to show he himself wasn't afraid, and he must have had in
consequence, he was subsequently to reflect, a lamentable air of
waiting.

The visitor's hand came out. " I hope I may take the

liberty ?" What afterwards happened our friend scarcely

knew, for it fell into a slight confusion, the confusion of a queer
gleam of gold — a sovereign fairly thrust at him ; of a quick, almost
violent motion on his own part, which, to make the matter worse,
might well have sent the money rolling on the floor ; and then of
marked blushes all round, and a sensible embarrassment; pro-
ducing indeed, in turn, rather oddly, and ever so quickly, an
increase of communion. It was as if the young man had offered
him money to make up to him for having, as it were, led him on,
and then, perceiving the mistake, but liking him the better for his
refusal, had wanted to obliterate this aggravation of his original
wrong. He had done so, presently, while Gedge got the door
open, by saying the best thing he could, and by saying it frankly
and gaily. " Luckily it doesn't at all affect the work /"

The small town-street, quiet and empty in the summer even-
tide, stretched to right and left, with a gabled and timbered house
or two, and fairly seemed to have cleared itself to congruity with

THE BIRTHPLACE 207

the historic void over which our friends, lingering an instant to
converse, looked at each other. The young wife, rather, looked
about a moment at all there wasn't to be seen, and then, before
Gedge had found a reply to her husband's remark, uttered,
evidently in the interest of conciliation, a little question of her
own that she tried to make earnest. "It's our unfortunate
ignorance, you mean, that doesn't ? "

"Unfortunate or fortunate. I like it so," said the husband.
" ' The play's the thing.' Let the author alone."

Gedge, with his key on his forefinger, leaned against the door-
post, took in the stupid little street, and was sorry to see them go
— they seemed so to abandon him. " That's just what They won't
do — not let me do. It's all I want — to let the author alone.
Practically" — he felt himself getting the last of his chance —
" there is no author ; that is for us to deal with. There are all
the immortal people — in the work ; but there's nobody else."

"Yes," said the young man — "that's what it comes to. There
should really, to clear the matter up, be no such Person."

" As you say," Gedge returned, " it's what it comes to. There
is no such Person."

The evening air listened, in the warm, thick midland stillness,
while the wife's little cry rang out. " But wasrit there ? "

"There was somebody," said Gedge, against the doorpost.
" But They've killed Him. And, dead as He is, They keep it
up, They do it over again, They kill Him every day."

He was aware of saying this so grimly — more grimly than he
wished — that his companions exchanged a glance and even
perhaps looked as if they felt him extravagant. That was the way,
really, Isabel had warned him all the others would be looking if
he should talk to Them as he talked to her. He liked, however,
for that matter, to hear how he should sound when pronounced
incapable through deterioration of the brain. "Then if there's
no author, if there's nothing to be said but that there isn't any-
body," the young woman smilingly asked, "why in the world
should there be a house?"

" There shouldn't," said Morris Gedge.

Decidedly, yes, he affected the young man. " Oh, I don't say,
mind you, that you should pull it down ! "

"Then where would you go?" their companion sweetly in-
quired.

"That's what my wife asks," Gedge replied.

" Then keep it up, keep it up ! " And the husband held out
his hand.

" That's what my wife says," Gedge went on as he shook it.

208 THE BETTER SORT

The young woman, charming creature, emulated the other
visitor ; she offered their remarkable friend her handshake.
"Then mind your wife."

The poor man faced her gravely. " I would if she were such
a wife as you ! "

VI

IT had made for him, all the same, an immense difference ; it
had given him an extraordinary lift, so that a certain sweet after-
taste of his freedom might, a couple of months later, have been
suspected of aiding to produce for him another, and really a
more considerable, adventure. It was an odd way to think of it,
but he had been, to his imagination, for twenty minutes in good
society — that being the term that best described for him the
company of people to whom he hadn't to talk, as he further
phrased it, rot. It was his title to society that he had, in his
doubtless awkward way, affirmed ; and the difficulty was just that,
having affirmed it, he couldn't take back the affirmation. Few
things had happened to him in life, that is few that were agree-
able, but at least this had, and he wasn't so constructed that he
could go on as if it hadn't. It was going on as if it had, however,
that landed him, alas ! in the situation unmistakeably marked by
a visit from Grant-Jackson, late one afternoon toward the end of
October. This had been the hour of the call of the young
Americans. Every day that hour had come round something of
the deep throb of it, the successful secret, woke up ; but the two
occasions were, of a truth, related only by being so intensely
opposed. The secret had been successful in that he had said
nothing of it to Isabel, who, occupied in their own quarter while
the incident lasted, had neither heard the visitors arrive nor
seen them depart. It was on the other hand scarcely success-
ful in guarding itself from indirect betrayals. There were two
persons in the world, at least, who felt as he did; they were
persons, also, who had treated him, benignly, as feeling as they
did, who had been ready in fact to overflow in gifts as a sign of
it, and though they were now off in space they were still with
him sufficiently in spirit to make him play, as it were, with the
sense of their sympathy. This in turn made him, as he was
perfectly aware, more than a shade or two reckless, so that, in his
reaction from that gluttony of the public for false facts which
had from the first tormented him, he fell into the habit of sailing,
as he would have said, too near the wind, or in other words — all
in presence of the people — of washing his hands of the legend.
He had crossed the line — he knew it ; he had struck wild — They

THE BIRTHPLACE 209

drove him to it ; he had substituted, by a succession of uncon-
trollable profanities, an attitude that couldn't be understood for
an attitude that but too evidently had been.

This was of course the franker line, only he hadn't taken it,
alas ! for frankness — hadn't in the least, really, taken it, but had
been simply himself caught up and disposed of by it, hurled by his
fate against the bedizened walls of the temple, quite in the way of
a priest possessed to excess of the god, or, more vulgarly, that of a
blind bull in a china-shop — an animal to which he often compared
himself. He had let himself fatally go, in fine, just for irritation,
for rage, having, in his predicament, nothing at all to do with
frankness — a luxury reserved for quite other situations. It had
always been his sentiment that one lived to learn ; he had learned
something every hour of his life, though people mostly never
knew what, in spite of its having generally been — hadn't it ? — at
somebody's expense. What he was at present continually learning
was the sense of a form of words heretofore so vain — the famous
4 'false position" that had so often helped out a phrase. One
used names in that way without knowing what they were worth ;
then of a sudden, one fine day, their meaning was bitter in the
mouth. This was a truth with the relish of which his fireside
hours were occupied, and he was quite conscious that a man was
exposed who looked so perpetually as if something had disagreed
with him. The look to be worn at the Birthplace was properly
the beatific, and when once it had fairly been missed by those
who took it for granted, who, indeed, paid sixpence for it — like
the table-wine in provincial France, it was compris — one would be
sure to have news of the remark.

News accordingly was what Gedge had been expecting — and
what he knew, above all, had been expected by his wife, who
had a way of sitting at present as with an ear for a certain knock.
She didn't watch him, didn't follow him about the house, at the
public hours, to spy upon his treachery ; and that could touch
him even though her averted eyes went through him more than
her fixed. Her mistrust was so perfectly expressed by her manner
of showing she trusted that he never felt so nervous, never so
tried to keep straight, as when she most let him alone. When
the crowd thickened and they had of necessity to receive together
he tried himself to get off by allowing her as much as possible
the word. When people appealed to him he turned to her — and
with more of ceremony than their relation warranted : he couldn't
help this either, if it seemed ironic — as to the person most
concerned or most competent. He flattered himself at these
moments that no one would have guessed her being his wife;

210 THE BETTER SORT

especially as, to do her justice, she met his manner with a
wonderful grim bravado — grim, so to say, for himself, grim by its
outrageous cheerfulness for the simple-minded. The lore she
did produce for them, the associations of the sacred spot that she
developed, multiplied, embroidered ; the things in short she said
and the stupendous way she said them ! She wasn't a bit
ashamed ; for why need virtue be ever ashamed ? It was virtue,
for it put bread into his mouth — he meanwhile, on his side,
taking it out of hers. He had seen Grant-Jackson, on the
October day, in the Birthplace itself — the right setting of course
for such an interview; and what occurred was that, precisely, when
the scene had ended and he had come back to their own sitting-
room, the question she put to him for information was : " Have
you settled it that I'm to starve ? "

She had for a long time said nothing to him so straight — which
was but a proof of her real anxiety ; the straightness of Grant-
Jackson's visit, following on the very slight sinuosity of a note
shortly before received from him, made tension show for what it
was. By this time, really, however, his decision had been taken ;
the minutes elapsing between his reappearance at the domestic
fireside and his having, from the other threshold, seen Grant-
Jackson's broad, well-fitted back, the back of a banker and a
patriot, move away, had, though few, presented themselves to him
as supremely critical. They formed, as it were, the hinge of his
door, that door actually ajar so as to show him a possible fate
beyond it, but which, with his hand, in a spasm, thus tightening
on the knob, he might either open wide or close partly and
altogether. He stood, in the autumn dusk, in the little museum
that constituted the vestibule of the temple, and there, as with a
concentrated push at the crank of a windlass, he brought himself
round. The portraits on the walls seemed vaguely to watch for it ;
it was in their august presence — kept dimly august, for the
moment, by Grant-Jackson's impressive check of his application
of a match to the vulgar gas — that the great man had uttered, as

if it said all, his " You know, my dear fellow, really ! " He

had managed it with the special tact of a fat man, always, when
there was any, very fine ; he had got the most out of the time,
the place, the setting, all the little massed admonitions and
symbols ; confronted there with his victim on the spot that he
took occasion to name to him afresh as, to his piety and patriotism,
the most sacred on earth, he had given it to be understood that
in the first place he was lost in amazement and that in the second
he expected a single warning now to suffice. Not to insist too
much moreover on the question of gratitude, he would let his

THE BIRTHPLACE 211

remonstrance rest, if need be, solely on the question of taste.

As a. matter of taste alone ! But he was surely not to be

obliged to follow that up. Poor Gedge indeed would have been
sorry to oblige him, for he saw it was precisely to the atrocious
taste of unthankfulness that the allusion was made. When he
said he wouldn't dwell on what the fortunate occupant of the
post owed him for the stout battle originally fought on his behalf,
he simply meant he would. That was his tact — which, with
everything else that had been mentioned, in the scene, to help,
really had the ground to itself. The day had been when Gedge
couldn't have thanked him enough — though he had thanked him,
he considered, almost fulsomely — and nothing, nothing that he
could coherently or reputably name, had happened since then.
From the moment he was pulled up, in short, he had no case,
and if he exhibited, instead of one, only hot tears in his eyes, the
mystic gloom of the temple either prevented his friend from
seeing them or rendered it possible that they stood for remorse.
He had dried them, with the pads formed by the base of his
bony thumbs, before he went in to Isabel. This was the more
fortunate as, in spite of her inquiry, prompt and pointed, he but
moved about the room looking at her hard. Then he stood
before the fire a little with his hands behind him and his coat-tails
divided, quite as the person in permanent possession. It was an
indication his wife appeared to take in ; but she put nevertheless
presently another question. "You object to telling me what he
said?"

" He said ' You know, my dear fellow, really ! ' "

"And is that all?"

" Practically. Except that I'm a thankless beast."

" Well ! " she responded, not with dissent.

" You mean that I am ? "

"Are those the words he used?" she asked with a scruple.

Gedge continued to think. "The words he used were that I
give away the Show and that, from several sources, it has come
round to Them."

"As of course a baby would have known ! " And then as her
husband said nothing : " Were those the words he used ? "

"Absolutely. He couldn't have used better ones."

"Did he call it," Mrs. Gedge inquired, "the 'Show'?"

" Of course he did. The Biggest on Earth."

She winced, looking at him hard — she wondered, but only for
a moment. "Well, it t's."

"Then it's something," Gedge went on, "to have given that
away. But," he added, " I've taken it back."

212 THE BETTER SORT

" You mean you've been convinced ? "

"I mean I've been scared."

" At last, at last ! " she gratefully breathed.

" Oh, it was easily done. It was only two words. But here
I am."

Her face was now less hard for him. "And what two
words?"

" ' You know, Mr. Gedge, that it simply won't do.' That was
all. But it was the way such a man says them."

"I'm glad, then," Mrs. Gedge frankly averred, "that he is such
a man. How did you ever think it could do ? "

" Well, it was my critical sense. I didn't ever know I had one
— till They came and (by putting me here) waked it up in me.
Then I had, somehow, don't you see? to live with it; and I
seemed to feel that, somehow or other, giving it time and in the
long run, it might, it ought to, come out on top of the heap. Now
that's where, he says, it simply won't do. So I must put it — I have
put it — at the bottom."

"A very good place, then, for a critical sense !" And Isabel,
more placidly now, folded her work. " J/, that is, you can only
keep it there. If it doesn't struggle up again."

" It can't struggle." He was still before the fire, looking round
at the warm, low room, peaceful in the lamplight, with the hum
of the kettle for the ear, with the curtain drawn over the leaded
casement, a short moreen curtain artfully chosen by Isabel for the
effect of the olden time, its virtue of letting the light within show
ruddy to the street. "It's dead," he went on; "I killed it
just now."

He spoke, really, so that she wondered. " Just now ? "

"There in the other place — I strangled it, poor thing, in the
dark. If you'll go out and see, there must be blood. Which,
indeed," he added, " on an altar of sacrifice, is all right. But the
place is forever spattered."

" I don't want to go out and see." She rested her locked hands
on the needlework folded on her knee, and he knew, with her
eyes on him, that a look he had seen before was in her face.
"You're off your head you know, my dear, in a way." Then,
however, more cheeringly : " It's a good job it hasn't been
too late."

" Too late to get it under ? "

"Too late for Them to give you the second chance that I
thank God you accept."

" Yes, if it had been ! " And he looked away as through

the ruddy curtain and into the chill street. Then he faced her

THE BIRTHPLACE 213

again. " I've scarcely got over my fright yet. I mean," he went
on, " for you."

"And I mean for you. Suppose what you had come to
announce to me now were that we had got the sack. How
should I enjoy, do you think, seeing you turn out? Yes, out
there ! " she added as his eyes again moved from their little warm
circle to the night of early winter on the other side of the pane,
to the rare, quick footsteps, to the closed doors, to the curtains
drawn like their own, behind which the small flat town, intrinsi-
cally dull, was sitting down to supper.

He stiffened himself as he warmed his back ; he held up his
head, shaking himself a little as if to shake the stoop out of his
shoulders, but he had to allow she was right. " What would
have become of us ? "

"What indeed? We should have begged our bread — or I
should be taking in washing."

He was silent a little. " I'm too old. I should have begun
sooner."

" Oh, God forbid ! " she cried.

" The pinch," he pursued, " is that I can do nothing else."

" Nothing whatever ! " she agreed with elation.

" Whereas here — if I cultivate it — I perhaps can still lie. But
I must cultivate it."

" Oh, you old dear ! " And she got up to kiss him.

" 111 do my best," he said.

VII

"Do you remember us?" the gentleman asked and smiled —
with the lady beside him smiling too ; speaking so much less
as an earnest pilgrim or as a tiresome tourist than as an old
acquaintance. It was history repeating itself as Gedge had some-
how never expected, with almost everything the same except that
the evening was now a mild April-end, except that the visitors
had put off mourning and showed all their bravery — besides
showing, as he doubtless did himself, though so differently, for a
little older ; except, above all, that — oh, seeing them again
suddenly affected him as not a bit the thing he would have
thought it. " We're in England again, and we were near ; I've
a brother at Oxford with whom we've been spending a day, and
we thought we'd come over." So the young man pleasantly said
while our friend took in the queer fact that he must himself seem
to them rather coldly to gape. They had come in the same way,
at the quiet close ; another August had passed, and this was the

214 THE BETTER SORT

second spring ; the Birthplace, given the hour, was about to
suspend operations till the morrow ; the last lingerer had gone,
and the fancy of the visitors was, once more, for a look round by
themselves. This represented surely no greater presumption
than the terms on which they had last parted with him seemed
to warrant ; so that if he did inconsequently stare it was just in
fact because he was so supremely far from having forgotten them.
But the sight of the pair luckily had a double effect, and the first
precipitated the second — the second being really his sudden
vision that everything perhaps depended for him on his recognis-
ing no complication. He must go straight on, since it was what
had for more than a year now so handsomely answered; he
must brazen it out consistently, since that only was what his
dignity was at last reduced to. He mustn't be afraid in one way
any more than he had been in another; besides which it came
over him with a force that made him flush that their visit, in its
essence, must have been for himself. It was good society again,
and they were the same. It wasn't for him therefore to behave as
if he couldn't meet them.

These deep vibrations, on Gedge's part, were as quick as they
were deep ; they came in fact all at once, so that his response,
his declaration that it was all right — "Oh, rather; the hour doesn't
matter for you/" — had hung fire but an instant ; and when they
were within and the door closed behind them, within the twilight
of the temple, where, as before, the votive offerings glimmered
on the walls, he drew the long breath of one who might, by a
self-betrayal, have done something too dreadful. For what had
brought them back was not, indubitably, the sentiment of the
shrine itself — since he knew their sentiment ; but their intelligent
interest in the queer case of the priest. Their call was the
tribute of curiosity, of sympathy, of a compassion really, as such
things went, exquisite — a tribute to that queerness which en-
titled them to the frankest welcome. They had wanted, for the
generous wonder of it, to see how he was getting on, how such a
man in such a place could ; and they had doubtless more than
half expected to see the door opened by somebody who had
succeeded him. Well, somebody had — only with a strange
equivocation ; as they would have, poor things, to make out for
themselves, an embarrassment as to which he pitied them.
Nothing could have been more odd, but verily it was this
troubled vision of their possible bewilderment, and this com-
punctious view of such a return for their amenity, that practically
determined for him his tone. The lapse of the months had
but made their name familiar to him ; they had on the other

THE BIRTHPLACE 215

occasion inscribed it, among the thousand names, in the current
public register, and he had since then, for reasons of his own,
reasons of feeling, again and again turned back to it. It was
nothing in itself; it told him nothing — "Mr. and Mrs. B. D.
Hayes, New York" — one of those American labels that were
just like every other American label and that were, precisely, the
most remarkable thing about people reduced to achieving an
identity in such other ways. They could be Mr. and Mrs. B. D.
Hayes and yet they could be, with all presumptions missing —
well, what these callers were. It had quickly enough indeed
cleared the situation a little further that his friends had absolutely,
the other time, as it came back to him, warned him of his original
danger, their anxiety about which had been the last note
sounded between them. What he was afraid of, with this
reminiscence, was that, finding him still safe, they would, the
next thing, definitely congratulate him and perhaps even, no less
candidly, ask him how he had managed. It was with the sense
of nipping some such inquiry in the bud that, losing no time and
holding himself with a firm grip, he began, on the spot, downstairs,
to make plain to them how he had managed. He averted the
question in short by the assurance of his answer. "Yes, yes, I'm
still here ; I suppose it is in a manner to one's profit that one
does, such as it is, one's best." He did his best on the present
occasion, did it with the gravest face he had ever worn and a
soft serenity that was like a large damp sponge passed over their
previous meeting — over everything in it, that is, but the fact of
its pleasantness.

" We stand here, you see, in the old living-room, happily still to
be reconstructed in the mind's eye, in spite of the havoc of time,
which we have fortunately, of late years, been able to arrest. It
was of course rude and humble, but it must have been snug and
quaint, and we have at least the pleasure of knowing that the
tradition in respect to the features that do remain is delightfully
uninterrupted. Across that threshold He habitually passed;
through those low windows, in childhood, He peered out into the
world that He was to make so much happier by the gift to it of
His genius ; over the boards of this floor — that is over some of
them, for we mustn't be carried away! — his little feet often
pattered ; and the beams of this ceiling (we must really in some
places take care of our heads !) he endeavoured, in boyish strife, to
jump up and touch. It's not often that in the early home of genius
and renown the whole tenor of existence is laid so bare, not often that
we are able to retrace, from point to point and from step to step,
its connection with objects, with influences — to build it round

216 THE BETTER SORT

again with the little solid facts out of which it sprang. This,
therefore, I need scarcely remind you, is what makes the small
space between these walls — so modest to measurement, so in-
significant of aspect — unique on all the earth. There is nothing
like it? Morris Gedge went on, insisting as solemnly and softly,
for his bewildered hearers, as over a pulpit-edge; "there is
nothing at all like it anywhere in the world. There is nothing,
only reflect, for the combination of greatness, and, as we
venture to say, of intimacy. You may find elsewhere perhaps
absolutely fewer changes, but where shall you find ^presence equally
diffused, uncontested and undisturbed? Where in particular
shall you find, on the part of the abiding spirit, an equally tower-
ing eminence ? You may find elsewhere eminence of a consider-
able order, but where shall you find with it, don't you see,
changes, after all, so few, and the contemporary element caught
so, as it were, in the very fact ? " His visitors, at first confounded,
but gradually spellbound, were still gaping with the universal
gape — wondering, he judged, into what strange pleasantry he had
been suddenly moved to break out, and yet beginning to see in
him an intention beyond a joke, so that they started, at this
point, almost jumped, when, by as rapid a transition, he made,
toward the old fireplace, a dash that seemed to illustrate,
precisely, the act of eager catching. " It is in this old chimney
corner, the quaint inglenook of our ancestors — just there in the
far angle, where His little stool was placed, and where, I dare
say, if we could look close enough, we should find the hearth-
stone scraped with His little feet — that we see the inconceiv-
able child gazing into the blaze of the old oaken logs and
making out there pictures and stories, see Him conning, with
curly bent head, His well-worn hornbook, or poring over
some scrap of an ancient ballad, some page of some such rudely
bound volume of chronicles as lay, we may be sure, in His
father's window-seat."

It was, he even himself felt at this moment, wonderfully done ;
no auditors, for all his thousands, had ever yet so inspired him.
The odd, slightly alarmed shyness in the two faces, as if in a
drawing-room, in their "good society," exactly, some act incon-
gruous, something grazing the indecent, had abruptly been per-
petrated, the painful reality of which faltered before coming home
— the visible effect on his friends, in fine, wound him up as to the
sense that they were worth the trick. It came of itself now — he
had got it so by heart ; but perhaps really it had never come so
well, with the staleness so disguised, the interest so renewed and
the clerical unction, demanded by the priestly character, so

THE BIRTHPLACE 217

successfully distilled. Mr. Hayes of New York had more than
once looked at his wife, and Mrs. Hayes of New York had more
than once looked at her husband — only, up to now, with a stolen
glance, with eyes it had not been easy to detach from the remark-
able countenance by the aid of which their entertainer held them.
At present, however, after an exchange less furtive, they ventured
on a sign that they had not been appealed to in vain. "Charm-
ing, charming, Mr. Gedge ! " Mr. Hayes broke out ; " we feel
that we've caught you in the mood."

His wife hastened to assent — it eased the tension. " It would
be quite the way; except," she smiled, "that you'd be too
dangerous. You've really a genius ! "

Gedge looked at her hard, but yielding no inch, even though
she touched him there at a point of consciousness that quivered.
This was the prodigy for him, and had been, the year through —
that he did it all, he found, easily, did it better than he had done
anything else in his life ; with so high and broad an effect, in
truth, an inspiration so rich and free, that his poor wife now,
literally, had been moved more than once to fresh fear. She
had had her bad moments, he knew, after taking the measure of
his new direction — moments of readjusted suspicion in which
she wondered if he had not simply embraced another, a different
perversity. There would be more than one fashion of giving
away the show, and wasn't this perhaps a question of giving it
away by excess ? He could dish them by too much romance as
well as by too little; she had not hitherto fairly apprehended
that there might be too much. It was a way like another, at any
rate, of reducing the place to the absurd ; which reduction, if he
didn't look out, would reduce them again to the prospect of
the streets, and this time surely without an appeal. It all de-
pended, indeed — he knew she knew that — on how much Grant-
Jackson and the others, how much the Body, in a word, would
take. He knew she knew what he himself held it would take —
that he considered no limit could be drawn to the quantity.
They simply wanted it piled up, and so did everybody else;
wherefore, if no one reported him, as before, why were They to
be uneasy ? It was in consequence of idiots brought to reason
that he had been dealt with before; but as there was now no
form of idiocy that he didn't systematically flatter, goading it on
really to its own private doom, who was ever to pull the string of
the guillotine? The axe was in the air — yes; but in a world
gorged to satiety there were no revolutions. And it had been
vain for Isabel to ask if the other thunder-growl also hadn't come
out of the blue. There was actually proof positive that the

218 THE BETTER SORT

winds were now at rest. How could they be more so? — he
appealed to the receipts. These were golden days — the show
had never so flourished. So he had argued, so he was arguing
still — and, it had to be owned, with every appearance in his
favour. Yet if he inwardly winced at the tribute to his plausi-
bility rendered by his flushed friends, this was because he felt in
it the real ground of his optimism. The charming woman before
him acknowledged his "genius" as he himself had had to do.
He had been surprised at his facility until he had grown used to
it. Whether or no he had, as a fresh menace to his future,
found a new perversity, he had found a vocation much older,
evidently, than he had at first been prepared to recognise. He
had done himself injustice. He liked to be brave because it
came so easy; he could measure it off by the yard. It was in
the Birthroom, above all, that he continued to do this, having
ushered up his companions without, as he was still more elated
to feel, the turn of a hair. She might take it as she liked, but he
had had the lucidity — all, that is, for his own safety — to meet
without the grace of an answer the homage of her beautiful
smile. She took it apparently, and her husband took it, but as a
part of his odd humour, and they followed him aloft with faces
now a little more responsive to the manner in which, on that
spot, he would naturally come out. He came out, according to
the word of his assured private receipt, " strong." He missed a
little, in truth, the usual round-eyed question from them — the
inveterate artless cue with which, from moment to moment,
clustered troops had, for a year, obliged him. Mr. and Mrs.
Hayes were from New York, but it was a little like singing, as he
had heard one of his Americans once say about something, to a
Boston audience. He did none the less what he could, and it
was ever his practice to stop still at a certain spot in the room
and, after having secured attention by look and gesture, suddenly
shoot off: "Here!"

They always understood, the good people — he could fairly love
them now for it ; they always said, breathlessly and unanimously,
"There?" and stared down at the designated point quite as if
some trace of the grand event were still to be made out. This
movement produced, he again looked round. " Consider it well :

the spot of earth !" "Oh, but it isn't earth!" the boldest

spirit — there was always a boldest — would generally pipe out.
Then the guardian of the Birthplace would be truly superior— as
if the unfortunate had figured the Immortal coming up, like a
potato, through the soil. "I'm not suggesting that He was
born on the bare ground. He was born here/" — with an un-

THE BIRTHPLACE 219

compromising dig of his heel. "There ought to be a brass,
with an inscription, let in." "Into the floor?" — it always came.
" Birth and burial : seedtime, summer, autumn ! " — that always,
with its special, right cadence, thanks to his unfailing spring,
came too. " Why not as well as into the pavement of the
church? — you've seen our grand old church?" The former of
which questions nobody ever answered — abounding, on the other
hand, to make up, in relation to the latter. Mr. and Mrs. Hayes
even were at first left dumb by it — not indeed, to do them justice,
having uttered the word that produced it. They had uttered no
word while he kept the game up, and (though that made it a
little more difficult) he could yet stand triumphant before them
after he had finished with his flourish. Then it was only that
Mr. Hayes of New York broke silence.

" Well, if we wanted to see, I think I may say we're quite
satisfied. As my wife says, it would seem to be your line." He
spoke now, visibly, with more ease, as if a light had come:
though he made no joke of it, for a reason that presently ap-
peared. They were coming down the little stair, and it was on
the descent that his companion added her word.

"Do you know what we half did think ?" And then to

her husband : " Is it dreadful to tell him ? " They were in the
room below, and the young woman, also relieved, expressed the
feeling with gaiety. She smiled, as before, at Morris Gedge,
treating him as a person with whom relations were possible,
yet remaining just uncertain enough to invoke Mr. Hayes's
opinion. " We have awfully wanted — from what we had heard."
But she met her husband's graver face; he was not quite out
of the wood. At this she was slightly flurried — but she cut it
short. "You must know — don't you? — that, with the crowds
who listen to you, we'd have heard."

He looked from one to the other, and once more again, with
force, something came over him. They had kept him in mind,
they were neither ashamed nor afraid to show it, and it was
positively an interest, on the part of this charming creature and
this keen, cautious gentleman, an interest resisting oblivion and
surviving separation, that had governed their return. Their
other visit had been the brightest thing that had ever happened
to him, but this was the gravest ; so that at the end of a minute
something broke in him and his mask, of itself, fell off. He
chucked, as he would have said, consistency; which, in its
extinction, left the tears in his eyes. His smile was therefore
queer. " Heard how I'm going it ? "

The young man, though still looking at him hard, felt sure,

220 THE BETTER SORT

with this, of his own ground. " Of course, you're tremendously
talked about. You've gone round the world."

"You've heard of me in America?"

" Why, almost of nothing else ! "

" That was what made us feel ! " Mrs. Hayes contributed.

"That you must see for yourselves?" Again he compared,
poor Gedge, their faces. " Do you mean I excite — a — scandal ? "

" Dear no ! Admiration. You renew so," the young man
observed, " the interest."

" Ah, there it is ! " said Gedge with eyes of adventure that
seemed to rest beyond the Atlantic.

" They listen, month after month, when they're out here, as
you must have seen ; and they go home and talk. But they sing
your praise."

Our friend could scarce take it in. " Over there ? "

" Over there. I think you must be even in the papers."

"Without abuse?"

" Oh, we don't abuse everyone."

Mrs. Hayes, in her beauty, it was clear, stretched the point.
" They rave about you."

"Then they don't know?"

"Nobody knows," the young man declared; "it wasn't any-
one's knowledge, at any rate, that made us uneasy."

" It was your own ? I mean your own sense ? "

" Well, call it that. We remembered, and we wondered what
had happened. "So," Mr. Hayes now frankly laughed, "we
came to see."

Gedge stared through his film of tears. "Came from America
to see me ? "

" Oh, a part of the way. But we wouldn't, in England, not
have seen you."

" And now we have !" the young woman soothingly added.

Gedge still could only gape at the candour of the tribute.
But he tried to meet them — it was what was least poor for him —
in their own key. " Well, how do you like it ? "

Mrs. Hayes, he thought — if their answer were important —
laughed a little nervously. " Oh, you see."

Once more he looked from one to the other. " It's too beastly
easy, you know."

Her husband raised his eyebrows. "You conceal your art.
The emotion — yes ; that must be easy ; the general tone must
flow. But about your facts — you've so many : how do you get
them through ? "

Gedge wondered. " You think I get too many ? "

THE BIRTHPLACE 221

At this they were amused together. "That's just what we
came to see ! "

"Well, you know, I've felt my way; I've gone step by step;
you wouldn't believe how I've tried it on. This — where you see
me — is where I've come out." After which, as they said nothing:
"You hadn't thought I could come out?"

Again they just waited, but the husband spoke : " Are you
so awfully sure you are out ? "

Gedge drew himself up in the manner of his moments of
emotion, almost conscious even that, with his sloping shoulders,
his long lean neck and his nose so prominent in proportion
to other matters, he looked the more like a giraffe. It was now
at last that he really caught on. " I may be in danger again —
and the danger is what has moved you ? Oh ! " the poor man
fairly moaned. His appreciation of it quite weakened him, yet
he pulled himself together. " You've your view of my danger ? "

It was wondrous how, with that note definitely sounded, the
air was cleared. Lucid Mr. Hayes, at the end of a minute,
had put the thing in a nutshell. " I don't know what you'll think
of us — for being so beastly curious."

"I think," poor Gedge grimaced, "you're only too beastly
kind."

" It's all your own fault," his friend returned, " for presenting
us (who are not idiots, say) with so striking a picture of a crisis.
At our other visit, you remember," he smiled, " you created an
anxiety for the opposite reason. Therefore if this should again
be a crisis for you, you'd really give us the case with an ideal
completeness."

"You make me wish," said Morris Gedge, "that it might
be one."

" Well, don't try — for our amusement — to bring one on. I don't
see, you know, how you can have much margin. Take care —
take care."

Gedge took it pensively in. "Yes, that was what you said
a year ago. You did me the honour to be uneasy as my
wife was."

Which determined on the young woman's part an immediate
question. " May I ask, then, if Mrs. Gedge is now at rest ? "

" No ; since you do ask. She fears, at least, that I go too far ;
she doesn't believe in my margin. You see, we had our scare
after your visit. They came down."

His friends were all interest. " Ah ! They came down ? "

" Heavy. They brought me down. That's why- "

" Why you are down ? " Mrs. Hayes sweetly demanded.

222 THE BETTER SORT

" Ah, but my dear man," her husband interposed, " you're not
down; you're up! You're only up a different tree, but you're
up at the tip-top."

" You mean I take it too high ? "

" That's exactly the question," the young man answered ; " and
the possibility, as matching your first danger, is just what we
felt we couldn't, if you didn't mind, miss the measure of."

Gedge looked at him. " I feel that I know what you at
bottom hoped"

" We at bottom ' hope,' surely, that you're all right."

" In spite of the fool it makes of everyone ? "

Mr. Hayes of New York smiled. " Say because of that. We
only ask to believe that everyone is a fool ! "

" Only you haven't been, without reassurance, able to imagine
fools of the size that my case demands ? " And Gedge had a
pause, while, as if on the chance of some proof, his companion
waited. " Well, I won't pretend to you that your anxiety hasn't
made me, doesn't threaten to make me, a bit nervous ; though
I don't quite understand it if, as you say, people but rave
about me."

" Oh, that report was from the other side ; people in our
country so very easily rave. You've seen small children laugh
to shrieks when tickled in a new place. So there are amiable
millions with us who are but small children. They perpetually
present new places for the tickler. What we've seen in further
lights," Mr. Hayes good-humouredly pursued, "is your people
here — the Committee, the Board, or whatever the powers to whom
you're responsible."

" Call them my friend Grant- Jack son then — my original
backer, though I admit, for that reason, perhaps my most
formidable critic. It's with him, practically, I deal; or rather
it's by him I'm dealt with — was dealt with before. I stand or
fall by him. But he has given me my head."

"Mayn't he then want you," Mrs, Hayes inquired, "just to
show as flagrantly running away."

" Of course — I see what you mean. I'm riding, blindly, for a
fall, and They're watching (to be tender of me!) for the smash
that may come of itself. It's Machiavellic — but everything's
possible. And what did you just now mean," Gedge asked —
"especially if you've only heard of my prosperity — by your
'further lights'?"

His friends for an instant looked embarrassed, but Mr. Hayes
came to the point. " We've heard of your prosperity, but we've
also, remember, within a few minutes, heard you"

THE BIRTHPLACE 223

" I was determined you should," said Gedge. " I'm good then
— but I overdo ? " His strained grin was still sceptical.

Thus challenged, at any rate, his visitor pronounced. " Well,
if you don't ; if at the end of six months more it's clear that you
haven't overdone ; then, then "

"Then what?"

" Then it's great."

" But it is great — greater than anything of the sort ever was. I
overdo, thank goodness, yes ; or I would if it were a thing you
could."

" Oh, well, if there's prooj "that you can't ! " With which, and

an expressive gesture, Mr. Hayes threw up his fears.

His wife, however, for a moment, seemed unable to let them
go. " Don't They want then any truth ? — none even for the mere
look of it?"

" The look of it," said Morris Gedge, " is what I give ! "

It made them, the others, exchange a look of their own. Then
she smiled. " Oh, well, if they think so ! "

"You at least don't? You're like my wife — which indeed, I
remember," Gedge added, "is a similarity I expressed a year ago
the wish for ! At any rate I frighten her"

The young husband, with an " Ah, wives are terrible ! "
smoothed it over, and their visit would have failed of further
excuse had not, at this instant, a movement at the other end of
the room suddenly engaged them. The evening had so nearly
closed in, though Gedge, in the course of their talk, had lighted
the lamp nearest them, that they had not distinguished, in con-
nection with the opening of the door of communication to the
warden's lodge, the appearance of another person, an eager
woman, who, in her impatience, had barely paused before
advancing. Mrs. Gedge — her identity took but a few seconds to
become vivid— was upon them, and she had not been too late for
Mr. Hayes's last remark. Gedge saw at once that she had come
with news ; no need even, for that certitude, of her quick retort
to the words in the air — " You may say as well, sir, that they're
often, poor wives, terrified ! " She knew nothing of the friends
whom, at so unnatural an hour, he was showing about; but
there was no livelier sign for him that this didn't matter than
the possibility with which she intensely charged her " Grant-
Jackson, to see you at once ! " — letting it, so to speak, fly in his
face.

" He has been with you ?"

" Only a minute — he's there. But it's you he wants to see."

He looked at the others. " And what does he want, dear ? "

224 THE BETTER SORT

" God knows ! There it is. It's his horrid hour — it w as that
other time."

She had nervously turned to the others, overflowing to them, in
her dismay, for all their strangeness — quite, as he said to himself,
like a woman of the people. She was the bare-headed goodwife
talking in the street about the row in the house, and it was in this
character that he instantly introduced her : " My dear doubting
wife, who will do her best to entertain you while I wait upon our
friend." And he explained to her as he could his now protesting
companions — " Mr. and Mrs. Hayes of New York, who have been
here before." He knew, without knowing why, that her an-
nouncement chilled him ; he failed at least to see why it should
chill him so much. His good friends had themselves been
visibly affected by it, and heaven knew that the depths of brood-
ing fancy in him were easily stirred by contact. If they had
wanted a crisis they accordingly had found one, albeit they had
already asked leave to retire before it. This he wouldn't have.
" Ah no, you must really see ! "

" But we shan't be able to bear it, you know," said the young
woman, " if it is to turn you out."

Her crudity attested her sincerity, and it was the latter, doubt-
less, that instantly held Mrs. Gedge. " It is to turn us out."

" Has he told you that, madam ? " Mr. Hayes inquired of her
— it being wondrous how the breath of doom had drawn them
together.

" No, not told me ; but there's something in him there — I
mean in his awful manner — that matches too well with other
things. We've seen," said the poor pale lady, " other things
enough."

The young woman almost clutched her. " Is his manner very
awful?"

" It's simply the manner," Gedge interposed, " of a very great
man."

"Well, very great men," said his wife, "are very awful things."

" It's exactly," he laughed, " what we're finding out ! But I
mustn't keep him waiting. Our friends here," he went on, "are
directly interested. You mustn't, mind you, let them go until we
know."

Mr. Hayes, however, held him; he found himself stayed.
" We're so directly interested that I want you to understand this.
If anything happens "

"Yes?" said Gedge, all gentle as he faltered.

" Well, we must set you up."

Mrs. Hayes quickly abounded. " Oh, do come to us ! "

THE BIRTHPLACE 225

Again he could but look at them. They were really wonderful
folk. And but Mr. and Mrs. Hayes ! It affected even Isabel,
through her alarm ; though the balm, in a manner, seemed to
foretell the wound. He had reached the threshold of his own
quarters ; he stood there as at the door of the chamber of judg-
ment. But he laughed ; at least he could be gallant in going up
for sentence. " Very good then — I'll come to you ! "

This was very well, but it didn't prevent his heart, a minute
later, at the end of the passage, from thumping with beats he
could count. He had paused again before going in ; on the other
side of this second door his poor future was to be let loose at
him. It was broken, at best, and spiritless, but wasn't Grant-
Jackson there, like a beast-tamer in a cage, all tights and spangles
and circus attitudes, to give it a cut with the smart official whip
and make it spring at him ? It was during this moment that he
fully measured the effect for his nerves of the impression made
on his so oddly earnest friends — whose earnestness he in fact,
in the spasm of this last effort, came within an ace of resenting.
They had upset him by contact ; he was afraid, literally, of meet-
ing his doom on his knees ; it wouldn't have taken much more,
he absolutely felt, to make him approach with his forehead in the
dust the great man whose wrath was to be averted. Mr. and
Mrs. Hayes of New York had brought tears to his eyes ; but was
it to be reserved for Grant-Jackson to make him cry like a baby ?
He wished, yes, while he palpitated, that Mr. and Mrs. Hayes of
New York hadn't had such an eccentricity of interest, for it
seemed somehow to come from them that he was going so fast
to pieces. Before he turned the knob of the door, however, he
had another queer instant ; making out that it had been, strictly,
his case that was interesting, his funny power, however accidental,
to show as in a picture the attitude of others — not his poor, dingy
personality. It was this latter quantity, none the less, that was
marching to execution. It is to our friend's credit that he
believed^ as he prepared to turn the knob, that he was going to be
hanged ; and it is certainly not less to his credit that his wife, on
the chance, had his supreme thought. Here it was that — possibly
with his last articulate breath — he thanked his stars, such as they
were, for Mr. and Mrs. Hayes of New York. At least they would
take care of her.

They were doing that certainly with some success when, ten
minutes later, he returned to them. She sat between them in the
beautified Birthplace, and he couldn't have been sure afterwards
that each wasn't holding her hand. The three together, at any
rate, had the effect of recalling to him — it was too whimsical —

226 THE BETTER SORT

some picture, a sentimental print, seen and admired in his youth,
a "Waiting for the Verdict," a "Counting the Hours," or some-
thing of that sort; humble respectability in suspense about humble
innocence. He didn't know how he himself looked, and he
didn't care ; the great thing was that he wasn't crying — though he
might have been ; the glitter in his eyes was assuredly dry,
though that there was a glitter, or something slightly to bewilder,
the faces of the others, as they rose to meet him, sufficiently
proved. His wife's eyes pierced his own, but it was Mrs. Hayes
of New York who spoke. " Was it then for that ? "

He only looked at them at first — he felt he might now enjoy it.
"Yes, it was for 'that.' I mean it was about the way I've been
going on. He came to speak of it."

" And he's gone ? " Mr. Hayes permitted himself to inquire.

" He's gone."

" It's over ? " Isabel hoarsely asked.

" It's over."

"Then we go?"

This it was that he enjoyed. " No, my dear ; we stay."

There was fairly a triple gasp; relief took time to operate.
" Then why did he come ? "

" In the fulness of his kind heart and of Their discussed and
decreed satisfaction. To express Their sense ! "

Mr. Hayes broke into a laugh, but his wife wanted to know.
" Of the grand work you're doing ? "

"Of the way I polish it off. They're most handsome about
it. The receipts, it appears, speak "

He was nursing his effect ; Isabel intently watched him, and
the others hung on his lips. "Yes, speak ?"

" Well, volumes. They tell the truth."

At this Mr. Hayes laughed again. " Oh, they at least do ? "

Near him thus, once more, Gedge knew their intelligence as
one — which was so good a consciousness to get back that his
tension now relaxed as by the snap of a spring and he felt his
old face at ease. " So you can't say," he continued, " that we
don't want it."

" I bow to it," the young man smiled. " It's what I said then.
It's great."

" It's great," said Morris Gedge. " It couldn't be greater."

His wife still watched him ; her irony hung behind. " Then
we're just as we were?"

"No, not as we were."

She jumped at it. " Better ? "

" Better. They give us a rise."

THE BIRTHPLACE 227

"Of income?"

"Of our sweet little stipend — by a vote of the Committee.
That's what, as Chairman, he came to announce."

The very echoes of the Birthplace were themselves, for the
instant, hushed; the warden's three companions showed, in the
conscious air, a struggle for their own breath. But Isabel, with
almost a shriek, was the first to recover hers. "They double
us?"

"Well— call it that. ' In recognition.' There you are." Isabel
uttered another sound — but this time inarticulate ; partly because
Mrs. Hayes of New York had already jumped at her to kiss her.
Mr. Hayes meanwhile, as with too much to say, but put out his
hand, which our friend took in silence. So Gedge had the last
word. " And there you are ! "

THE PAPERS

i

THERE was a longish period — the dense duration of a London
winter, cheered, if cheered it could be called, with lurid
electric, with fierce " incandescent " flares and glares — when they
repeatedly met, at feeding-time, in a small and not quite savoury
pothouse a stone's-throw from the Strand. They talked always
of pothouses, of feeding-time — by which they meant any hour
between one and four of the afternoon ; they talked of most
things, even of some of the greatest, in a manner that gave, or
that they desired to show as giving, in respect to the conditions
of their life, the measure of their detachment, their contempt,
their general irony. Their general irony, which they tried at the
same time to keep gay and to make amusing at least to each
other, was their refuge from the want of savour, the want of
napkins, the want, too often, of shillings, and of many things
besides that they would have liked to have. Almost all they had
with any security was their youth, complete, admirable, very nearly
invulnerable, or as yet inattackable ; for they didn't count their
talent, which they had originally taken for granted and had since
then lacked freedom of mind, as well indeed as any offensive
reason, to reappraise. They were taken up with other questions and
other estimates — the remarkable limits, for instance, of their luck,
the remarkable smallness of the talent of their friends. They were
above all in that phase of youth and in that state of aspiration in
which " luck " is the subject of most frequent reference, as definite
as the colour red, and in which it is the elegant name for money
when people are as refined as they are poor. She was only a
suburban young woman in a sailor hat, and he a young man
destitute, in strictness, of occasion for a " topper " ; but they felt
that they had in a peculiar way the freedom of the town, and the
town, if it did nothing else, gave a range to the spirit. They
sometimes went, on excursions that they groaned at as pro-
fessional, far afield from the Strand, but the curiosity with which
they came back was mostly greater than any other, the Strand

228

THE PAPERS 229

being for them, with its ampler alternative Fleet Street, over-
whelmingly the Papers, and the Papers being, at a rough guess,
all the furniture of their consciousness.

The Daily Press played for them the part played by the em-
bowered nest on the swaying bough for the parent birds that
scour the air. It was, as they mainly saw it, a receptacle, owing
its form to the instinct more remarkable, as they held the journal-
istic, than that even of the most highly organised animal, into
which, regularly, breathlessly, contributions had to be dropped —
odds and ends, all grist to the mill, all somehow digestible and
convertible, all conveyed with the promptest possible beak and
the flutter, often, of dreadfully fatigued little wings. If there had
been no Papers there would have been no young friends for us
of the figure we hint at, no chance mates, innocent and weary,
yet acute even to penetration, who were apt to push off their
plates and rest their elbows on the table in the interval between
the turn-over of the pint-pot and the call for the awful glibness of
their score. Maud Blandy drank beer — and welcome, as one
may say ; and she smoked cigarettes when privacy permitted,
though she drew the line at this in the right place, just as she
flattered herself she knew how to draw it, journalistically, where
other delicacies were concerned. She was fairly a product of the
day — so fairly that she might have been born afresh each morn-
ing, to serve, after the fashion of certain agitated ephemeral
insects, only till the morrow. It was as if a past had been wasted
on her and a future were not to be fitted ; she was really herself,
so far at least as her great preoccupation went, an edition, an
" extra special," coming out at the loud hours and living its life,
amid the roar of vehicles, the hustle of pavements, the shriek of
newsboys, according to the quantity of shock to be proclaimed
and distributed, the quantity to be administered, thanks to the
varying temper of Fleet Street, to the nerves of the nation. Maud
was a shocker, in short, in petticoats, and alike for the thorough-
fare, the club, the suburban train and the humble home ; though
it must honestly be added that petticoats were not of her essence.
This was one of the reasons, in an age of " emancipations," of
her intense actuality, as well as, positively, of a good fortune to
which, however impersonal she might have appeared, she was not
herself in a position to do full justice ; the felicity of her having
about her naturally so much of the young bachelor that she was
saved the disfigurement of any marked straddling or elbowing.
It was literally true of her that she would have pleased less, or
at least have offended more, had she been obliged, or been
prompted, to assert — all too vainly, as it would have been sure to

230 THE BETTER SORT

be — her superiority to sex. Nature, constitution, accident, what-
ever we happen to call it, had relieved her of this care; the
struggle for life, the competition with men, the taste of the day,
the fashion of the hour had made her superior, or had at any
rate made her indifferent, and she had no difficulty in remaining
so. The thing was therefore, with the aid of an extreme general
flatness of person, directness of step and simplicity of motive,
quietly enough done, without a grace, a weak inconsequence, a
stray reminder to interfere with the success ; and it is not too
much to say that the success — by which I mean the plainness of
the type — would probably never have struck you as so great as
at the moments of our young lady's chance comradeship with
Howard Bight. For the young man, though his personal signs
had not, like his friend's, especially the effect of one of the stages
of an evolution, might have been noted as not so fiercely or so
freshly a male as to distance Maud in the show.

She presented him in truth, while they sat together, as com-
paratively girlish. She fell naturally into gestures, tones, expres-
sions, resemblances, that he either suppressed, from sensibility to
her personal predominance, or that were merely latent in him
through much taking for granted. Mild, sensitive, none too
solidly nourished, and condemned, perhaps by a deep delusion
as to the final issue of it, to perpetual coming and going, he was
so resigned to many things, and so disgusted even with many
others, that the least of his cares was the cultivation of a bold
front. What mainly concerned him was its being bold enough
to get him his dinner, and it was never more void of aggression
than when he solicited in person those scraps of information,
snatched at those floating particles of news, on which his dinner
depended. Had he had time a little more to try his case, he
would have made out that if he liked Maud Blandy it was partly
by the impression of what she could do for him : what she could
do for herself had never entered into his head. The positive
quantity, moreover, was vague to his mind ; it existed, that is, for
the present, but as the proof of how, in spite of the want of
encouragement, a fellow could keep going. She struck him in
fact as the only encouragement he had, and this altogether by
example, since precept, frankly, was deterrent on her lips, as
speech was free, judgment prompt, and accent not absolutely
pure. The point was that, as the easiest thing to be with her, he
was so passive that it almost made him graceful and so attentive
that it almost made him distinguished. She was herself neither
of these things, and they were not of course what a man had
most to be ; whereby she contributed to their common view the

THE PAPERS 231

impatiences required by a proper reaction, forming thus for him
a kind of protective hedge behind which he could wait. Much
waiting, for either, was, I hasten to add, always in order, inasmuch
as their novitiate seemed to them interminable and the steps of
their ladder fearfully far apart. It rested — the ladder — against
the great stony wall of the public attention — a sustaining mass
which apparently wore somewhere, in the upper air, a big, thank-
less, expressionless face, a countenance equipped with eyes, ears,
an uplifted nose and a gaping mouth — all convenient if they could
only be reached. The ladder groaned meanwhile, swayed and
shook with the weight of the close-pressed climbers, tier upon
tier, occupying the upper, the middle, the nethermost rounds and
quite preventing, for young persons placed as our young friends
were placed, any view of the summit. It was meanwhile more-
over only Howard Bight's perverse view — he was confessedly
perverse — that Miss Blandy had arrived at a perch superior to
his own.

She had hitherto recognised in herself indeed but a tighter
clutch and a grimmer purpose; she had recognised, she believed,
in keen moments, a vocation ; she had recognised that there had
been eleven of them at home, with herself as youngest, and dis-
tinctions by that time so blurred in her that she might as easily
have been christened John. She had recognised truly, most of
all, that if they came to talk they both were nowhere ; yet this
was compatible with her insisting that Howard had as yet com-
paratively had the luck. When he wrote to people they con-
sented, or at least they answered ; almost always, for that matter,
they answered with greed, so that he was not without something
of some sort to hawk about to buyers. Specimens indeed of
human greed — the greed, the great one, the eagerness to figure,
the snap at the bait of publicity, he had collected in such store
as to stock, as to launch, a museum. In this museum the prize
object, the high rare specimen, had been for some time estab-
lished ; a celebrity of the day enjoying, uncontested, a glass
case all to himself, more conspicuous than any other, before
which the arrested visitor might rebound from surprised recogni-
tion. Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., stood forth
there as large as life, owing indeed his particular place to the
shade of direct acquaintance with him that Howard Bight
could boast, yet with his eminent presence in such a collection
but too generally and notoriously justified. He was universal
and ubiquitous, commemorated, under some rank rubric, on
every page of every public print every day in every year, and as
inveterate a feature of each issue of any self-respecting sheet as

232 THE BETTER SORT

the name, the date, the tariffed advertisements. He had always
done something, or was about to do something, round which the
honours of announcement clustered, and indeed, as he had
inevitably thus become a subject of fallacious report, one half of
his chronicle appeared to consist of official contradiction of the
other half. His activity— if it had not better been called his
passivity— was beyond any other that figured in the public eye,
for no other assuredly knew so few or such brief intermittences.
Yet, as there was the inside as well as the outside view of his
current history, the quantity of it was easy to analyse for the
possessor of the proper crucible. Howard Bight, with his arms
on the table, took it apart and put it together again most days in
the year, so that an amused comparison of notes on the subject
often added a mild spice to his colloquies with Maud Blandy.
They knew, the young pair, as they considered, many secrets,
but they liked to think that they knew none quite so scandalous
as the way that, to put it roughly, this distinguished person
maintained his distinction.

It was known certainly to all who had to do with the Papers,
a brotherhood, a sisterhood of course interested — for what was
it, in the last resort, but the interest of their bread and butter ? —
in shrouding the approaches to the oracle, in not telling tales out
of school. They all lived alike on the solemnity, the sanctity of
the oracle, and the comings and goings, the doings and undoings,
the intentions and retractations of Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet
K.C.B., M.P., were in their degree a part of that solemnity. The
Papers, taken together the glory of the age, were, though super-
ficially multifold, fundamentally one, so that any revelation of
their being procured or procurable to float an object not
intrinsically buoyant would very logically convey discredit from
the circumference — where the revelation would be likely to be
made — to the centre. Of so much as this our grim neophytes,
in common with a thousand others, were perfectly aware; but
something in the nature of their wit, such as it was, or in the
condition of their nerves, such as it easily might become,
sharpened almost to acerbity their relish of so artful an imitation
of the voice of fame. The fame was all voice, as they could
guarantee who had an ear always glued to the speaking-tube;
the items that made the sum were individually of the last
vulgarity, but the accumulation was a triumph — one of the
greatest the age could show — of industry and vigilance. It was
after all not true that a man had done nothing who for ten years
had so fed, so dyked and directed and distributed the fitful
sources of publicity. He had laboured, in his way, like a navvy

THE PAPERS 233

with a spade ; he might be said to have earned by each night's
work the reward, each morning, of his small spurt of glory.
Even for such a matter as its not being true that Sir A. B. C.
Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., was to start on his visit to the
Sultan of Samarcand on the 23rd, but being true that he was to
start on the 29th, the personal attention required was no small
affair, taking the legend with the fact, the myth with the mean-
ing, the original artless error with the subsequent earnest truth —
allowing in fine for the statement still to come that the visit
would have to be relinquished in consequence of the visitor's
other pressing engagements, and bearing in mind the countless
channels to be successively watered. Our young man, one
December afternoon, pushed an evening paper across to his
companion, keeping his thumb on a paragraph at which she
glanced without eagerness. She might, from her manner, have
known by instinct what it would be, and her exclamation had the
note of satiety. " Oh, he's working them now ? "

"If he has begun he'll work them hard. By the time that
has gone round the world there'll be something else to say.
* We are authorised to state that the marriage of Miss Miranda
Beadel-Muffet to Captain Guy Devereux, of the Fiftieth Rifles,
will not take place.' Authorised to state— rather ! when every
wire in the machine has been pulled over and over. They're
authorised to state something every day in the year, and the
authorisation is not difficult to get. Only his daughters, now
that they're coming on, poor things — and I believe there are
many — will have to be chucked into the pot and produced on
occasions when other matter fails. How pleasant for them to
find themselves hurtling through the air, clubbed by the paternal
hand, like golf-balls in a suburb ! Not that I suppose they don't
like it — why should one suppose anything of the sort?" Howard
Bight's impression of the general appetite appeared to-day to be
especially vivid, and he and his companion were alike prompted
to one of those slightly violent returns on themselves and the
work they were doing which none but the vulgar-minded alto-
gether avoid. "People — as I see them — would almost rather
be jabbered about unpleasantly than not be jabbered about at
all : whenever you try them — whenever, at least, I do — I'm con-
firmed in that conviction. It isn't only that if one holds out the
mere tip of the perch they jump at it like starving fish ; it is that
they leap straight out of the water themselves, leap in their thou-
sands and come flopping, open-mouthed and goggle-eyed, to one's
very door. What is the sense of the French expression about
a person's making des yeux de carpc ? It suggests the eyes that

234 THE BETTER SORT

a young newspaper -man seems to see all round him, and I
declare I sometimes feel that, if one has the courage not to blink
at the show, the gilt is a good deal rubbed off the gingerbread
of one's early illusions. They all do it, as the song is at the
music-halls, and it's some of one's surprises that tell one most.
You've thought there were some high souls that didn't do it —
that wouldn't, I mean, to work the oracle, lift a little finger of
their own. But, Lord bless you, give them a chance — you'll find
some of the greatest the greediest. I give you my word for it,
I haven't a scrap of faith left in a single human creature.
Except, of course," the young man added, " the grand creature
that you are, and the cold, calm, comprehensive one whom you
thus admit to your familiarity. We face the music. We see, we
understand ; we know we've got to live, and how we do it. But
at least, like this, alone together, we take our intellectual revenge,
we escape the indignity of being fools dealing with fools. I don't
say we shouldn't enjoy it more if we were. But it can't be
helped ; we haven't the gift — the gift, I mean, of not seeing.
We do the worst we can for the money."

" You certainly do the worst you can," Maud Blandy soon
replied, " when you sit there, with your wanton wiles, and take
the spirit out of me. I require a working faith, you know. If
one isn't a fool, in our world, where is one ? "

" Oh, I say ! " her companion groaned without alarm. " Don't
you fail me^ mind you."

They looked at each other across their clean platters, and,
little as the light of romance seemed superficially to shine in
them or about them, the sense was visibly enough in each of
being involved in the other. He would have been sharply alone,
the softly sardonic young man, if the somewhat dry young
woman hadn't affected him, in a way he was even too nervous
to put to the test, as saving herself up for him ; and the
consciousness of absent resources that was on her own side
quite compatible with this economy grew a shade or two less
dismal with the imagination of his somehow being at costs
for her. It wasn't an expense of shillings — there was not much
question of that ; what it came to was perhaps nothing more
than that, being, as he declared himself, "in the know," he kept
pulling her in too, as if there had been room for them both.
He told her everything, all his secrets. He talked and talked,
often making her think of herself as a lean, stiff person, desti-
tute of skill or art, but with ear enough to be performed to,
sometimes strangely touched, at moments completely ravished,
by a fine violinist. He was her fiddler and genius ; she was

THE PAPERS 235

sure neither of her taste nor of his tunes, but if she could do
nothing else for him she could hold the case while he handled
the instrument. It had never passed between them that they
could draw nearer, for they seemed near, near verily for pleasure,
when each, in a decent young life, was so much nearer to the
other than to anything else. There was no pleasure known
to either that wasn't further off. What held them together was
in short that they were in the same boat, a cockle-shell in
a great rough sea, and that the movements required for keeping
it afloat not only were what the situation safely permitted, but
also made for reciprocity and intimacy. These talks over greasy
white slabs, repeatedly mopped with moist grey cloths by young
women in black uniforms, with inexorable braided " buns " in the
nape of weak necks, these sessions, sometimes prolonged, in
halls of oilcloth, among penal-looking tariffs and pyramids of
scones, enabled them to rest on their oars ; the more that they
were on terms with the whole families, chartered companies, of
food-stations, each a race of innumerable and indistinguishable
members, and had mastered those hours of comparative elegance,
the earlier and the later, when the little weary ministrants were
limply sitting down and the occupants of the red benches
bleakly interspaced. So it was, that, at times, they renewed
their understanding, and by signs, mannerless and meagre, that
would have escaped the notice of witnesses. Maud Blandy had
no need to kiss her hand across to him to show she felt what he
meant; she had moreover never in her life kissed her hand to
anyone, and her companion couldn't have imagined it of her.
His romance was so grey that it wasn't romance at all; it was
a reality arrived at without stages, shades, forms. If he had
been ill or stricken she would have taken him — other resources
failing — into her lap ; but would that, which would scarce even
have been motherly, have been romantic? She nevertheless
at this moment put in her plea for the general element. " I can't
help it, about Beadel-Muffet ; it's too magnificent — it appeals to
me. And then I've a particular feeling about him — I'm waiting
to see what will happen. It is genius, you know, to get yourself
so celebrated for nothing — to carry out your idea in the face
of everything. I mean your idea of being celebrated. It isn't
as if he had done even one little thing. What has he done
when you come to look ? "

" Why, my dear chap, he has done everything. He has missed
nothing. He has been in everything, of everything, at every-
thing, over everything, under everything, that has taken place for
the last twenty years. He's always present, and, though he never

236 THE BETTER SORT

makes a speech, he never fails to get alluded to in the speeches of
others. That's doing it cheaper than anyone else does it, but it's
thoroughly doing it — which is what we're talking about. And so
far," the young man contended, " from its being * in the face ' of
anything, it's positively with the help of everything, since the
Papers are everything and more. They're made for such people,
though no doubt he's the person who has known best how to use
them. I've gone through one of the biggest sometimes, from
beginning to end — it's quite a thrilling little game — to catch him
once out. It has happened to me to think I was near it when, on
the last column of the last page — I count 'advertisements,' heaven
help us, out ! — I've found him as large as life and as true as the
needle to the pole. But at last, in a way, it goes, it can't help
going, of itself. He comes in, he breaks out, of himself; the
letters, under the compositor's hand, form themselves, from the
force of habit, into his name-^-any connection for it, any context,
being as good as any other, and the wind, which he has originally
' raised,' but which continues to blow, setting perpetually in his
favour. The thing would really be now, don't you see, for him to
keep himself out. That would be, on my honour, it strikes me —
his getting himself out — the biggest fact in his record."

The girl's attention, as her friend developed the picture, had
become more present. "He carit get himself out. There he
is." She had a pause ; she had been thinking. " That's just my
idea."

" Your idea ? Well, an idea's always a blessing. What do you
want for it ? "

She continued to turn it over as if weighing its value. " Some-
thing perhaps could be done with it — only it would take imagina-
tion."

He wondered, and she seemed to wonder that he didn't see.
" Is it a situation for a ' ply ' ? "

" No, it's too good for a ply — yet it isn't quite good enough for
a short story."

" It would do then for a novel ? "

"Well, I seem to see it," Maud said— "and with a lot in it to
be got out. But I seem to see it as a question not of what you
or I might be able to do with it, but of what the poor man him-
self may. That's what I meant just now," she explained, " by my
having a creepy sense of what may happen for him. It has
already more than once occurred to me. Then" she wound up,
" we shall have real life, the case itself."

" Do you know you've got imagination ? " Her friend, rather
interested, appeared by this time to have seized her thought.

THE PAPERS 237

" I see him having for some reason, very imperative, to seek
retirement, lie low, to hide, in fact, like a man 'wanted,' but
pursued all the while by the lurid glare that he has himself so
started and kept up, and at last literally devoured (' like Franken-
stein,' of course !) by the monster he has created."

" I say, you have got it ! " — and the young man flushed, visibly,
artistically, with the recognition of elements which his eyes had
for a minute earnestly fixed. " But it will take a lot of doing."

"Oh," said Maud, "we shan't have to do it. He'll do it
himself."

"I wonder." Howard Bight really wondered. "The fun
would be for him to do \ifor us. I mean for him to want us to
help him somehow to get out."

" Oh, ' us ' ! " the girl mournfully sighed.

" Why not, when he comes to us to get in ? "

Maud Blandy stared. "Do you mean to you personally ? You
surely know by this time that no one ever 'comes' to me."

" Why, I went to him in the first instance ; I made up to him
straight, I did him 'at home,' somewhere, as I've surely mentioned
to you before, three years ago. He liked, I believe — for he's
really a delightful old ass — the way I did it ; he knows my name
and has my address, and has written me three or four times since,
with his own hand, a request to be so good as to make use of my
(he hopes) still close connection with the daily Press to rectify the
rumour that he has reconsidered his opinion on the subject of the
blankets supplied to the Upper Tooting Workhouse Infirmary.
He has reconsidered his opinion on no subject whatever — which
he mentions, in the interest of historic truth, without further
intrusion on my valuable time. And he regards that sort of
thing as a commodity that I can dispose of — thanks to my ' close
connection ' — for several shillings."

" And can you ? "

" Not for several pence. They're all tariffed, but he's tariffed
low — having a value, apparently, that money doesn't represent.
He's always welcome, but he isn't always paid for. The beauty,
however, is in his marvellous memory, his keeping us all so apart
and not muddling the fellow to whom he has written that he
hasn't done this, that or the other with the fellow to whom he has
written that he has. He'll write to me again some day about
something else — about his alleged position on the date of the
next school-treat of the Chelsea Cabmen's Orphanage. I shall
seek a market for the precious item, and that will keep us in
touch ; so that if the complication you have the sense of in your
bones does come into play — the thought's too beautiful !— he

238 THE BETTER SORT

may once more remember me. Fancy his coming to one with a
'What can you do for me now?'" Bight lost himself in the
happy vision ; it gratified so his cherished consciousness of the
"irony of fate" — a consciousness so cherished that he never
could write ten lines without use of the words.

Maud showed however at this point a reserve which appeared
to have grown as the possibility opened out. " I believe in it —
it must come. It can't not. It's the only end. He doesn't
know ; nobody knows — the simple-minded all : only you and I
know. But it won't be nice, remember."

"It won't be funny?"

" It will be pitiful. There'll have to be a reason."

" For his turning round ? " the young man nursed the vision.
" More or less — I see what you mean. But except for a ' ply '
will that so much matter? His reason will concern himself.
What will concern us will be his funk and his helplessness, his
having to stand there in the blaze, with nothing and nobody to
put it out. We shall see him, shrieking for a bucket of water,
wither up in the central flame."

Her look had turned sombre. " It makes one cruel. That is
it makes you. I mean our trade does."

" I dare say — I see too much. But I'm willing to chuck it."

" Well," she presently replied, " I'm not willing to, but it seems
pretty well on the cards that I shall have to. / don't see too
much. I don't see enough. So, for all the good it does me ! "

She had pushed back her chair and was looking round for
her umbrella. " Why, what's the matter ? " Howard Bight too
blankly inquired.

She met his eyes while she pulled on her rusty old gloves.
"Well, I'll tell you another time."

He kept his place, still lounging, contented where she had
again become restless. " Don't you call it seeing enough to
see — to have had so luridly revealed to you — the doom of
Beadel-Muffet?"

" Oh, he's not my business, he's yours. You're his man, or one
of his men — he'll come back to you. Besides, he's a special case,
and, as I say, I'm too sorry for him."

"That's a proof then of what you do see."

Her silence for a moment admitted it, though evidently she
was making, for herself, a distinction, which she didn't express.
"I don't then see what I want, what I require. And he? she
added, "if he does have some reason, will have to have an awfully
strong one. To be strong enough it will have to be awful."

" You mean he'll have done something ? "

THE PAPERS 239

" Yes, that may remain undiscovered if he can only drop out
of the papers, sit for a while in darkness. You'll know what it is;
you'll not be able to help yourself. But I shan't want to, for
anything."

She had got up as she said it, and he sat looking at her, thanks
to her odd emphasis, with an interest that, as he also rose, passed
itself off as a joke. "Ah, then, you sweet sensitive thing, I
promise to keep it from you."

II

THEY met again a few days later, and it seemed the law of their
meetings that these should take place mainly within moderate
eastward range of Charing Cross. An afternoon performance of
a play translated from the Finnish, already several times given,
on a series of Saturdays, had held Maud for an hour in a small,
hot, dusty theatre where the air hung as heavy about the great
"trimmed" and plumed hats of the ladies as over the flora and
fauna of a tropical forest ; at the end of which she edged out of
her stall in the last row, to join a small band of unattached
critics and correspondents, spectators with ulterior views and
pencilled shirtcuffs, who, coming together in the lobby for an
exchange of ideas, were ranging from " Awful rot " to " Rather
jolly." Ideas, of this calibre, rumbled and flashed, so that, lost
in the discussion, our young woman failed at first to make out
that a gentleman on the other side of the group, but standing a
little off, had his eyes on her for some extravagant, though
apparently quite respectable, purpose. He had been waiting for
her to recognise him, and as soon as he had caught her attention
he came round to her with an eager bow. She had by this time
entirely placed him — placed him as the smoothest and most
shining subject with which, in the exercise of her profession, she
had yet experimented ; but her recognition was accompanied with
a pang that his amiable address made but the sharper. She had
her reason for awkwardness in the presence of a rosy, glossy,
kindly, but discernibly troubled personage whom she had waited
on " at home " at her own suggestion — promptly welcomed — and
the sympathetic element in whose "personality," the Chippen-
dale, the photographic, the autographic elements in whose flat in
the Earl's Court Road, she had commemorated in the liveliest
prose of which she was capable. She had described with
humour his favourite pug, she had revealed with permission his
favourite make of Kodak, she had touched upon his favourite
manner of spending his Sundays and had extorted from him the

24o THE BETTER SORT

shy confession that he preferred after all the novel of adventure
to the novel of subtlety. Her embarrassment was therefore now
the greater as, touching to behold, he so clearly had approached
her with no intention of asperity, not even at first referring at all
to the matter that couldn't have been gracefully explained.

She had seen him originally — had had the instinct of it in
making up to him — as one of the happy of the earth, and the
impression of him "at home," on his proving so good-natured
about the interview, had begotten in her a sharper envy, a
hungrier sense of the invidious distinctions of fate, than any her
literary conscience, which she deemed rigid, had yet had to
reckon with. He must have been rich, rich by such estimates
as hers ; he at any rate had everything, while she had nothing —
nothing but the vulgar need of offering him to brag, on his be-
half, for money, if she could get it, about his luck. She hadn't
in fact got money, hadn't so much as managed to work in her
stuff anywhere ; a practical comment sharp enough on her having
represented to him — with wasted pathos, she was indeed soon to
perceive — how " important " it was to her that people should let
her get at them. This dim celebrity had not needed that
argument ; he had not only, with his alacrity, allowed her, as she
had said, to try her hand, but had tried with her, quite feverishly,
and all to the upshot of showing her that there were even greater
outsiders than herself. He could have put down money, could
have published, as the phrase was — a bare two columns — at his
own expense ; but it was just a part of his rather irritating luxury
that he had a scruple about that, wanted intensely to taste the
sweet, but didn't want to owe it to any wire-pulling. He wanted
the golden apple straight from the tree, where it yet seemed so
unable to grow for him by any exuberance of its own. He had
breathed to her his real secret— that to be inspired, to work with
effect, he had to feel he was appreciated, to have it all somehow
come back to him. The artist, necessarily sensitive, lived on
encouragement, on knowing and being reminded that people
cared for him a little, cared even just enough to flatter him a wee
bit. They had talked that over, and he had really, as he called
it, quite put himself in her power. He had whispered in her
ear that it might be very weak and silly, but that positively to be
himself, to do anything, certainly to do his best, he required the
breath of sympathy. He did love notice, let alone praise — there
it was. To be systematically ignored — well, blighted him at the
root. He was afraid she would think he had said too much,
but she left him with his leave, none the less, to repeat a part of it.
They had agreed that she was to bring in prettily, somehow, tha

THE PAPERS 241

he did love praise ; for just the right way he was sure he could
trust to her taste.

She had promised to send him the interview in proof, but she
had been able, after all, to send it but in type-copy. If she,
after all, had had a flat adorned — as to the drawing-room alone —
with eighty-three photographs, and all in plush frames ; if she
had lived in the Earl's Court Road, had been rosy and glossy and
well filled out ; and if she had looked withal, as she always made
a point of calling it when she wished to refer without vulgarity to
the right place in the social scale, " unmistakeably gentle " — if she
had achieved these things she would have snapped her fingers at
all other sweets, have sat as tight as possible and let the world
wag, have spent her Sundays in silently thanking her stars, and
not have cared to know one Kodak, or even one novelist's
" methods," from another. Except for his unholy itch he was in
short so just the person she would have liked to be that the last
consecration was given for her to his character by his speaking
quite as if he had accosted her only to secure her view of the
strange Finnish "soul." He had come each time — there had
been four Saturdays ; whereas Maud herself had had to wait till
to-day, though her bread depended on it, for the roundabout
charity of her publicly bad seat. It didn't matter why he had
come — so that he might see it somewhere printed of him that he
was " a conspicuously faithful attendant " at the interesting
series ; it only mattered that he was letting her off so easily, and
yet that there was a restless hunger, odd on the part of one of
the filled-out, in his appealing eye, which she now saw not to be
a bit intelligent, though that didn't matter either. Howard Bight
came into view while she dealt with these impressions, whereupon
she found herself edging a little away from her patron. Her
other friend, who had but just arrived and was apparently waiting
to speak to her, would be a pretext for a break before the poor
gentleman should begin to accuse her of having failed him. She
had failed herself so much more that she would have been ready
to reply to him that he was scarce the one to complain ; fortu-
nately, however, the bell sounded the end of the interval and her
tension was relaxed. They all flocked back to their places, and
her camarade — she knew enough often so to designate him — was
enabled, thanks to some shifting of other spectators, to occupy a
seat beside her. He had brought with him the breath of busi-
ness ; hurrying from one appointment to another he might have
time but for a single act. .He had seen each of the others by
itself, and the way he now crammed in the third, after having
previously snatched the fourth, brought home again to the girl

242 THE BETTER SORT

that he was leading the real life. Her own was a dull imitation
of it. Yet it happened at the same time that before the curtain
rose again he had, with a " Who's your fat friend ? " professed to
have caught her in the act of making her own brighter.

" ' Mortimer Marshal ' ? " he echoed after she had, a trifle dryly,
satisfied him. " Never heard of him."

"Well, I shan't tell him that. But you have? she said;
" you've only forgotten. I told you after I had been to him."

Her friend thought — it came back to him. " Oh yes, and
showed me what you had made of it. I remember your stuff
was charming."

" I see you remember nothing," Maud a little more dryly said.
" I didn't show you what I had made of it. I've never made
anything. You've not seen my stuff, and nobody has. They
won't have it."

She spoke with a smothered vibration, but, as they were still
waiting, it had made him look at her ; by which she was slightly
the more disconcerted. " Who won't ? "

"Everyone, everything won't. Nobody, nothing will. He's
hopeless, or rather /am. I'm no good. And he knows it."

"O — oh!" the young man kindly but vaguely protested.
" Has he been making that remark to you ? "

" NO — that's the worst of it. He's too dreadfully civil. He
thinks I can do something."

" Then why do you say he knows you can't ? "

She was impatient; she gave it up. "Well, I don't know
what he knows — except that he does want to be loved."

" Do you mean he has proposed to you to love him ? "

" Loved by the great heart of the public — speaking through its
natural organ. He wants to be — well, where Beadel-Muffet is."

" Oh, I hope not ! " said Bight with grim amusement.

His friend was struck with his tone. "Do you mean it's
coming on for Beadel-Muffet — what we talked about?" And
then as he looked at her so queerly that her curiosity took a jump :
" It really and truly is f Has anything happened ? "

" The rummest thing in the world — since I last saw you.
We're wonderful, you know, you and I together — we see. And
what we see always takes place, usually within the week. It
wouldn't be believed. But it will do for us. At any rate it's high
sport."

"Do you mean," she asked, "that his scare has literally begun?"

He meant, clearly, quite as much as he said. " He has written
to me again he wants to see me, and we've an appointment for
Monday."

THE PAPERS 243

" Then why isn't it the old game ? "

"Because it isn't. He wants to gather from me, as I have
served him before, if something can't be done. On a souvent
besoin (T un plus petit que soi. Keep quiet, and we shall see some-
thing."

This was very well ; only his manner visibly had for her the
effect of a chill in the air. " I hope," she said, " you're going at
least to be decent to him."

"Well, you'll judge. Nothing at all can be done — it's too
ridiculously late. And it serves him right. I shan't deceive him,
certainly, but I might as well enjoy him."

The fiddles were still going, and Maud had a pause. " Well,
you know you've more or less lived on him. I mean it's the kind
of thing you are living on."

" Precisely — that's just why I loathe it."

Again she hesitated. "You mustn't quarrel, you know, with
your bread and butter."

He looked straight before him, as if she had been consciously,
and the least bit disagreeably, sententious. " What in the world's
that but what I shall just be not doing ? If our bread and butter
is the universal push I consult our interest by not letting it trifle
with us. They're not to blow hot and cold — it won't do. There
he is — let him get out himself. What I call sport is to see if he
can."

" And not — poor wretch — to help him ? "

But Bight was ominously lucid. " The devil is that he can't be
helped. His one idea of help, from the day he opened his eyes,
has been to be prominently — damn the word ! — mentioned : it's
the only kind of help that exists in connection with him. What
therefore is a fellow to do when he happens to want it to stop —
wants a special sort of prominence that will work like a trap in a
pantomime and enable him to vanish when the situation requires
it? Is one to mention that he wants not to be mentioned —
never, never, please, any more ? Do you see the success of that,
all over the place, do you see the headlines in the American
papers ? No, he must die as he has lived — the Principal Public
Person of his time."

"Well," she sighed, "it's all horrible." And then without a
transition : " What do you suppose has happened to him ? "

" The dreadfulness I wasn't to tell you ? ''

" I only mean if you suppose him in a really bad hole."

The young man considered. " It can't certainly be that he has
had a change of heart — never. It may be nothing worse than
that the woman he wants to marry has turned against it."

244 THE BETTER SORT

"But I supposed him — with his children all so boomed — to
be married."

" Naturally ; else he couldn't have got such a boom from the
poor lady's illness, death and burial. Don't you remember two
years ago? — 'We are given to understand that Sir A. B. C.
Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., particularly desires that no flowers
be sent for the late Hon. Lady Beadel-Muffet's funeral.' And
then, the next day : ' We are authorised to state that the im-
pression, so generally prevailing, that Sir A. B. C. Beadel-
Muffet has expressed an objection to flowers in connection with
the late Hon. Lady Beadel-Muffet's obsequies, rests on a mis-
apprehension of Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet's markedly individual
views. The floral tributes already delivered in Queen's Gate
Gardens, and remarkable for number and variety, have been the
source of such gratification to the bereaved gentleman as his
situation permits.' With a wind-up of course for the following
week — the inevitable few heads of remark, on the part of the
bereaved gentleman, on the general subject of Flowers at Funerals
as a Fashion, vouchsafed, under pressure possibly indiscreet, to a
rising young journalist always thirsting for the authentic word."

" I guess now," said Maud, after an instant, " the rising young
journalist. You egged him on."

" Dear, no. I panted in his rear."

" It makes you," she added, " more than cynical."

" And what do you call c more than ' cynical ? "

" It makes you sardonic. Wicked," she continued ; "devilish."

" That's it — that is cynical. Enough's as good as a feast."
But he came back to the ground they had quitted. " What were
you going to say he's prominent for, Mortimer Marshal ? "

She wouldn't, however, follow him there yet, her curiosity on
the other issue not being spent. " Do you know then as a fact,
that he's marrying again, the bereaved gentleman ? "

Her friend, at this, showed impatience. " My dear fellow, do
you see nothing ? We had it all, didn't we, three months ago, and
then we didn't have it, and then we had it again ; and goodness
knows where we are. But I throw out the possibility. I forget
her bloated name, but she may be rich, and she may be decent.
She may make it a condition that he keeps out — out, I mean, of
the only things he has really ever been ' in.' "

"The Papers?"

"The dreadful, nasty, vulgar Papers. She may put it to
him — I see it dimly and queerly, but I see it — that he must get
out first, and then they'll talk ; then she'll say yes, then he'll have
the money. I see it — and much more sharply — that he wants

THE PAPERS 245

the money, needs it, I mean, badly, desperately, so that this
necessity may very well make the hole in which he finds himself.
Therefore he must do something — what he's trying to do. It
supplies the motive that our picture, the other day, rather
missed."

Maud Blandy took this in, but it seemed to fail to satisfy her.
" It must be something worse. You make it out that, so that
your practical want of mercy, which you'll not be able to conceal
from me, shall affect me as less inhuman."

" I don't make it out anything, and I don't care what it is ; the
queerness, the grand ' irony ' of the case is itself enough for me.
You, on your side, however, I think, make it out what you call
' something worse,' because of the romantic bias of your mind.
You ' see red.' Yet isn't it, after all, sufficiently lurid that he shall
lose his blooming bride ? "

"You're sure," Maud appealed, "that he'll lose her?"

" Poetic justice screams for it ; and my whole interest in the
matter is staked on it."

But the girl continued to brood. " I thought you contend that
nobody's half 'decent.' Where do you find a woman to make
such a condition ? "

" Not easily, I admit." The young man thought. " It will be
his luck to have found her. That's his tragedy, say, that she can
financially save him, but that she happens to be just the one
freak, the creature whose stomach has turned. The spark — I
mean of decency — has got, after all, somehow to be kept alive ;
and it may be lodged in this particular female form."

" I see. But why should a female form that's so particular
confess to an affinity with a male form that's so fearfully general ?
As he's all self-advertisement, why isn't it much more natural to
her simply to loathe him ? "

"Well, because, oddly enough, it seems that people don't."

" Vou do," Maud declared. " You'll kill him."

He just turned a flushed cheek to her, and she saw that she
had touched something that lived in him. " We can" he con-
sciously smiled, "deal death. And the beauty is that it's in
a perfectly straight way. We can lead them on. But have you
ever seen Beadel-Muffet for yourself?" he continued.

"No. How often, please, need I tell you that I've seen
nobody and nothing?"

" Well, if you had you'd understand."

" You mean he's so fetching ? "

" Oh, he's great. He's not ' all ' self-advertisement — or at
least he doesn't seem to be : that's* his pull. But I see, you

246 THE BETTER SORT

female humbug," Bight pursued, "how much you'd like him
yourself."

" I want, while I'm about it, to pity him in sufficient quantity."

" Precisely. Which means, for a woman, with extravagance
and to the point of immorality."

"I ain't a woman," Maud Blandy sighed. " I wish I were ! "

" Well, about the pity," he went on ; " you shall be immoral,
I promise you, before you've done. Doesn't Mortimer Marshal,"
he asked, " take you for a woman ? "

" You'll have to ask him. How," she demanded, " does one
know those things?" And she stuck to her Beadel-Muffet
" If you're to see him on Monday shan't you then get to the
bottom of it ? "

"Oh, I don't conceal from you that I promise myself larks,
but I won't tell you, positively I won't," Bight said, " what I see.
You're morbid. If it's only bad enough — I mean his motive —
you'll want to save him."

"Well, isn't that what you're to profess to him that you want?"

"Ah," the young man returned, "I believe you'd really invent
a way."

"I would if I could." And with that she dropped it. "There's
my fat friend," she presently added, as the entr'acte still hung
heavy and Mortimer Marshal, from a row much in advance of
them, screwed himself round in his tight place apparently to
keep her in his eye.

" He does then," said her companion, " take you for a woman.
I seem to guess he's ' littery.' "

"That's it; so badly that he wrote that 'littery' ply Corisanda,
you must remember, with Beatrice Beaumont in the principal
part, which was given at three matinees in this very place and
which hadn't even the luck of being slated. Every creature
connected with the production, from the man himself and
Beatrice /forself down to the mothers and grandmothers of the
sixpenny young women, the young women of the programmes,
was interviewed both before and after, and he promptly published
the piece, pleading guilty to the 'littery' charge — which is the
great stand he takes and the subject of the discussion."

Bight had wonderingly followed. " Of what discussion ? "

" Why, the one he thinks there ought to have been. There
hasn't been any, of course, but he wants it, dreadfully misses it.
People won't keep it up — whatever they did do, though I don't
myself make out that they did anything. His state of mind
requires something to start with, which has got somehow to be
provided. There must have been a noise made, don't you see ?

THE PAPERS 247

to make him prominent ; and in order to remain prominent he
has got to go for his enemies. The hostility to his ply, and all
because it's 'littery,' we can do nothing without that; but it's
uphill work to come across it. We sit up nights trying, but we
seem to get no for'arder. The public attention would seem
to abhor the whole matter even as nature abhors a vacuum.
We've nothing to go upon, otherwise we might go far. But there
we are."

" I see," Bight commented. " You're nowhere at all."

" No ; it isn't even that, for we're just where Corisanda, on the
stage and in the closet, put us at a stroke. Only there we stick
fast — nothing seems to happen, nothing seems to come or to
be capable of being made to come. We wait."

" Oh, if he waits with you ! " Bight amicably jibed.

" He may wait for ever ? "

" No, but resignedly. You'll make him forget his wrongs."

" Ah, I'm not of that sort, and I could only do it by making
him come into his rights. And I recognise now that that's
impossible. There are different cases, you see, whole different
classes of them, and his is the opposite to Beadel-Muffet's."

Howard Bight gave a grunt. " Why the opposite if you also
pity him? I'll be hanged," he added, "if you won't save
him too."

But she shook her head. She knew. " No ; but it's nearly,
in its way, as lurid. Do you know," she asked, "what he has
done?"

" Why, the difficulty appears to be that he can't have done
anything. He should strike once more — hard, and in the same
place. He should bring out another ply."

"Why so? You can't be more than prominent, and he is
prominent. You can't do more than subscribe, in your promi-
nence, to thirty-seven ' press-cutting ' agencies in England and
America, and, having done so, you can't do more than sit at
home with your ear on the postman's knock, looking out for
results. There comes in the tragedy — there are no results.
Mortimer Marshal's postman doesn't knock ; the press-cutting
agencies can't find anything to cut. With thirty-seven, in the
whole English-speaking world, scouring millions of papers for
him in vain, and with a big slice of his private income all the
while going to it, the ' irony ' is too cruel, and the way he looks
at one, as in one's degree responsible, does make one wince. He
expected, naturally, most from the Americans, but it's they who
have failed him worst. Their silence is that of the tomb, and it
seems to grow, if the silence of the tomb can grow. He won't

248 THE BETTER SORT

admit that the thirty-seven look far enough or long enough, and
he writes them, I infer, angry letters, wanting to know what the
deuce they suppose he has paid them for. But what are they
either, poor things, to do ? "

" Do ? They can print his angry letters. That, at least, will
break the silence, and he'll like it better than nothing."

This appeared to strike our young woman. " Upon my word,
I really believe he would." Then she thought better of it. " But
they'd be afraid, for they do guarantee, you know, that there's
something for everyone. They claim it's their strength — that
there's enough to go round. They won't want to show that they
break down."

" Oh, well," said the young man, " if he can't manage to smash
a pane of glass somewhere ! "

" That's what he thought 7 would do. And it's what / thought
I might," Maud added; "otherwise I wouldn't have approached
him. I did it on spec, but I'm no use. I'm a fatal influence.
I'm a non-conductor."

She said it with such plain sincerity that it quickly took her
companion's attention. " I say /" he covertly murmured. " Have
you a secret sorrow ? "

" Of course I've a secret sorrow." And she stared at it, stiff
and a little sombre, not wanting it to be too freely handled,
while the curtain at last rose to the lighted stage.

Ill

SHE was later on more open about it, sundry other things, not
wholly alien, having meanwhile happened. One of these had
been that her friend had waited with her to the end of the Finnish
performance and that it had then, in the lobby, as they went out,
not been possible for her not to make him acquainted with Mr.
Mortimer Marshal. This gentleman had clearly waylaid her and
had also clearly divined that her companion was of the Papers —
papery all through ; which doubtless had something to do with
his having handsomely proposed to them to accompany him
somewhere to tea. They hadn't seen why they shouldn't, it being
an adventure, all in their line, like another ; and he had carried
them, in a four-wheeler, to a small and refined club in a region
which was as the fringe of the Piccadilly region, where even their
own presence scarce availed to contradict the implication of the
exclusive. The whole occasion, they were further to feel, was
essentially a tribute to their professional connection, especially
that side of it which flushed and quavered, which panted and

THE PAPERS 249

pined in their host's personal nervousness. Maud Blandy now
saw it vain to contend with his delusion that she^ underfed and
unprinted, who had never been so conscious as during these
bribed moments of her non-conducting quality, was papery to any
purpose — a delusion that exceeded, by her measure, every other
form of pathos. The decoration of the tea-room was a pale,
aesthetic green, the liquid in the delicate cups a copious potent
amber ; the bread and butter was thin and golden, the muffins a
revelation to her that she was barbarously hungry. There were
ladies at other tables with other gentlemen — ladies with long
feather boas and hats not of the sailor pattern, and gentlemen
whose straight collars were doubled up much higher than Howard
Bight's and their hair parted far more at the side. The talk was
so low, with pauses somehow so not of embarrassment that it
could only have been earnest, and the air, an air of privilege and
privacy to our young woman's sense, seemed charged with fine
things taken for granted. If it hadn't been for Bight's company
she would have grown almost frightened, so much seemed to be
offered her for something she couldn't do. That word of Bight's
about smashing a window-pane had lingered with her; it had
made her afterwards wonder, while they sat in their stalls, if there
weren't some brittle surface in range of her own elbow. She had
to fall back on the consciousness of how her elbow, in spite of
her type, lacked practical point, and that was just why the terms
in which she saw her services now, as she believed, bid for, had
the effect of scaring her. They came out most, for that matter,
in Mr. Mortimer Marshal's dumbly-insistent eyes, which seemed
to be perpetually saying: "You know what I mean when I'm too
refined — like everything here, don't you see ? — to say it out.
You know there ought to be something about me somewhere,
and that really, with the opportunities, the facilities you enjoy, it
wouldn't be so much out of your way just to — well, reward this
little attention."

The fact that he was probably every day, in just the same
anxious flurry and with just the same superlative delicacy, paying
little attentions with an eye to little rewards, this fact by itself but
scantily eased her, convinced as she was that no luck but her own
was as hopeless as his. He squared the clever young wherever
he could get at them, but it was the clever young, taking them
generally, who fed from his hand and then forgot him. She
didn't forget him ; she pitied him too much, pitied herself, and
was more and more, as she found, now pitying everyone; only
she didn't know how to say to him that she could do, after all,
nothing for him. She oughtn't to have come, in the first place,

250 THE BETTER SORT

and wouldn't if it hadn't been for her companion. Her com-
panion was increasingly sardonic — which was the way in which,
at best, she now increasingly saw him ; he was shameless in
acceptance, since, as she knew, as she felt at his side, he had
come only, at bottom, to mislead and to mystify. He was, as
she wasn't, on the Papers and of them, and their baffled enter-
tainer knew it without either a hint on the subject from herself
or a need, on the young man's own lips, of the least vulgar
allusion. Nothing was so much as named, the whole connection
was sunk ; they talked about clubs, muffins, afternoon per-
formances, the effect of the Finnish soul upon the appetite,
quite as if they had met in society. Nothing could have been
less like society — she innocently supposed at least— than the real
spirit of their meeting ; yet Bight did nothing that he might do
to keep the affair within bounds. When looked at by their friend
so hard and so hintingly, he only looked back, just as dumbly,
but just as intensely and, as might be said, portentously; ever
so impenetrably, in fine, and ever so wickedly. He didn't
smile — as if to cheer— the least little bit; which he might be
abstaining from on purpose to make his promises solemn : so, as
he tried to smile — she couldn't, it was all too dreadful — she
wouldn't meet her friend's eyes, but kept looking, heartlessly, at
the " notes " of the place, the hats of the ladies, the tints of the
rugs, the intenser Chippendale, here and there, of the chairs and
tables, of the very guests, of the very waitresses. It had come to
her early : " I've done him, poor man, at home, and the obvious
thing now will be to do him at his club." But this inspira-
tion plumped against her fate even as an imprisoned insect
against the window-glass. She couldn't do him at his club
without decently asking leave ; whereby he would know of her
feeble feeler, feeble because she was so sure of refusals. She
would rather tell him, desperately, what she thought of him
than expose him to see again that she was herself nowhere,
herself nothing. Her one comfort was that, for the half-hour —
it had made the situation quite possible — he seemed fairly
hypnotised by her colleague; so that when they took leave he as
good as thanked her for what she had this time done for him.
It was one of the signs of his infatuated state that he clearly
viewed Bight as a mass of helpful cleverness, though the cruel
creature, uttering scarce a sound, had only fixed him in a manner
that might have been taken for the fascination of deference. He
might perfectly have been an idiot for all the poor gentleman
knew. But the poor gentleman saw a possible "leg up" in
every bush; and nothing but impertinence would have convinced

THE PAPERS 251

him that she hadn't brought him, compunctiously as to the past,
a master of the proper art. Now, more than ever, how he would
listen for the postman !

The whole occasion had broken so, for busy Bight, into matters
to be attended to before Fleet Street warmed to its work, that
the pair were obliged, outside, to part company on the spot, and
it was only on the morrow, a Saturday, that they could taste
again of that comparison of notes which made for each the
main savour, albeit slightly acrid, of their current consciousness.
The air was full, as from afar, of the grand indifference of spring,
of which the breath could be felt so much before the face could
be seen, and they had bicycled side by side out to Richmond
Park as with the impulse to meet it on its way. They kept a
Saturday, when possible, sacred to the Suburbs as distinguished
from the Papers — when possible being largely when Maud
could achieve the use of the somewhat fatigued family machine.
Many sisters contended for it, under whose flushed pressure it
might have been seen spinning in many different directions.
Superficially, at Richmond, our young couple rested — found a
quiet corner to lounge deep in the Park, with their machines
propped by one side of a great tree and their associated backs
sustained by another. But agitation, finer than the finest scorch-
ing, was in the air for them ; it was made sharp, rather abruptly,
by a vivid outbreak from Maud. It was very well, she observed,
for her friend to be clever at the expense of the general "greed";
he saw it in the light of his own jolly luck, and what she saw,
as it happened, was nothing but the general art of letting you
starve, yourself, in your hole. At the end of five minutes her
companion had turned quite pale with having to face the large
extent of her confession. It was a confession for the reason
that in the first place it evidently cost her an effort that pride
had again and again successfully prevented, and because in the
second she had thus the air of having lived overmuch on swagger.
She could scarce have said at this moment what, for a good
while, she had really lived on, and she didn't let him know
now to complain either of her privation or of her disappoint-
ments. She did it to show why she couldn't go with him
when he was so awfully sweeping. There were at any rate
apparently, all over, two wholly different sets of people. If
everyone rose to his bait no creature had ever risen to hers ;
and that was the grim truth of her position, which proved at
the least that there were two quite different kinds of luck.
They told two different stories of human vanity; they couldn't
be reconciled. And the poor girl put it in a nutshell. " There's

252 THE BETTER SORT

but one person I've ever written to who has so much as noticed
my letter."

He wondered, painfully affected — it rather overwhelmed him ;
he took hold of it at the easiest point. " One person ? "

" The misguided man we had tea with. He alone — he rose."

" Well then, you see that when they do rise they are misguided.
In other words they're donkeys."

"What I see is that I don't strike the right ones and that
I haven't therefore your ferocity ; that is my ferocity, if I have
any, rests on a different ground. You'll say that I go for the
wrong people ; but I don't, God knows — witness Mortimer
Marshal — fly too high. I picked him out, after prayer and
fasting, as just the likeliest of the likely — not anybody a bit
grand and yet not quite a nobody ; and by an extraordinary
chance I was justified. Then I pick out others who seem just
as good, I pray and fast, and no sound comes back. But I work
through my ferocity too," she stiffly continued, " though at first
it was great, feeling as I did that when my bread and butter was
in it people had no right not to oblige me. It was their duty —
what they were prominent for — to be interviewed, so as to keep
me going ; and I did as much for them any day as they would
be doing for me."

Bight heard her, but for a moment said nothing. " Did you
tell them that ? I mean say to them it was your little all ? "

"Not vulgarly — I know how. There are ways of saying it's
1 important ' ; and I hint it just enough to see that the importance
fetches them no more than anything else. It isn't important to
them. And I, in their place," Maud went on, " wouldn't answer
either ; I'll be hanged if ever I would. That's what it comes to,
that there are two distinct lots, and that my luck, being born so,
is always to try the snubbers. You were born to know by in-
stinct the others. But it makes me more tolerant."

"More tolerant of what?" her friend asked.

"Well, of what you described to me. Of what you rail at."

" Thank you for me ! " Bight laughed.

" Why not ? Don't you live on it ? "

"Not in such luxury — you surely must see for yourself — as
the distinction you make seems to imply. It isn't luxury to be
nine-tenths of the time sick of everything. People moreover are
worth to me but tuppence apiece ; there are too many, confound
them — so many that I don't see really how any can be left over
for your superior lot. It is a chance," he pursued — " I've had
refusals too — though I confess they've sometimes been of the
funniest. Besides, I'm getting out of it," the young man wound

THE PAPERS 253

up. " God knows I want to. My advice to you," he added in
the same breath, " is to sit tight. There are as good fish in
the sea !"

She waited a moment. " You're sick of everything and you're
getting out of it ; it's not good enough for you, in other words,
but it's still good enough for me. Why am I to sit tight when
you sit so loose ? "

"Because what you want will come — can't help coming.
Then, in time, you'll also get out of it. But then you'll have
had it, as I have, and the good of it."

" But what, really, if it breeds nothing but disgust," she asked,
" do you call the good of it ? "

" Well, two things. First the bread and butter, and then the
fun. I repeat it— sit tight."

" Where's the fun," she asked again, " of learning to despise
people ? "

" You'll see when it comes. It will all be upon you, it will
change for you any day. Sit tight, sit tight."

He expressed such confidence that she might for a minute
have been weighing it. " If you get out of it, what will you do ? "

" Well, imaginative work. This job has made me at least see.
It has given me the loveliest tips."

She had still another pause. "It has given me — my expe-
rience has — a lovely tip too."

"And what's that?"

" I've told you before — the tip of pity. I'm so much sorrier
for them all — panting and gasping for it like fish out of water —
than I am anything else."

He wondered. " But I thought that was what just isn't your
experience."

" Oh, I mean then," she said impatiently, " that my tip is from
yours. It's only a different tip. I want to save them."

" Well," the young man replied, and as if the idea had had a
meaning for him, " saving them may perhaps work out as a
branch. The question is can you be paid for it ? "

" Beadel-Muffet would pay me," Maud suddenly suggested.

" Why, that's just what I'm expecting," her companion laughed,
"that he will, after to-morrow — directly or indirectly — do me."

"Will you take it from him then only to get him in deeper,
as that's what you perfectly know you'll do? You won't save
him ; you'll lose him."

" What then would you, in the case," Bight asked, " do for
your money ? "

Well, the girl thought. "I'd get him to see me — I should

254 THE BETTER SORT

have first, I recognise, to catch my hare — and then I'd work up
my stuff. Which would be boldly, quite by a master-stroke, a
statement of his fix — of the fix, I mean, of his wanting, his
supplicating to be dropped. I'd give out that it would really
oblige. Then I'd send my copy about, and the rest of the
matter would take care of itself. I don't say you could do it
that way — you'd have a different effect. But I should be able
to trust the thing, being mine, not to be looked at, or, if looked
at, chucked straight into the basket. I should so have, to that
extent, handled the matter, and I should so, by merely touching
it, have broken the spell. That's my one line — I stop things
off by touching them. There'd never be a word about him
more."

Her friend, with his legs out and his hands locked at the back
of his neck, had listened with indulgence. "Then hadn't
I better arrange it for you that Beadel-Muffet shall see you ? "

" Oh, not after you've damned him ! "

" You want to see him first ? "

"It will be the only way — to be of any use to him. You
ought to wire him in fact not to open his mouth till he has seen
me."

"Well, I will," said Bight at last. "But, you know, we shall
lose something very handsome — his struggle, all in vain, with his
fate. Noble sport, the sight of it all." He turned a little, to
rest on his elbow, and, cycling suburban young man as he was,
he might have been, outstretched under his tree, melancholy
Jacques looking off into a forest glade, even as sailor-hatted
Maud, in— for elegance — a new cotton blouse and a long-limbed
angular attitude, might have prosefully suggested the mannish
Rosalind. He raised his face in appeal to her. " Do you really
ask me to sacrifice it ? "

" Rather than sacrifice him ? Of course I do."

He said for a while nothing more ; only, propped on his elbow,
lost himself again in the Park. After which he turned back to
her. " Will you have me ? " he suddenly asked.

"'Have you' ?"

" Be my bonny bride. For better, for worse. I hadn't, upon
my honour," he explained with obvious sincerity, "understood
you were so down."

" Well, it isn't so bad as that," said Maud Blandy.

" So bad as taking up with me ? "

" It isn't as bad as having let you know — when I didn't want
you to."

He sank back again with his head dropped, putting himself

THE PAPERS 255

more at his ease. " You're too proud — that's what's the matter
with you. And I'm too stupid."

" No, you're not," said Maud grimly. " Not stupid."

" Only cruel, cunning, treacherous, cold-blooded, vile ? " He
drawled the words out softly, as if they sounded fair.

" And I'm not stupid either," Maud Blandy went on. " We
just, poor creatures — well, we just know"

" Of course we do. So why do you want us to drug ourselves
with rot ? to go on as if we didn't know ? "

She made no answer for a moment ; then she said : " There's
good to be known too."

" Of course, again. There are all sorts of things, and some
much better than others. That's why," the young man added,
" I just put that question to you."

" Oh no, it isn't. You put it to me because you think I feel
I'm no good."

" How so, since I keep assuring you that you've only to wait ?
How so, since I keep assuring you that if you do wait it will all
come with a rush ? But say I am sorry for you," Bight lucidly
pursued; "how does that prove either that my motive is base or
that I do you a wrong ? "

The girl waived this question, but she presently tried another.
"Is it your idea that we should live on all the people ? "

" The people we catch ? Yes, old man, till we can do better."

" My conviction is," she soon returned, " that if I were to
marry you I should dish you. I should spoil the business. It
would fall off; and, as I can do nothing myself, then where
should we be ? "

"Well," said Bight, "we mightn't be quite so high up in the
scale of the morbid."

" It's you that are morbid," she answered. " You've, in your
way — like everyone else, for that matter, all over the place —
' sport ' on the brain."

" Well," he demanded, " what is sport but success ? What is
success but sport ? "

"Bring that out somewhere. If it be true," she said, "I'm
glad I'm a failure."

After which, for a longish space, they sat together in silence, a
silence finally broken by a word from the young man. "But
about Mortimer Marshal — how do you propose to save him ? "

It was a change of subject that might, by its so easy introduc-
tion of matter irrelevant, have seemed intended to dissipate
whatever was left of his proposal of marriage. That proposal,
however, had been somehow both too much in the tone of

256 THE BETTER SORT

familiarity to linger and too little in that of vulgarity to drop.
It had had no form, but the mild air kept perhaps thereby the
better the taste of it. This was sensibly moreover in what the
girl found to reply. " I think, you know, that he'd be no such
bad friend. I mean that, with his appetite, there would be some-
thing to be done. He doesn't half hate me."

"Ah, my dear," her friend ejaculated, "don't, for God's sake,
be low."

But she kept it up. "He clings to me. You saw. It's
hideous, the way he's able to ' do ' himself."

Bight lay quiet, then spoke as with a recall of the Chippendale
Club. " Yes, I couldn't ' do ' you as he could. But if you don't
bring it off ? "

"Why then does he cling? Oh, because, all the same, I'm
potentially the Papers still. I'm at any* rate the nearest he has
got to them. And then I'm other things."

" I see."

"I'm so awfully attractive," said Maud Blandy. She got up
with this and, snaking out her frock, looked at her resting
bicycle, looked at the distances possibly still to be gained. Her
companion paused, but at last also rose, and by that time she was
awaiting him, a little gaunt and still not quite cool, as an illustra-
tion of her last remark. He stood there watching her, and she
followed this remark up. " I do, you know, really pity him."

It had almost a feminine fineness, and their eyes continued to
meet. " Oh, you'll work it ! " And the young man went to his
machine.

IV

IT was not till five days later that they again came together, and
during these days many things had happened. Maud Blandy had,
with high elation, for her own portion, a sharp sense of this ; if
it had at the time done nothing more intimate for her the Sunday
of bitterness just spent with Howard Bight had started, all
abruptly, a turn of the tide of her luck. This turn had not in
the least been in the young man's having spoken to her of
marriage — since she hadn't even, up to the late hour of their
parting, so much as answered him straight : she dated the sense
of difference much rather from the throb of a happy thought
that had come to her while she cycled home to Kilburnia in the
darkness. The throb had made her for the few minutes, tired as
she was, put on speed, and it had been the cause of still further
proceedings for her the first thing the next morning. The
active step that was the essence of these proceedings had almost

THE PAPERS 257

got itself taken before she went to bed ; which indeed was what
had happened to the extent of her writing, on the spot, a medi-
tated letter. She sat down to it by the light of the guttering
candle that awaited her on the dining-room table and in the stale
air of family food that only liad been — a residuum so at the
mercy of mere ventilation that she didn't so much as peep into a
cupboard; after which she had been on the point of nipping
over, as she would have said, to drop it into that opposite pillar-
box whose vivid maw, opening out through thick London nights,
had received so many of her fruitless little ventures. But she
had checked herself and waited, waited to be sure, with the
morning, that her fancy wouldn't fade; posting her note in the
end, however, with a confident jerk, as soon as she was up. She
had, later on, had business, or at least had sought it, among the
haunts that she had taught herself to regard as professional ; but
neither on the Monday nor on either of the days that directly
followed had she encountered there the friend whom it would
take a difference in more matters than could as yet be dealt with
to enable her to regard, with proper assurance or with proper
modesty, as a lover. Whatever he was, none the less, it couldn't
otherwise have come to her that it was possible to feel lonely in
the Strand. That showed, after all, how thick they must con-
stantly have been — which was perhaps a thing to begin to think
of in a new, in a steadier light. But it showed doubtless still
more that her companion was probably up to something rather
awful; it made her wonder, holding her breath a little, about
Beadel-Muffet, made her certain that he and his affairs would
partly account for Bight's whirl of absence.

Ever conscious of empty pockets, she had yet always a penny,
or at least a ha'penny, for a paper, and those she now scanned,
she quickly assured herself, were edited quite as usual. Sir
A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P. had returned on Monday
from Undertone, where Lord and Lady Wispers had, from the
previous Friday, entertained a very select party; Sir A. B. C.
Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P. was to attend on Tuesday the
weekly meeting of the society of the Friends of Rest ; Sir A. B. C.
Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P. had kindly consented to preside on
Wednesday, at Samaritan House, at the opening of the Sale of
Work of the Middlesex Incurables. These familiar announce-
ments, however, far from appeasing her curiosity, had an effect
upon her nerves ; she read into them mystic meanings that she
had never read before. Her freedom of mind in this direction
was indeed at the same time limited, for her own horizon was
already, by the Monday night, bristling with new possibilities, and

258 THE BETTER SORT

the Tuesday itself — well, what had the Tuesday itself become,
with this eruption, from within, of interest amounting really to a
revelation, what had the Tuesday itself become but the greatest
day yet of her life ? Such a description of it would have appeared
to apply predominantly to the morning had she not, under the
influence, precisely, of the morning's thrill, gone, towards evening,
with her design, into the Charing Cross Station. There, at the
bookstall, she bought them all, every rag that was hawked ; and
there, as she unfolded one at a venture, in the crowd and under
the lamps, she felt her consciousness further, felt it for the
moment quite impressively, enriched. " Personal Peeps — Number
Ninety-Three : a Chat with the New Dramatist " needed neither
the " H. B." as a terminal signature nor a text spangled, to the
exclusion of almost everything else, with Mortimer Marshals
that looked as tall as if lettered on posters, to help to account for
her young man's use of his time. And yet, as she soon made
out, it had been used with an economy that caused her both to
wonder and to wince; the " peep " commemorated being none
other than their tea with the artless creature the previous
Saturday, and the meagre incidents and pale impressions of that
occasion furnishing forth the picture.

Bight had solicited no new interview; he hadn't been such
a fool — for she saw, soon enough, with all her intelligence,
that this was what he would have been, and that a repetition
of contact would have dished him. What he had done, she
found herself perceiving — and perceiving with an emotion that
caused her face to glow — was journalism of the intensest
essence; a column concocted of nothing, an omelette made,
as it were, without even the breakage of the egg or two that
might have been expected to be the price. The poor gentle-
man's whereabouts at five o'clock was the only egg broken,
and this light and delicate crash was the sound in the world
that would be sweetest to him. What stuff it had to be, since
the writer really knew nothing about him, yet how its being
just such stuff made it perfectly serve its purpose ! She might
have marvelled afresh, with more leisure, at such purposes, but
she was lost in the wonder of seeing how, without matter, without
thought, without an excuse, without a fact and yet at the same
time sufficiently without a fiction, he had managed to be as
resonant as if he had beaten a drum on the platform of a booth.
And he had not been too personal, not made anything awkward
for her> had given nothing and nobody away, had tossed the
Chippendale Club into the air with such a turn that it had
fluttered down again, like a blown feather, miles from its site.

THE PAPERS 259

The thirty-seven agencies would already be posting to their
subscriber thirty-seven copies, and their subscriber, on his side,
would be posting, to his acquaintance, many times thirty-seven,
and thus at least getting something for his money; but this didn't
tell her why her friend had taken the trouble — if it had been a
trouble ; why at all events he had taken the time, pressed as he
apparently was for that commodity. These things she was indeed
presently to learn, but they were meanwhile part of a suspense
composed of more elements than any she had yet tasted. And
the suspense was prolonged, though other affairs too, that were
not part of it, almost equally crowded upon her ; the week having
almost waned when relief arrived in the form of a cryptic post-
card. The post-card bore the H. B., like the precious " Peep,"
which had already had a wondrous sequel, and it appointed, for
the tea-hour, a place of meeting familiar to Maud, with the simple
addition of the significant word " Larks ! "

When the time he had indicated came she waited for him, at
their small table, swabbed like the deck of a steam-packet, nose
to nose with a mustard-pot and a price-list, in the consciousness
of perhaps after all having as much to tell him as to hear from
him. It appeared indeed at first that this might well be the
case, for the questions that came up between them when he had
taken his place were overwhelmingly those he himself insisted on
putting. " What has he done, what has he, and what will he ? "
— that inquiry, not loud but deep, had met him as he sat down ;
without however producing the least recognition. Then she as
soon felt that his silence and his manner were enough for her, or
that, if they hadn't been, his wonderful look, the straightest she
had ever had from him, would instantly have made them so. He
looked at her hard, hard, as if he had meant " I say, mind your
eyes ! " and it amounted really to a glimpse, rather fearful, of the
subject. It was no joke, the subject, clearly, and her friend had
fairly gained age, as he had certainly lost weight, in his recent
dealings with it. It struck her even, with everything else, that
this was positively the way she would have liked him to show if
their union had taken the form they hadn't reached the point of
discussing ; wearily coming back to her from the thick of things,
wanting to put on his slippers and have his tea, all prepared by
her and in their place, and beautifully to be trusted to regale her
in his turn. He was excited, disavowedly, and it took more dis-
avowal still after she had opened her budget — which she did, in
truth, by saying to him as her first alternative : " What did you do
him for, poor Mortimer Marshal ? It isn't that he's not in the
seventh heaven ! "

2<5o THE BETTER SORT

" He is in the seventh heaven! " Bight quickly broke in. " He
doesn't want my blood ? "

" Did you do him," she asked, " that he should want it ? It's
splendid how you could — simply on that show."

" That show ? Why," said Howard Bight, " that show was an
immensity. That show was volumes, stacks, abysses."

He said it in such a tone that she was a little at a loss. " Oh,
you don't want abysses."

"Not much, to knock off such twaddle. There isn't a breath in
it of what I saw. What I saw is my own affair. I've got the
abysses for myself. They're in my head — it's always something.
But the monster," he demanded, " has written you ? "

"How couldn't he — that night? I got it the next morning,
telling me how much he wanted to thank me and asking me
where he might see me. So I went," said Maud, " to see him."

" At his own place again ? "

"At his own place again. What do I yearn for but to be
received at people's own places?"

"Yes, for the stuff. But when you've had — as you had had
from him— the stuff?"

" Well, sometimes, you see, I get more. He gives me all I can
take." It was in her head to ask if by chance Bight were jealous,
but she gave it another turn. "We had a big palaver, partly
about you. He appreciates."

"Me?"

" Me—first of all, I think. All the more that I've had — fancy !
— a proof of my stuff, the despised and rejected, as originally
concocted, and that he has now seen it. I tried it on again
with Brains^ the night of your thing — sent it off with your thing
enclosed as a rouser. They took it, by return, like a shot — you'll
see on Wednesday. And if the dear man lives till then, for
impatience, I'm to lunch with him that day."

"I see," said Bight. "Well, that was what I did it for. It
shows how right I was."

They faced each other, across their thick crockery, with eyes
that said more than their words, and that, above all, said, and
asked, other things. So she went on in a moment : " I don't
know what he doesn't expect. And he thinks I can keep it
up."

" Lunch with him every Wednesday ? "

"Oh, he'd give me my lunch, and more. It was last Sunday
that you were right — about my sitting close," she pursued. " I'd
have been a pretty fool to jump. Suddenly, I see, the music
begins. I'm awfully obliged to you."

THE PAPERS 261

" You feel," he presently asked, " quite differently— so differ-
ently that I've missed my chance ? I don't care for that serpent,
but there's something else that you don't tell me." The young
man, detached and a little spent, with his shoulder against the
wall and a hand vaguely playing over the knives, forks and
spoons, dropped his succession of sentences without an apparent
direction. " Something else has come up, and you're as pleased
as Punch. Or, rather, you're not quite entirely so, because you
can't goad me to fury. You can't worry me as much as you'd
like. Marry me first, old man, and then see if I mind. Why
shouldn't you keep it up? — I mean lunching with him?" His
questions came as in play that was a little pointless, without his
waiting more than a moment for answers; though it was not
indeed that she might not have answered even in the moment,
had not the pointless play been more what she wanted. " Was it
at the place," he went on, " that he took us to ? "

" Dear no — at his flat, where I've been before. You'll see, in
Brains^ on Wednesday. I don't think I've muffed it — it's really
rather there. But he showed me everything this time — the bath-
room, the refrigerator, and the machines for stretching his
trousers. He has nine, and in constant use."

" Nine ? " said Bight gravely.

"Nine."

" Nine trousers ? "

" Nine machines. I don't know how many trousers."

"Ah, my dear," he said, "that's a grave omission; the want of
the information will be felt and resented. But does it all, at any
rate," he asked, "sufficiently fetch you?" After which, as she
didn't speak, he lapsed into helpless sincerity. " Is it really, you
think, his dream to secure you ? "

She replied, on this, as if his tone made it too amusing.
" Quite. There's no mistaking it. He sees me as, most days in
the year, pulling the wires and beating the drum somewhere;
that is he sees me of course not exactly as writing about 'our
home ' — once I've got one — myself, but as procuring others to do
it through my being (as you've made him believe) in with the
Organs of Public Opinion. He doesn't see, if I'm half decent,
why there shouldn't be something about him every day in the
week. He's all right, and he's all ready. And who, after all, can
do him so well as the partner of his flat ? It's like making, in one
of those big domestic siphons, the luxury of the poor, your own
soda-water. It comes cheaper, and it's always on the sideboard.
* Vichy chez soi? The interviewer at home."

Her companion took it in. " Your place is on my sideboard —

262 THE BETTER SORT

you're really a first-class fizz ! He steps then, at any rate, into
Beadel-Muffet's place."

"That," Maud assented, "is what he would like to do." And
she knew more than ever there was something to wait for.

" It's a lovely opening," Bight returned. But he still said, for
the moment, nothing else ; as if, charged to the brim though he
had originally been, she had rather led his thought away.

" What have you done with poor Beadel ? " she consequently
asked. "What is it, in the name of goodness, you're doing to him?
It's worse than ever."

"Of course it's worse than ever."

"He capers," said Maud, "on every housetop — he jumps out
of every bush." With which her anxiety really broke out. " Is it
you that are doing it ? "

" If you mean am I seeing him, I certainly am. I'm seeing
nobody else. I assure you he's spread thick."

" But you're acting for him ? "

Bight waited. " Five hundred people are acting for him ; but
the difficulty is that what he calls the ' terrific forces of publicity '
— by which he means ten thousand other persons — are acting
against him. We've all in fact been turned on — to turn every-
thing off, and that's exactly the job that makes the biggest noise.
It appears everywhere, in every kind of connection and every
kind of type, that Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P. desires
to cease to appear anywhere ; and then it appears that his desiring
to cease to appear is observed to conduce directly to his more
tremendously appearing, or certainly, and in the most striking
manner, to his not in the least ^appearing. The workshop of
silence roars like the Zoo at dinner-time. He can't disappear; he
hasn't weight enough to sink; the splash the diver makes, you
know, tells where he is. If you ask me what I'm doing," Bight
wound up, "I'm holding him under water. But we're in the
middle of the pond, the banks are thronged with spectators, and
I'm expecting from day to day to see stands erected and gate-
money taken. There," he wearily smiled, "you have it. Besides,"
he then added with an odd change of tone, " I rather think you'll
see to-morrow."

He had made her at last horribly nervous. " What shall
I see?"

" It will all be out."

" Then why shouldn't you tell me ? "

"Well," the young man said, "he has disappeared. There
you are. I mean personally. He's not to be found. But
nothing could make more, you see, for ubiquity. The country

THE PAPERS 263

will ring with it. He vanished on Tuesday night — was then last
seen at his club. Since then he has given no sign. How can
a man disappear who does that sort of thing? It is, as you
say, to caper on the housetops. But it will only be known to-
night."

"Since when, then," Maud asked, "have you known it?"

" Since three o'clock to-day. But I've kept it. I am — a while
longer — keeping it."

She wondered ; she was full of fears. " What do you expect
to get for it ? "

" Nothing — if you spoil my market I seem to make out that
you want to."

She gave this no heed ; she had her thought. " Why then did
you three days ago wire me a mystic word ? "

"Mystic ?"

" What do you call ' Larks ' ? "

" Oh, I remember. Well, it was because I saw larks coming ;
because I saw, I mean, what has happened. I was sure it would
have to happen."

"And what the mischief is it?"

Bight smiled. "Why, what I tell you. That he has gone."

"Gone where?"

" Simply bolted to parts unknown. ' Where ' is what nobody
who belongs to him is able in the least to say, or seems likely to
be able."

" Any more than why ? "

" Any more than why."

" Only you are able to say that ? "

" Well," said Bight, " I can say what has so lately stared me in
the face, what he has been thrusting at me in all its grotesqueness :
his desire for a greater privacy worked through the Papers them-
selves. He came to me with it," the young man presently
added. " I didn't go to him"

" And he trusted you," Maud replied.

"Well, you see what I have given him — the very flower of my
genius. What more do you want ? I'm spent, seedy, sore. I'm
sick," Bight declared, " of his beastly funk."

Maud's eyes, in spite of it, were still a little hard. "Is he
thoroughly sincere ? "

" Good God, no ! How can he be ? Only trying it — as a cat,
for a jump, tries too smooth a wall. He drops straight back."

" Then isn't his funk real ? "

" As real as he himself is."

Maud wondered. " Isn't his flight ? "

264 THE BETTER SORT

"That's what we shall see !"

" Isn't," she continued, " his reason ? "

" Ah," he laughed out, " there you are again ! "

But she had another thought and was not discouraged. " Mayn't
he be, honestly, mad ? "

"Mad — oh yes. But not, I think, honestly. He's not
honestly anything in the world but the Beadel-Muffet of our
delight."

"Your delight," Maud observed after a moment, "revolts me."
And then she said : " When did you last see him ? "

" On Tuesday at six, love. I was one of the last."

" Decidedly, too, then, I judge, one of the worst." She gave
him her idea. " You hounded him on."

" I reported," said Bight, " success. Told him how it was
going."

" Oh, I can see you ! So that if he's dead "

" Well ? " asked Bight blandly.

" His blood is on your hands."

He eyed his hands a moment. " They are dirty for him !
But now, darling," he went on, "be so good as to show me
yours."

"Tell me first," she objected, "what you believe. Is it
suicide ? "

" I think that's the thing for us to make it. Till somebody,"
he smiled, " makes it something else." And he showed how he
warmed to the view. " There are weeks of it, dearest, yet."

He leaned more toward her, with his elbows on the table, and
in this position, moved by her extreme gravity, he lightly flicked
her chin with his finger. She threw herself, still grave, back from
his touch, but they remained thus a while closely confronted.
"Well," she at last remarked, "I shan't pity you."

" You make it, then, everyone except me ? "

" I mean," she continued, "if you do have to loathe yourself."

" Oh, I shan't miss it." And then as if to show how little, " I
did mean it, you know, at Richmond," he declared.

" I won't have you if you've killed him," she presently
returned.

"You'll decide in that case for the nine? " And as the allusion,
with its funny emphasis, left her blank : " You want to wear all
the trousers ? "

" You deserve," she said, when light came, " that I should take
him." And she kept it up. " It's a lovely flat."

Well, he could do as much. " Nine, I suppose, appeals to you
as the number of the muses ? "

THE PAPERS 265

This short passage, remarkably, for all its irony, brought them
together again, to the extent at least of leaving Maud's elbows
on the table and of keeping her friend, now a little back in his
chair, firm while he listened to her. So the girl came out. " I've
seen Mrs. Chorner three times. I wrote that night, after our talk
at Richmond, asking her to oblige. And I put on cheek as I
had never, never put it. I said the public would be so glad to
hear from her ' on the occasion of her engagement.' "

" Do you call that cheek ? " Bight looked amused. " She at
any rate rose straight."

" No, she rose crooked ; but she rose. What you had told me
there in the Park — well, immediately happened. She did consent
to see me, and so far you had been right in keeping me up to it.
But what do you think it was for ? "

" To show you her flat, her tub, her petticoats ? "

" She doesn't live in a flat ; she lives in a house of her own,
and a jolly good one, in Green Street, Park Lane ; though I did,
as happened, see her tub, which is a dream — all marble and
silver, like a kind of a swagger sarcophagus, a thing for the
Wallace Collection ; and though her petticoats, as she first shows,
seem all that, if you wear petticoats yourself, you can look at.
There's no doubt of her money — given her place and her things,
and given her appearance too, poor dear, which would take some
doing."

" She squints ? " Bight sympathetically asked.

" She's so ugly that she has to be rich — she couldn't afford it
on less than five thousand a year. As it is, I could well see, she
can afford anything — even such a nose. But she's funny and
decent; sharp, but a really good sort. And they're not en-
gaged."

" She told you so ? Then there you are ! "

"It all depends," Maud went on; "and you don't know
where I am at all. / know what it depends on."

''Then there you are again ! It's a mine of gold."

"Possibly, but not in your sense. She wouldn't give me the
first word of an interview — it wasn't for that she received me.
It was for something much better."

Well, Bight easily guessed. " For my job ? "

" To see what can be done. She loathes his publicity."

The young man's face lighted. "She told you so?"

" She received me on purpose to tell me."

"Then why do you question my 'larks'? What do you
want more?"

" I want nothing — with what I have : nothing, I mean, but to

266 THE BETTER SORT

help her. We made friends — I like her. And she likes me?
said Maud Blandy.

"Like Mortimer Marshal, precisely."

"No, precisely not like Mortimer Marshal. I caught, on the
spot, her idea — that was what took her. Her idea is that I can
help her — help her to keep them quiet about Beadel : for which
purpose I seem to have struck her as falling from the skies, just
at the right moment, into her lap."

Howard Bight followed, yet lingered by the way. " To keep
whom quiet ? "

"Why, the beastly Papers — what we've been talking about.
She wants him straight out of them — straight"

" She too ? " Bight wondered. " Then she's in terror ? "

"No, not in terror — or it wasn't that when I last saw her.
But in mortal disgust. She feels it has gone too far — which is
what she wanted me, as an honest, decent, likely young woman,
up to my neck in it, as she supposed, to understand from her.
My relation with her is now that I do understand and that if an
improvement takes place I shan't have been the worse for it.
Therefore you see," Maud went on, "you simply cut my
throat when you prevent improvement."

" Well, my dear," her friend returned, " I won't let you bleed
to death." And he showed, with this, as confessedly struck.
"She doesn't then, you think, know ?"

" Know what ? "

"Why, what, about him, there may be to be known. Doesn't
know of his flight."

"She didn't— certainly."

" Nor of anything to make it likely ? "

" What you call his queer reason ? No — she named it to me
no more than you have; though she does mention, distinctly,
that he himself hates, or pretends to hate, the exhibition daily
made of him."

" She speaks of it," Bight asked, " as pretending ? "

Maud straightened it out. " She feels him — that she practi-
cally told me — as rather ridiculous. She honestly has her
feeling; and, upon my word, it's what I like her for. Her
stomach has turned and she has made it her condition.
'Muzzle your Press,' she says; 'then we'll talk.' She gives
him three months — she'll give him even six. And this, mean-
while— when he comes to you — is how you forward the
muzzling."

"The Press, my child," Bight said, "is the watchdog of
civilisation, and the watchdog happens to be — it can't be helped

THE PAPERS 267

— in a chronic state of rabies. Muzzling is easy talk; one can but
keep the animal on the run. Mrs. Chorner, however," he added,
" seems a figure of fable."

" It's what I told you she would have to be when, some time
back, you threw out, as a pure hypothesis, to supply the man
with a motive, your exact vision of her. Your motive has come
true," Maud went on — "with the difference only, if I understand
you, that this doesn't appear the whole of it. That doesn't
matter" — she frankly paid him a tribute. "Your forecast was
inspiration."

" A stroke of genius " — he had been the first to feel it. But
there were matters less clear. "When did you see her last?"

" Four days ago. It was the third time."

" And even then she didn't imagine the truth about him ? "

"I don't know, you see," said Maud, "what you call the
truth."

"Well, that he — quite by that time— didn't know where the
deuce to turn. That's truth enough."

Maud made sure. " I don't see how she can have known it
and not have been upset. She wasn't," said the girl, "upset.
She isn't upset. But she's original."

"Well, poor thing," Bight remarked, " she'll have to be."

"Original?"

" Upset. Yes, and original too, if she doesn't give up the
job." It had held him an instant — but there were many things.
" She sees the wild ass he is, and yet she's willing ? "

" ' Willing ' is just what I asked you three months ago," Maud
returned, " how she could be."

He had lost it— he tried to remember. "What then did
I say?"

"Well, practically, that women are idiots. Also, I believe,
that he's a dazzling beauty."

"Ah yes, he is, poor wretch, though beauty to-day in distress."

" Then there you are," said Maud. They had got up, as at
the end of their story, but they stood a moment while he
waited for change. "If it comes out," the girl dropped, "that
will save him. If he's dishonoured — as I see her — she'll have
him, because then he won't be ridiculous. And I can under-
stand it."

Bight looked at her in such appreciation that he forgot, as he
pocketed it, to glance at his change. " Oh, you creatures ! "

" Idiots, aren't we ? "

Bight let the question pass, but still with his eyes on her,
" You ought to want him to be dishonoured."

268 THE BETTER SORT

" I can't want him, then — if he's to get the good of it — to
be dead."

Still for a little he looked at her. " And if you're to get the
good ? " But she had turned away, and he went with her to
the door, before which, when they had passed out, they had
in the side-street, a backwater to the flood of the Strand, a further
sharp colloquy. They were alone, the small street for a moment
empty, and they felt at first that they had adjourned to a greater
privacy, of which, for that matter, he took prompt advantage.
" You're to lunch again with the man of the flat ? "

"Wednesday, as I say; 1.45."

" Then oblige me by stopping away."

" You don't like it ? " Maud asked.

"Oblige me, oblige me," he repeated.

"And disoblige him?"

" Chuck him. We've started him. It's enough."

Well, the girl but wanted to be fair. " It's you who started
him ; so I admit you're quits."

" That then started you — made Brains repent ; so you see
what you both owe me. I let the creature off, but I hold you to
your debt. There's only one way for you to meet it." And then
as she but looked into the roaring Strand : " With worship." It
made her, after a minute, meet his eyes, but something just then
occurred that stayed any word on the lips of either. A sound
reached their ears, as yet unheeded, the sound of newsboys in
the great thoroughfare shouting " extra-specials " and mingling
with the shout a catch that startled them. The expression in
their eyes quickened as they heard, borne on the air, "Mysterious

Disappearance ! " and then lost it in the hubbub. It was

easy to complete the cry, and Bight himself gasped. "Beadel-
Muffet ? Confound them ! "

" Already ? " Maud had turned positively pale.

" They've got it first — be hanged to them ! "

Bight gave a laugh — a tribute to their push— but her hand was
on his arm for a sign to listen again. It was there, in the raucous
throats ; it was there, for a penny, under the lamps and in the
thick of the stream that stared and passed and left it. They
caught the whole thing — " Prominent Public Man !" And there
was something brutal and sinister in the way it was given to the
flaring night, to the other competing sounds, to the general
hardness of hearing and sight which was yet, on London pave-
ments, compatible with an interest sufficient for cynicism. He
had been, poor Beadel, public and prominent, but he had never
affected Maud Blandy at least as so marked with this character

THE PAPERS 269

as while thus loudly committed to extinction. It was horrid — it
was tragic ; yet her lament for him was dry. "If he's gone
I'm dished."

" Oh, he's gone— now," said Bight.

" I mean if he's dead."

" Well, perhaps he isn't. I see," Bight added, " what you do
mean. If he's dead you can't kill him."

" Oh, she wants him alive," said Maud.

"Otherwise she can't chuck him?"

To which the girl, however, anxious and wondering, made no
direct reply. "Good-bye to Mrs. Chorner. And I owe it to
you."

" Ah, my love ! " he vaguely appealed.

"Yes, it's you who have destroyed him, and it makes up for
what you've done for me."

"I've done it, you mean, against you? I didn't know," he
said, " you'd take it so hard."

Again, as he spoke, the cries sounded out : " Mysterious Dis-
appearance of Prominent Public Man ! " It seemed to swell as
they listened ; Maud started with impatience. " I hate it too
much," she said, and quitted him to join the crowd.

He was quickly at her side, however, and before she reached
the Strand he had brought her again to a pause. " Do you mean
you hate it so much you won't have me ? "

It had pulled her up short, and her answer was proportionately
straight. " I won't have you if he's dead."

"Then will you if he's not?"

At this she looked at him hard. " Do you know, first ? "

« No— blessed if I do."

" On your honour ? "

" On my honour."

"Well," she said after a hesitation, "if she doesn't drop
me "

" It's an understood thing ? " he pressed.

But again she hung fire. " Well, produce him first."

They stood there striking their bargain, and it was made, by
the long look they exchanged, a question of good faith. "I'll
produce him," said Howard Bight.

2;o THE BETTER SORT

IF it had not been a disaster, Beadel-Muffet's plunge into the
obscure, it would have been a huge success ; so large a space did
the prominent public man occupy, for the next few days, in the
Papers, so near did he come, nearer certainly than ever before, to
supplanting other topics. The question of his whereabouts, of
his antecedents, of his habits, of his possible motives, of his
probable, or improbable, embarrassments, fairly raged, from day
to day and from hour to hour, making the Strand, for our two
young friends, quite fiercely, quite cruelly vociferous. They met
again promptly, in the thick of the uproar, and no other eyes
could have scanned the current rumours and remarks so eagerly
as Maud's unless it had been those of Maud's companion. The
rumours and remarks were mostly very wonderful, and all of
a nature to sharpen the excitement produced in the comrades by
their being already, as they felt, "in the know." Even for the
girl this sense existed, so that she could smile at wild surmises ;
she struck herself as knowing much more than she did, especially
as, with the alarm once given, she abstained, delicately enough,
from worrying, from catechising Bight. She only looked at him
as to say " See, while the suspense lasts, how generously I spare
you," and her attitude was not affected by the interested promise
he had made her. She believed he knew more than he said,
though he had sworn as to what he didn't ; she saw him in short
as holding some threads but having lost others, and his state of
mind, so far as she could read it, represented in equal measure
assurances unsupported and anxieties unconfessed. He would
have liked to pass for having, on cynical grounds, and for the
mere ironic beauty of it, believed that the hero of the hour was
only, as he had always been, "up to" something from which he
would emerge more than ever glorious, or at least conspicuous ;
but, knowing the gentleman was more than anything, more than
all else, asinine, he was not deprived of ground in which fear
could abundantly grow. If Beadel, in other words, was ass
enough, as was conceivable, to be working the occasion, he was
by the same token ass enough to have lost control of it, to have
committed some folly from which even fools don't rebound.
That was the spark of suspicion lurking in the young man's ease,
and that, Maud knew, explained something else.

The family and friends had but too promptly been approached,
been besieged; yet Bight, in all the promptness, had markedly
withdrawn from the game — had had, one could easily judge,
already too much to do with it. Who but he, otherwise, would

THE PAPERS 271

have been so naturally let loose upon the forsaken home, the
bewildered circle, the agitated club, the friend who had last con-
versed with the eminent absentee, the waiter, in exclusive halls,
who had served him with five-o'clock tea, the porter, in august
Pall Mall, who had called his last cab, the cabman, supremely
privileged, who had driven him — where? "The Last Cab"
would, as our young woman reflected, have been a heading so
after her friend's own heart, and so consonant with his genius,
that it took all her discretion not to ask him how he had resisted
it. She didn't ask, she but herself noted the title for future use
— she would have at least got that, " The Last Cab," out of the
business; and, as the days went by and the extra-specials
swarmed, the situation between them swelled with all the un-
spoken. Matters that were grave depended on it for each— and
nothing so much, for instance, as her seeing Mrs. Chorner again.
To see that lady as things had been had meant that the poor
woman might have been helped to believe in her. Believing in
her she would have paid her, and Maud, disposed as she was,
really had felt capable of earning the pay. Whatever, as the
case stood, was caused to hang in the air, nothing dangled more
free than the profit derivable from muzzling the Press. With
the watchdog to whom Bight had compared it barking for dear
life, the moment was scarcely adapted for calling afresh upon
a person who had offered a reward for silence. The only silence,
as we say, was in the girl's not mentioning to her friend how
these embarrassments affected her. Mrs. Chorner was a person
she liked — a connection more to her taste than any she had
professionally made, and the thought of her now on the rack,
tormented with suspense, might well have brought to her lips
a "See there what you've done ! "

There was, for that matter, in Bight's face — he couldn't keep
it out — precisely the look of seeing it ; which was one of her
reasons too for not insisting on her wrong. If he couldn't
conceal it this was a part of the rest of the unspoken ; he didn't
allude to the lady lest it might be too sharply said to him that it
was on her account he should most blush. Last of all he was
hushed by the sense of what he had himself said when the news
first fell on their ears. His promise to "produce" the fugitive
was still in the air, but with every day that passed the prospect
turned less to redemption. Therefore if her own promise, on
a different head, depended on it, he was naturally not in a hurry
to bring the question to a test So it was accordingly that they
but read the Papers and looked at each other. Maud felt in
truth that these organs had never been so worth it, nor either she

272 THE BETTER SORT

or her friend — whatever the size of old obligations — so much
beholden to them. They helped them to wait, and the better,
really, the longer the mystery lasted. It grew of course daily
richer, adding to its mass as it went and multiplying its features,
looming especially larger through the cloud of correspondence,
communication, suggestion, supposition, speculation, with which
it was presently suffused. Theories and explanations sprouted at
night and bloomed in the morning, to be overtopped at noon by
a still thicker crop and to achieve by evening the density of
a tropical forest. These, again, were the green glades in which
our young friends wandered.

Under the impression of the first night's shock Maud had
written to Mortimer Marshal to excuse herself from her engage-
ment to luncheon — a step of which she had promptly advised
Bight as a sign of her playing fair. He took it, she could see,
for what it was worth, but she could see also how little he now
cared. He was thinking of the man with whose strange agita-
tion he had so cleverly and recklessly played, and, in the face of
the catastrophe of which they were still so likely to have news,
the vanities of smaller fools, the conveniences of first-class flats,
the memory of Chippendale teas, ceased to be actual or ceased
at any rate to be importunate. Her old interview, furbished into
freshness, had appeared, on its Wednesday, in Brains, but she
had not received in person the renewed homage of its author —
she had only, once more, had the vision of his inordinate
purchase and diffusion of the precious number. It was a vision,
however, at which neither Bight nor she smiled ; it was funny on
so poor a scale compared with their other show. But it befell
that when this latter had, for ten days, kept being funny to the
tune that so lengthened their faces, the poor gentleman glorified
in Brains succeeded in making it clear that he was not easily to
be dropped. He wanted now, evidently, as the girl said to her-
self, to live at concert pitch, and she gathered, from three or four
notes, to which, at short intervals, he treated her, that he was
watching in anxiety for reverberations not as yet perceptible.
His expectation of results from what our young couple had done
for him would, as always, have been a thing for pity with
a young couple less imbued with the comic sense ; though
indeed it would also have been a comic thing for a young couple
less attentive to a different drama. Disappointed of the girl's
company at home the author of Corisanda had proposed fresh
appointments, which she had desired at the moment, and
indeed more each time, not to take up ; to the extent even that,
catching sight of him, unperceived, on one of these occasions,

THE PAPERS 273

in her inveterate Strand, she checked on the spot a first impulse
to make herself apparent. He was before her, in the crowd,
and going the same way. He had stopped a little to look at
a shop, and it was then that she swerved in time not to pass
close to him. She turned and reversed, conscious and con-
vinced that he was, as she mentally put it, on the prowl for her.

She herself, poor creature — as she also mentally put it — she
herself was shamelessly on the prowl, but it wasn't, for her self-
respect, to get herself puffed, it wasn't to pick up a personal
advantage. It was to pick up news of Beadel-Muffet, to be near
the extra-specials, and it was, also — as to this she was never blind
— to cultivate that nearness by chances of Howard Bight. The
blessing of blindness, in truth, at this time, she scantily enjoyed —
being perfectly aware of the place occupied, in her present
attitude to that young man, by the simple impossibility of not see-
ing him. She had done with him, certainly, if he had killed Beadel,
and nothing was now growing so fast as the presumption in
favour of some catastrophe, yet shockingly to be revealed, en-
acted somewhere in desperate darkness — though probably "on
lines," as the Papers said, anticipated by none of the theorists in
their own columns, any more than by clever people at the clubs,
where the betting was so heavy. She had done with him, indubit-
ably, but she had not — it was equally unmistakeable — done with
letting him see how thoroughly she would have done ; or, to feel
about it otherwise, she was laying up treasure in time — as against
the privations of the future. She was affected moreover — perhaps
but half-consciously — by another consideration; her attitude to
Mortimer Marshal had turned a little to fright; she wondered,
uneasily, at impressions she might have given him ; and she had
it, finally, on her mind that, whether or no the vain man believed
in them, there must be a limit to the belief she had communi-
cated to her friend. He was her friend, after all — whatever should
happen ; and there were things that, even in that hampered char-
acter, she couldn't allow him to suppose. It was a queer business
now, in fact, for her to ask herself if she, Maud Blandy, had
produced on any sane human sense an effect of flirtation.

She saw herself in this possibility as in some grotesque reflec-
tor, a full-length looking-glass of the inferior quality that deforms
and discolours. It made her, as a flirt, a figure for frank derision,
and she entertained, honest girl, none of the self-pity that would
have spared her a shade of this sharpened consciousness, have
taken an inch from facial proportion where it would have been
missed with advantage, or added one in such other quarters as
would have welcomed the gift. She might have counted the hairs

274 THE BETTER SORT

of her head, for any wish she could have achieved to remain vague
about them, just as she might have rehearsed, disheartened,
postures of grace, for any dream she could compass of having
ever accidentally struck one. Void, in short, of a personal illusion,
exempt with an exemption which left her not less helplessly aware
of where her hats and skirts and shoes failed, than of where her
nose and mouth and complexion, and, above all, where her poor
figure, without a scrap of drawing, did, she blushed to bethink
herself that she might have affected her young man as really
bragging of a conquest. Her other young man's pursuit of her,
what was it but rank greed — not in the least for her person, but
for the connection of which he had formed so preposterous a
view ? She was ready now to say to herself that she had
swaggered to Bight for the joke — odd indeed though the wish to
undeceive him at the moment when he would have been more
welcome than ever to think what he liked. The only thing she
wished him not to think, as she believed, was that she thought
Mortimer Marshal thought her — or anyone on earth thought her
— intrinsically charming. She didn't want to put to him " Do

you suppose I suppose that if it came to the point ? " her

reasons for such avoidance being easily conceivable. He was not
to suppose that, in any such quarter, she struck herself as either
casting a spell or submitting to one ; only, while their crisis
lasted, rectifications were scarce in order. She couldn't remind
him even, without a mistake, that she had but wished to worry
him ; because in the first place that suggested again a pretension
in her (so at variance with the image in the mirror) to put forth
arts — suggested possibly even that she used similar ones when
she lunched, in bristling flats, with the pushing ; and because in
the second it would have seemed a sort of challenge to him
to renew his appeal.

Then, further and most of all, she had a doubt which by itself
would have made her wary, as it distinctly, in her present sus-
pended state, made her uncomfortable ; she was haunted by the
after-sense of having perhaps been fatuous. A spice of con-
viction, in respect to what was open to her, an element of elation,
in her talk to Bight about Marshal, had there not, after all,
been ? Hadn't she a little liked to think the wretched man could
cling to her ? and hadn't she also a little, for herself, filled out
the future, in fancy, with the picture of the droll relation ? She
had seen it as droll, evidently ; but had she seen it as impossible,
unthinkable ? It had become unthinkable now, and she was not
wholly unconscious of how the change had worked. Such work-
ings were queer — but there they were; the foolish man had

THE PAPERS 275

become odious to her precisely because she was hardening her
face for Bight. The latter was no foolish man, but this it was
that made it the more a pity he should have placed the impass-
able between them. That was what, as the days went on, she
felt herself take in. It was there, the impassable — she couldn't
lucidly have said why, couldn't have explained the thing on the
real scale of the wrong her comrade had done. It was a wrong,
it was a wrong — she couldn't somehow get out of that ; which
was a proof, no doubt, that she confusedly tried. The author of
Corisanda was sacrificed in the effort — for ourselves it may come
to that. Great to poor Maud Blandy as well, for that matter,
great, yet also attaching, were the obscurity and ambiguity in
which some impulses lived and moved — the rich gloom of their
combinations, contradictions, inconsistencies, surprises. It rested
her verily a little from her straightness — the line of a character,
she felt, markedly like the line of the Edgware Road and of
Maida Vale — that she could be queerly inconsistent, and incon-
sistent in the hustling Strand, where, if anywhere, you had,
under pain of hoofs and wheels, to decide whether or no you
would cross. She had moments, before shop -windows, into
which she looked without seeing, when all the unuttered came
over her. She had once told her friend that she pitied everyone,
and at these moments, in sharp unrest, she pitied Bight for their
tension, in which nothing was relaxed.

It was all too mixed and too strange — each of them in a
different corner with a different impossibility. There was her
own, in far Kilburnia ; and there was her friend's, everywhere —
for where didn't he go? and there was Mrs. Chorner's, on the
very edge of Park " Line," in spite of all petticoats and marble
baths; and there was Beadel-Muffet's, the wretched man, God
only knew where — which was what made the whole show
supremely incoherent : he ready to give his head, if, as seemed
so unlikely, he still had a head, to steal into cover and keep
under, out of the glare ; he having scoured Europe, it might so
well be guessed, for some hole in which the Papers wouldn't find
him out, and then having — what else was there by this time to
presume ? — died, in the hole, as the only way not to see, to hear,
to know, let alone be known, heard, seen. Finally, while he lay
there relieved by the only relief, here was poor Mortimer Marshal,
undeterred, undismayed, unperceiving, so hungry to be para-
graphed in something like the same fashion and published on
something like the same scale, that, for the very blindness of it,
he couldn't read the lesson that was in the air, and scrambled, to
his utmost, toward the boat itself that ferried the warning ghost.

276 THE BETTER SORT

Just that, beyond everything, was the incoherence that made for
rather dismal farce, and on which Bight had put his finger in
naming the author of Corisanda as a candidate, in turn, for the
comic, the tragic vacancy. It was a wonderful moment for such
an ideal, and the sight was not really to pass from her till she
had seen the whole of the wonder. A fortnight had elapsed
since the night of Beadel's disappearance, and the conditions
attending the afternoon performances of the Finnish drama had
in some degree reproduced themselves — to the extent, that is,
of the place, the time and several of the actors involved ; the
audience, for reasons traceable, being differently composed.
A lady of " high social position," desirous still further to elevate
that character by the obvious aid of the theatre, had engaged a
playhouse for a series of occasions on which she was to affront
in person whatever volume of attention she might succeed in
collecting. Her success had not immediately been great, and
by the third or the fourth day the public consciousness was so
markedly astray that the means taken to recover it penetrated, in
the shape of a complimentary ticket, even to our young woman.
Maud had communicated with Bight, who could be sure of a
ticket, proposing to him that they should go together and offer-
ing to await him in the porch of the theatre. He joined her
there, but with so queer a face — for her subtlety — that she
paused before him, previous to their going in, with a straight
" You know something ! "

" About that rank idiot ? " He shook his head, looking kind
enough; but it didn't make him, she felt, more natural. "My
dear, it's all beyond me."

"I mean," she said with a shade of uncertainty, "about poor
dear Beadel."

" So do I. So does everyone. No one now, at any moment,
means anything about anyone else. But I've lost intellectual
control — of the extraordinary case. I flattered myself I still had
a certain amount. But the situation at last escapes me. I break
down. Non comprenny ? I give it up."

She continued to look at him hard. " Then what's the matter
with you ? "

"Why, just that, probably — that I feel like a clever man
'done,' and that your tone with me adds to the feeling. Or,
putting it otherwise, it's perhaps only just one of the ways in
which I'm so interesting ; that, with the life we lead and the age
we live in, there's always something the matter with me — there
can't help being : some rage, some disgust, some fresh amaze-
ment against which one hasn't, for all one's experience, been

THE PAPERS 277

proof. That sense — of having been sold again — produces
emotions that may well, on occasion, be reflected in the counte-
nance. There you are."

Well, he might say that, " There you are," as often as he liked
without, at the pass they had come to, making her in the least
see where she was. She was only just where she stood, a little
apart in the lobby, listening to his words, which she found
eminently characteristic of him, struck with an odd impression
of his talking against time, and, most of all, tormented to
recognise that she could fairly do nothing better, at such a
moment, than feel he was awfully nice. The moment — that of
his most blandly (she would have said in the case of another
most impudently) failing, all round, to satisfy her — was appro-
priate only to some emotion consonant with her dignity. It was
all crowded and covered, hustled and interrupted now ; but what
really happened in this brief passage, and with her finding no
words to reply to him, was that dignity quite appeared to
collapse and drop from her, to sink to the floor, under the feet
of people visibly bristling with " paper," where the young man's
extravagant offer of an arm, to put an end and help her in, had
the effect of an invitation to leave it lying to be trampled on.

Within, once seated, they kept their places through two
intervals, but at the end of the third act — there were to be no
less than five — they fell in with a movement that carried half the
audience to the outer air. Howard Bight desired to smoke, and
Maud offered to accompany him-, for the purpose, to the portico,
where, somehow, for both of them, the sense was immediately
strong that this, the squalid Strand, damp yet incandescent, ugly
yet eloquent, familiar yet fresh, was life, palpable, ponderable,
possible, much more than the stuff, neither scenic nor cosmic,
they had quitted. The difference came to them, from the street,
in a moist mild blast, which they simply took in, at first, in a
long draught, as more amusing than their play, and which, for the
moment, kept them conscious of the voices of the air as of
something mixed and vague. The next thing, of course, how-
ever, was that they heard the hoarse newsmen, though with the
special sense of the sound not standing out — which, so far as it
did come, made them exchange a look. There was no hawker
just then within call.

" What are they crying ? "

" Blessed if I care ! " Bight said while he got his light — which
he had but just done when they saw themselves closely ap-
proached. The Papers had come into sight in the form of a
small boy bawling the "Winner" of something, and at the same

278 THE BETTER SORT

moment they recognised their reprieve they recognised also the
presence of Mortimer Marshal.

He had no shame about it. "I fully believed I should find
you."

" But you haven't been," Bight asked, " inside ? "

" Not at to-day's performance — I only just thought I'd pass.
But at each of the others," Mortimer Marshal confessed.

" Oh, you're a devotee," said Bight, whose reception of the poor
man contended, for Maud's attention, with this extravagance of
the poor man's own importunity. Their friend had sat through
the piece three times on the chance of her being there for one or
other of the acts, and if he had given that up in discouragement
he still hovered and waited. Who now, moreover, was to say he
wasn't rewarded ? To find her companion as well as at last to
find herself gave the reward a character that it took, somehow,
for her eye, the whole of this misguided person's curiously large
and flat, but distinctly bland, sweet, solicitous countenance to
express. It came over the girl with horror that here was a
material object — the incandescence, on the edge of the street,
didn't spare it — which she had had perverse moments of seeing
fixed before her for life. She asked herself, in this agitation,
what she would have likened it to ; more than anything perhaps
to a large clean china plate, with a neat " pattern," suspended, to
the exposure of hapless heads, from the centre of the domestic
ceiling. Truly she was, as by the education of the strain under-
gone, learning something every hour — it seemed so to be the
case that a strain enlarged the mind, formed the taste, enriched,
even, the imagination. Yet in spite of this last fact, it must be
added, she continued rather mystified by the actual pitch of her
comrade's manner, Bight really behaving as if he enjoyed their
visitor's " note." He treated him so decently, as they said, that
he might suddenly have taken to liking his company ; which was
an odd appearance till Maud understood it — whereupon it became
for her a slightly sinister one. For the effect of the honest gentle-
man, she by that time saw, was to make her friend nervous and
vicious, and the form taken by his irritation was just this danger-
ous candour, which encouraged the candour of the victim. She
had for the latter a residuum of pity, whereas Bight, she felt, had
none, and she didn't want him, the poor man, absolutely to pay
with his life.

It was clear, however, within a few minutes, that this was what
he was bent on doing, and she found herself helpless before his
smug insistence. She had taken his measure; he was made
incorrigibly to try, irredeemably to fail — to be, in short, eternally

THE PAPERS 279

defeated and eternally unaware. He wouldn't rage — he couldrit,
for the citadel might, in that case, have been carried by his
assault ; he would only spend his life in walking round and round
it, asking everyone he met how in the name of goodness one did
get in. And everyone would make a fool of him — though no one
so much as her companion now — and everything would fall from
him but the perfection of his temper, of his tailor, of his manners,
of his mediocrity. He evidently rejoiced at the happy chance
which had presented him again to Bight, and he lost as little
time as possible in proposing, the play ended, an adjournment
again to tea. The spirit of malice in her comrade, now inordi-
nately excited, met this suggestion with an amendment that fairly
made her anxious ; Bight threw out, in a word, the idea that he
himself surely, this time, should entertain Mr. Marshal.

" Only I'm afraid I can take you but to a small pothouse that
we poor journalists haunt."

" They're just the places I delight in — it would be of an extra-
ordinary interest. I sometimes venture into them — feeling awfully
strange and wondering, I do assure you, who people are. But to

go there with you /" And he looked from Bight to Maud and

from Maud back again with such abysses of appreciation that she
knew him as lost indeed.

VI

IT was demonic of Bight, who immediately answered that he would
tell him with pleasure who everyone was, and she felt this the more
when her friend, making light of the rest of the entertainment
they had quitted, advised their sacrificing it and proceeding to the
other scene. He was really too eager for his victim — she wondered
what he wanted to do with him. He could only play him at the
most a practical joke — invent appetising identities, once they
were at table, for the dull consumers around. No one, at the
place they most frequented, had an identity in the least appe-
tising, no one was anyone or anything. It was apparently of the
essence of existence on such terms — the terms, at any rate, to
which she was reduced — that people comprised in it couldn't even
minister to each other's curiosity, let alone to envy or awe. She
would have wished therefore, for their pursuer, to intervene a
little, to warn him against beguilement ; but they had moved
together along the Strand and then out of it, up a near cross
street, without her opening her mouth. Bight, as she felt, was
acting to prevent this ; his easy talk redoubled, and he led his
lamb to the shambles. The talk had jumped to poor Beadel —

280 THE BETTER SORT

her friend had startled her by causing it, almost with violence, at
a given moment, to take that direction, and he thus quite
sufficiently stayed her speech. The people she lived with
mightn't make you curious, but there was of course always a
sharp exception for him. She kept still, in fine, with the wonder
of what he wanted ; though indeed she might, in the presence of
their guest's response, have felt he was already getting it. He was
getting, that is — and she was, into the bargain — the fullest
illustration of the ravage of a passion; so sublimely Marshal
rose to the proposition, infernally thrown off, that, in whatever
queer box or tight place Beadel might have found himself, it was
something, after all, to have so powerfully interested the public.
The insidious artless way in which Bight made his point! — "I
don't know that I've ever known the public (and I watch it, as in
my trade we have to, day and night) so consummately interested."
They had that phenomenon — the present consummate interest —
well before them while they sat at their homely meal, served with
accessories so different from those of the sweet Chippendale
(another chord on which the young man played with just the
right effect !), and it would have been hard to say if the guest were,
for the first moments, more under the spell of the marvellous
" hold " on the town achieved by the great absentee, or of that of
the delicious coarse tablecloth, the extraordinary form of the
saltcellars, and the fact that he had within range of sight, at the
other end of the room, in the person of the little quiet man with
blue spectacles and an obvious wig, the greatest authority in
London about the inner life of the criminal classes. Beadel, none
the less, came up again and stayed up — would clearly so have
been kept up, had there been need, by their host, that the girl
couldn't at last fail to see how much it was for herself that his
intention worked. What was it, all the same — since it couldn't
be anything so simple as to expose their hapless visitor ? What
had she to learn about him? — especially at the hour of seeing
what there was still to learn about Bight. She ended by deciding
— for his appearance bore her out — that his explosion was but the
form taken by an inward fever. The fever, on this theory, was
the result of the final pang of responsibility. The mystery of
Beadel had grown too dark to be borne — which they would
presently feel ; and he was meanwhile in the phase of bluffing it
off, precisely because it was to overwhelm him.

"And do you mean you too would pay with your lifel" He
put the question, agreeably, across the table to his guest ; agree-
ably of course in spite of his eye's dry glitter.

His guest's expression, at this, fairly became beautiful. " Well,

THE PAPERS 281

it's an awfully nice point. Certainly one would like to feel the
great murmur surrounding one's name, to be there, more or less,
so as not to lose the sense of it, and as I really think, you know,
the pleasure ; the great city, the great empire, the world itself for
the moment, hanging literally on one's personality and giving a
start, in its suspense, whenever one is mentioned. -Big sensation,
you know, that," Mr. Marshal pleadingly smiled, "and of course
if one were dead one wouldn't enjoy it. One would have to
come to life for that."

" Naturally," Bight rejoined—" only that's what the dead don't
do. You can't eat your cake and have it. The question is," he
good-naturedly explained, "whether you'd be willing, for the
certitude of the great murmur you speak of, to part with your
life under circumstances of extraordinary mystery."

His guest earnestly fixed it. "Whether / would be will-
ing?"

" Mr. Marshal wonders," Maud said to Bight, " if you are, as
a person interested in his reputation, definitely proposing to him
some such possibility."

He looked at her, on this, with mild, round eyes, and she felt,
wonderfully, that he didn't quite see her as joking. He smiled —
he always smiled, but his anxiety showed, and he turned it again
to their companion. " You mean — a — the knowing how it might
be going to be felt ? "

"Well, yes — call it that. The consciousness of what one's
unexplained extinction — given, to start with, one's high position
— would mean, wouldn't be able to help meaning, for millions
and millions of people. The point is — and I admit it's, as you
call it, a 'nice' one — if you can think of the impression so
made as worth the purchase. Naturally, naturally, there's but
the impression you make. You don't receive any. You can't.
You've only your confidence — so far as that's an impression.
Oh, it is indeed a nice point ; and I only put it to you," Bight
wound up, " because, you know, you do like to be recognised."

Mr. Marshal was bewildered, but he was not so bewildered as
not to be able, a trifle coyly, but still quite bravely, to confess to
that. Maud, with her eyes on her friend, found herself thinking
of him as of some plump, innocent animal, more or less of the
pink-eyed rabbit or sleek guinea-pig order, involved in the slow
spell of a serpent of shining scales. Bight's scales, truly, had
never so shone as this evening, and he used to admiration —
which was just a part of the lustre — the right shade of gravity.
He was neither so light as to fail of the air of an attractive offer,
nor yet so earnest as to betray a gibe. He might conceivably

282 THE BETTER SORT

have been, as an undertaker of improvements in defective
notorieties, placing before his guest a practical scheme. It was
really quite as if he were ready to guarantee the " murmur " if
Mr. Marshal was ready to pay the price. And the price wouldn't
of course be only Mr. Marshal's existence. All this, at least, if
Mr. Marshal felt moved to take it so. The prodigious thing,
next, was that Mr. Marshal was so moved — though, clearly, as
was to be expected, with important qualifications. " Do you
really mean," he asked, " that one would excite this delightful
interest ? "

" You allude to the charged state of the air on the subject of
Beadel ? " Bight considered, looking volumes. " It would depend
a good deal upon who one is"

He turned, Mr. Marshal, again to Maud Blandy, and his eyes
seemed to suggest to her that she should put his question for
him. They forgave her, she judged, for having so oddly forsaken
him, but they appealed to her now not to leave him to struggle
alone. Her own difficulty was, however, meanwhile, that she
feared to serve him as he suggested without too much, by way of
return, turning his case to the comic ; whereby she only looked
at him hard and let him revert to their friend. " Oh," he said,
with a rich wistfulness from which the comic was not absent, " of
course everyone can't pretend to be Beadel."

" Perfectly. But we're speaking, after all, of those who do
count."

There was quite a hush, for the minute, while the poor man
faltered. " Should you say that / — in any appreciable way —
count ? "

Howard Bight distilled honey. " Isn't it a little a question of
how much we should find you did, or, for that matter, might, as
it were, be made to, in the event of a real catastrophe ? "

Mr. Marshal turned pale, yet he met it too with sweetness.
" I like the way " — and he had a glance for Maud — " you talk of
catastrophes ! "

His host did the comment justice. "Oh, it's only because,
you see, we're so peculiarly in the presence of one. Beadel
shows so tremendously what a catastrophe does for the right
person. His absence, you may say, doubles, quintuples, his
presence."

" I see, I see ! " Mr. Marshal was all there. " It's awfully
interesting to be so present. And yet it's rather dreadful to be
so absent." It had set him fairly musing; for couldn't the
opposites be reconciled ? " If he is" he threw out, " absent !"

" Why, he's absent, of course," said Bight, " if he's dead."

THE PAPERS 283

" And really dead is what you believe him to be ? "

He breathed it with a strange break, as from a mind too full.
It was on the one hand a grim vision for his own case, but was
on the other a kind of clearance of the field. With Beadel out
of the way his own case could live, and he was obviously thinking
what it might be to be as dead as that and yet as much alive.
What his demand first did, at any rate, was to make Howard
Bight look straight at Maud. Her own look met him, but she
asked nothing now. She felt him somehow fathomless, and his
practice with their infatuated guest created a new suspense. He
might indeed have been looking at her to learn how to reply,
but even were this the case she had still nothing to answer.
So in a moment he had spoken without her. " I've quite given
him up."

It sank into Marshal, after which it produced something. " He
ought then to come back. I mean," he explained, "to see for
himself — to have the impression."

" Of the noise he has made ? Yes "—Bight weighed it—" that
would be the ideal."

" And it would, if one must call it ' noise,' " Marshal limpidly
pursued, " make — a — more."

"Oh, but if you,W//"

" Can't, you mean, through having already made so much, add
to the quantity ? "

" Can't "—Bight was a wee bit sharp — "come back, confound
it, at all. Can't return from the dead ! "

Poor Marshal had to take it. " No — not if you are dead."

" Well, that's what we're talking about."

Maud, at this, for pity, held out a perch. " Mr. Marshal, I
think, is talking a little on the basis of the possibility of your not
being ! " He threw her an instant glance of gratitude, and it
gave her a push. " So long as you're not quite too utterly, you
can come back."

"Oh," said Bight, "in time for the fuss?"

" Before "—Marshal met it — "the interest has subsided. It
naturally then wouldn't — would it ? — subside ! "

" No," Bight granted ; " not if it hadn't, through wearing out
— I mean your being lost too long — already died out."

" Oh, of course," his guest agreed, " you mustn't be lost too
long." A vista had plainly opened to him, and the subject led
him on. He had, before its extent, another pause. " About how
long, do you think ? "

Well, Bight had to think. " I should say Beadel had rather
overdone it."

284 THE BETTER SORT

The poor gentleman stared. " But if he can't help him-
self ?"

Bight gave a laugh. " Yes ; but in case he could."

Maud again intervened, and, as her question was for their
host, Marshal was all attention. " Do you consider Beadel has
overdone it ? "

Well, once more, it took consideration. The issue of Bight's,
however, was not of the clearest. "I don't think we can tell
unless he were to. I don't think that, without seeing it, and
judging by the special case, one can quite know how it would be
taken. He might, on the one side, have spoiled, so to speak,
his market; and he might, on the other, have scored as never
before."

"It might be," Maud threw in, "just the making of him."

"Surely" — Marshal glowed— " there's just that chance."

" What a pity then," Bight laughed, " that there isn't someone
to take it ! For the light it would throw, I mean, on the laws — so
mysterious, so curious, so interesting — that govern the great
currents of public attention. They're not wholly whimsical —
wayward and wild; they have their strange logic, their obscure
reason — if one could only get at it ! The man who does, you
see — and who can keep his discovery to himself! — will make his
everlasting fortune, as well, no doubt, as that of a few others.
It's our branch, our preoccupation, in fact, Miss Blandy's and
mine — this pursuit of the incalculable, this study, to that end, of
the great forces of publicity. Only, of course, it must be re-
membered," Bight went on, " that in the case we're speaking of —
the man disappearing as Beadel has now disappeared, and sup-
planting for the time every other topic — must have someone on
the spot for him, to keep the pot boiling, someone acting, with
real intelligence, in his interest. I mean if he's to get the good
of it when he does turn up. It would never do, you see, that
that should be flat ! "

" Oh no, not flat, never ! " Marshal quailed at the thought.
Held as in a vise by his host's high lucidity, he exhaled his
interest at every pore. " It wouldn't be flat for Beadel, would it ?
— I mean if he were to come."

" Not much ! It wouldn't be flat for Beadel— I think I can
undertake." And Bight undertook so well that he threw himself
back in his chair with his thumbs in the armholes of his waist-
coat and his head very much up. " The only thing is that for
poor Beadel it's a luxury, so to speak, wasted — and so dreadfully,
upon my word, that one quite regrets there's no one to step in."

" To step in ? " His visitor hung upon his lips.

THE PAPERS 285

"To do the thing better, so to speak — to do it right; to —
having raised the whirlwind — really ride the storm. To seize the
psychological hour."

Marshal met it, yet he wondered. " You speak of the reappear-
ance? I see. But the man of the reappearance would have,
wouldn't he ? — or perhaps I don't follow ? — to be the same as the
man of the ^appearance. It wouldn't do as well — would it ? —
for somebody else to turn up ? "

Bight considered him with attention — as if there were fine
possibilities. " No ; unless such a person should turn up, say —
well, with news of him."

" But what news ? "

"With lights — the more lurid the better — on the darkness.
With the facts, don't you see, 0/"the disappearance."

Marshal, on his side, threw himself back. " But he'd have to
know them ! "

" Oh," said Bight, with prompt portentousness, " that could be
managed."

It was too much, by this time, for his victim, who simply turned
on Maud a dilated eye and a flushed cheek. " Mr. Marshal," it
made her say — " Mr. Marshal would like to turn up."

Her hand was on the table, and the effect of her words,
combined with this, was to cause him, before responsive speech
could come, to cover it respectfully but expressively with his own.
"Do you mean," he panted to Bight, "that you have, amid the
general collapse of speculation, facts to give ? "

" I've always facts to give."

It begot in the poor man a large hot smile. " But — how shall
I say? — authentic, or as I believe you clever people say, 'in-
spired' ones?"

" If I should undertake such a case as we're supposing, I
would of course by that circumstance undertake that my facts
should be — well, worthy of it. I would take," Bight on his own
part modestly smiled, " pains with them."

It finished the business. " Would you take pains for me ? "

Bight looked at him now hard. " Would you like to appear ? "

" Oh, * appear ' ! " Marshal weakly murmured.

" Is it, Mr. Marshal, a real proposal ? I mean are you
prepared ? "

Wonderment sat in his eyes — an anguish of doubt and desire.
" But wouldn't you prepare me ? "

"Would you prepare me — that's the point," Bight laughed —
" to prepare you ? "

There was a minute's mutual gaze, but Marshal took it in.

286 THE BETTER SORT

" I don't know what you're making me say ; I don't know what
you're making me fee!. When one is with people so up in these

things " and he turned to his companions, alternately, a look

as of conscious doom lighted with suspicion, a look that was like
a cry for mercy — " one feels a little as if one ought to be saved
from one's self. For I dare say one's foolish enough with one's
poor little wish "

" The little wish, my dear sir " — Bight took him up — " to stand
out in the world ! Your wish is the wish of all high spirits."

" It's dear of you to say it." Mr. Marshal was all response.
" I shouldn't want, even if it were weak or vain, to have lived
wholly unknown. And if what you ask is whether I understand
you to speak, at it were, professionally "

" You do understand me ? " Bight pushed back his chair.

" Oh, but so well ! — when I've already seen what you can do.
I need scarcely say, that having seen it, I shan't bargain."

"Ah, then, /shall," Bight smiled. "I mean with the Papers.
It must be half profits."

" ' Profits ' ? " His guest was vague.

"Our friend," Maud explained to Bight, "simply wants the
position."

Bight threw her a look. "Ah, he must take what I give him."

" But what you give me/' their friend handsomely contended,
" is the position."

" Yes ; but the terms that I shall get ! I don't produce you,
of course," Bight went on, "till I've prepared you. But when
I do produce you it will be as a value."

"You'll get so much for me?" the poor gentleman quavered.

"I shall be able to get, I think, anything I ask. So we divide."
And Bight jumped up.

Marshal did the same, and, while, with his hands on the back
of his chair, he steadied himself from the vertiginous view, they
faced each other across the table. " Oh, it's too wonderful ! "

"You're not afraid?"

He looked at a card on the wall, framed, suspended and
marked with the word "Soups." He looked at Maud, who had
not moved. " I don't know ; I may be ; I must feel. What
I should fear," he added, " would be his coming back."

"Beadel's? Yes, that would dish you. But since he
can't !"

" I place myself," said Mortimer Marshal, " in your hands."

Maud Blandy still hadn't moved ; she stared before her at the
cloth. A small sharp sound, unheard, she saw, by the others,
had reached her from the street, and with her mind instinctively

THE PAPERS 287

catching at it, she waited, dissimulating a little, for its repetition
or its effect. It was the howl of the Strand, it was news of
the absent, and it would have a bearing. She had a hesitation,
for she winced even now with the sense of Marshal's intensest
look at her. He couldn't be saved from himself, but he might
be, still, from Bight; though it hung of course, her chance to
warn him, on what the news would be. She thought with con-
centration, while her friends unhooked their overcoats, and by
the time these garments were donned she was on her feet.
Then she spoke. " I don't want you to be ' dished.' "

He allowed for her alarm. " But how can I be ? "

" Something has come."

" Something ? " The men had both spoken.

They had stopped where they stood; she again caught the
sound. " Listen ! They're crying."

They waited then, and it came — came, of a sudden, with a
burst and as if passing the place. A hawker, outside, with his
"extra," called by someone and hurrying, bawled it as he
moved. " Death of Beadel-Muffet — Extraordinary News ! "

They all gasped, and Maud, with her eyes on Bight, saw him,
to her satisfaction at first, turn pale. But his guest drank it in.
" If it's true then" — Marshal triumphed at her— "I'm ^/ dished."

But she only looked hard at Bight, who struck her as having,
at the sound, fallen to pieces, and as having above all, on the
instant, turned cold for his worried game. "Is it true?" she
austerely asked.

His white face answered. " It's true."

VII

THE first thing, on the part of our friends — after each inter-
locutor, producing a penny, had plunged into the unfolded
" Latest " — was this very evidence of their dispensing with their
companion's further attendance on their agitated state, and all
the more that Bight was to have still, in spite of agitation, his
function with him to accomplish : a result much assisted by the
insufflation of wind into Mr. Marshal's sails constituted by the
fact before them. With Beadel publicly dead this gentleman's
opportunity, on the terms just arranged, opened out; it was
quite as if they had seen him, then and there, step, with a kind
of spiritual splash, into the empty seat of the boat so launched,
scarcely even taking time to master the essentials before he gave
himself to the breeze. The essentials indeed he was, by their
understanding, to receive in full from Bight at their earliest

288 THE BETTER SORT

leisure ; but nothing could so vividly have marked his confidence
in the young man as the promptness with which he appeared
now ready to leave him to his inspiration. The news moreover,
as yet, was the rich, grim fact — a sharp flare from an Agency,
lighting into blood-colour the locked room, finally, with the
police present, forced open, of the first hotel at Frankfort-on-the-
Oder; but there was enough of it, clearly, to bear scrutiny, the
scrutiny represented in our young couple by the act of perusal
prolonged, intensified, repeated, so repeated that it was exactly
perhaps with this suggestion of doubt that poor Mr. Marshal had
even also a little lost patience. He vanished, at any rate, while
his supporters, still planted in the side-street into which they had
lately issued, stood extinguished, as to any facial communion,
behind the array of printed columns. It was only after he had
gone that, whether aware or not, the others lowered, on either
side, the absorbing page and knew that their eyes had met. A
remarkable thing, for Maud Blandy, then happened, a thing quite
as remarkable at least as poor Beadel's suicide, which we recall
her having so considerably discounted.

Present as they thus were at the tragedy, present in far Frank-
fort just where they stood, by the door of their stale pothouse
and in the thick of London air, the logic of her situation, she
was sharply conscious, would have been an immediate rupture with
Bight. He was scared at what he had done — he looked his
scare so straight out at her that she might almost have seen in it
the dismay of his question of how far his responsibility, given
the facts, might, if pried into, be held — and not only at the
judgment-seat of mere morals — to reach. The dismay was to
that degree illuminating that she had had from him no such
avowal of responsibility as this amounted to, and the limit to any
laxity on her own side had therefore not been set for her with
any such sharpness. It put her at last in the right, his scare —
quite richly in the right; and as that was naturally but where
she had waited to find herself, everything that now silently passed
between them had the merit, if it had none other, of simplifying.
Their hour had struck, the hour after which she was definitely
not to have forgiven him. Yet what occurred, as I say, was that,
if, at the end of five minutes, she had moved much further, it
proved to be, in spite of logic, not in the sense away from him,
but in the sense nearer. He showed to her, at these strange
moments, as blood-stained and literally hunted ; the yell of the
hawkers, repeated and echoing round them, was like a cry for his
life ; and there was in particular a minute during which, gazing
down into the roused Strand, all equipped both with mob and

THE PAPERS 289

with constables, she asked herself whether she had best get off
with him through the crowd, where they would be least noticed,
or get him away through quiet Covent Garden, empty at that
hour, but with policemen to watch a furtive couple, and with the
news, more bawled at their heels in the stillness, acquiring the
sound of the very voice of justice. It was this last sudden
terror that presently determined her, and determined with it an
impulse of protection that had somehow to do with pity without
having to do with tenderness. It settled, at all events, the ques-
tion of leaving him ; she couldn't leave him there and so ; she
must see at least what would have come of his own sense of the
shock.

The way he took it, the shock, gave her afresh the measure of
how perversely he had played with Marshal — of how he had
tried so, on the very edge of his predicament, to cheat his fears
and beguile his want of ease. He had insisted to his victim on
the truth he had now to reckon with, but had insisted only
because he didn't believe it. Beadel, by that attitude, was but
lying low ; so that he would have no promise really to redeem.
At present he had one, indeed, and Maud could ask herself if
the redemption of it, with the leading of their wretched friend
a further fantastic dance, would be what he depended on to drug
the pain of remorse. By the time she had covered as much
ground as this, however, she had also, standing before him, taken
his special out of his hand and, folding it up carefully with her
own and smoothing it down, packed the two together into such
a small tight ball as she might toss to a distance without the air,
which she dreaded, of having, by any looser proceeding, disowned
or evaded the news. Howard Bight, helpless and passive, put-
ting on the matter no governed face, let her do with him as she
liked, let her, for the first time in their acquaintance, draw his
hand into her arm as if he were an invalid or as if she were
a snare. She took with him, thus guided and sustained, their
second plunge ; led him, with decision, straight to where their
shock was shared and amplified, pushed her way, guarding him,
across the dense thoroughfare and through the great westward
current which fairly seemed to meet and challenge them, and
then, by reaching Waterloo Bridge with him and descending the
granite steps, set him down at last on the Embankment. It was
a fact, none the less, that she had in her eyes, all the while, and
too strangely for speech, the vision of the scene in the little
German city : the smashed door, the exposed horror, the wonder-
ing, insensible group, the English gentleman, in the disordered
room, driven to bay among the scattered personal objects that

290 THE BETTER SORT

only too floridly announced and emblazoned him, and several of
which the Papers were already naming — the poor English gentle-
man, hunted and hiding, done to death by the thing he yet, for
so long, always would have, and stretched on the floor with his
beautiful little revolver still in his hand and the effusion of his
blood, from a wound taken, with rare resolution, full in the face,
extraordinary and dreadful.

She went on with her friend, eastward and beside the river,
and it was as if they both, for that matter, had, in their silence, the
dire material vision. Maud Blandy, however, presently stopped
short — one of the connections of the picture so brought her to a
stand. It had come over her, with a force she couldn't check,
that the catastrophe itself would have been, with all the un-
fathomed that yet clung to it, just the thing for her companion's
professional hand; so that, queerly but absolutely, while she
looked at him again in reprobation and pity, it was as much as
she could do not to feel it for him as something missed, not to
wish he might have been there to snatch his chance, and not,
above all, to betray to him this reflection. It had really risen to
her lips — " Why aren't you, old man, on the spot ? " and indeed
the question, had it broken forth, might well have sounded as a
provocation to him to start without delay. Such was the effect,
in poor Maud, for the moment, of the habit, so confirmed in her,
of seeing time marked only by the dial of the Papers. She had
admired in Bight the true journalist that she herself was so
clearly not — though it was also not what she had most admired
in him; and she might have felt, at this instant, the charm of
putting true journalism to the proof. She might have been on
the point of saying: "Real business, you know, would be for
you to start now, just as you are, before anyone else, sure as you
can so easily be of having the pull"; and she might, after a
moment, while they paused, have been looking back, through the
river-mist, for a sign of the hour, at the blurred face of Big Ben.
That she grazed this danger yet avoided it was partly the result
in truth of her seeing for herself quickly enough that the last
thing Bight could just then have thought of, even under provoca-
tion of the most positive order, was the chance thus failing him,
or the train, the boat, the advantage, that the true journalist
wouldn't have missed. He quite, under her eyes, while they
stood together, ceased to be the true journalist ; she saw him, as
she felt, put off the character as definitely as she might have
seen him remove his coat, his hat, or the contents of his pockets,
in order to lay them on the parapet before jumping into the
river. Wonderful was the difference that this transformation,

THE PAPERS 291

marked by no word and supported by no sign, made in the man
she had hitherto known. Nothing, again, could have so ex-
pressed for her his continued inward dismay. It was as if, for
that matter, she couldn't have asked him a question without
adding to it ; and she didn't wish to add to it, since she was by
this time more fully aware that she wished to be generous.
When she at last uttered other words it was precisely so that
she mightn't press him.

" I think of her — poor thing : that's what it makes me do. I
think of her there at this moment — just out of the ' Line ' — with
this stuff shrieked at her windows." With which, having so at
once contained and relieved herself, she caused him to walk on.

"Are you talking of Mrs. Chorner?" he after a moment
asked. And then, when he had had her quick " Of course — of
who else?" he said what she didn't expect. "Naturally one
thinks of her. But she has herself to blame. I mean she drove

him " What he meant, however, Bight suddenly dropped,

taken as he was with another idea, which had brought them the
next minute to a halt. " Mightn't you, by the way, see her ? "

" See her now ? "

"'Now' or never — for the good of it. Now's just your
time."

" But how can it be hers, in the very midst ? "

" Because it's in the very midst. She'll tell you things to-night
that she'll never tell again. To-night she'll be great."

Maud gaped almost wildly. " You want me, at such an hour,
to call ?"

"And send up your card with the word — oh, of course the
right one ! — on it."

"What do you suggest," Maud asked, "as the right one?"

"Well, ' The world wants you ' — that usually does. I've seldom
known it, even in deeper distress than is, after all, here supposable,
to fail. Try it, at any rate."

The girl, strangely touched, intensely wondered. " Demand of
her, you mean, to let me explain for her ? "

"There you are. You catch on. Write that — if you like —
* Let me explain.' She'll want to explain."

Maud wondered at him more — he had somehow so turned the
tables on her. " But she doesn't. It's exactly what she doesn't ;
she never has. And that he, poor wretch, was always wanting

" Was precisely what made her hold off? I grant it." He had
waked up. " But that was before she had killed him. Trust
me, she'll chatter now."

292 THE BETTER SORT

This, for his companion, simply forced it out. " It wasn't she
who killed him. That, my dear, you know."

" You mean it was I who did ? Well then, my child, interview
me" And, with his hands in his pockets and his idea apparently
genuine, he smiled at her, by the grey river and under the high
lamps, with an effect strange and suggestive. " That would be
a go!"

" You mean " — she jumped at it — " you'll tell me what you
know?"

" Yes, and even what I've done ! But — if you'll take it so — for
the Papers. Oh, for the Papers only ! "

She stared. " You mean you want me to get it in ? "

" I don't 'want ' you to do anything, but I'm ready to help you,
ready to get it in for you, like a shot, myself, if it's a thing you
yourself want."

" A thing I want — to give you away ? "

" Oh," he laughed, " I'm just now worth giving ! You'd really
do it, you know. And, to help you, here I am. It would be for
you — only judge ! — a leg up."

It would indeed, she really saw ; somehow, on the spot, she
believed it. But his surrender made her tremble. It wasn't a
joke — she could give him away ; or rather she could sell him for
money. Money, thus, was what he offered her, or the value of
money, which was the same ; it was what he wanted her to have.
She was conscious already, however, that she could have it only
as he offered it, and she said therefore, but half-heartedly, " I'll
keep your secret."

He looked at her more gravely. "Ah, as a secret I can't
give it." Then he hesitated. " I'll get you a hundred pounds
for it."

"Why don't you," she asked, "get them for 57ourself?"

" Because I don't care for myself. I care only for you."

She waited again. "You mean for my taking you?" And
then as he but looked at her : " How should I take you if I had
dealt with you that way ? "

" What do I lose by it," he said, " if, by our understanding of
the other day, since things have so turned out, you're not to take
me at all? So, at least, on my proposal, you get something
else."

" And what," Maud returned, "do you get ?"

"I don't 'get'; I lose. I have lost. So I don't matter."
The eyes with which she covered him at this might have signified
either that he didn't satisfy her or that his last word — as his
word — rather imposed itself. Whether or no, at all events, she

THE PAPERS 293

decided that he still did matter. She presently moved again, and
they walked some minutes more. He had made her tremble,
and she continued to tremble. So unlike anything that had ever
come to her was, if seriously viewed, his proposal. The quality
of it, while she walked, grew intenser with each step. It struck
her as, when one came to look at it, unlike any offer any man
could ever have made or any woman ever have received ; and it
began accordingly, on the instant, to affect her as almost incon-
ceivably romantic, absolutely, in a manner, and quite out of the
blue, dramatic ; immeasurably more so, for example, than the
sort of thing she had come out to hear in the afternoon — the sort
of thing that was already so far away. If he was joking it was
poor, but if he was serious it was, properly, sublime. And he
wasn't joking. He was, however, after an interval, talking again,
though, trembling still, she had not been attentive ; so that she
was unconscious of what he had said until she heard him once
more sound Mrs. Chorner's name. " If you don't, you know,
someone else will, and someone much worse. You told me she
likes you." She had at first no answer for him, but it presently
made her stop again. It was beautiful, if she would, but it was
odd — this pressure for her to push at the very hour he himself
had renounced pushing. A part of the whole sublimity of his
attitude, so far as she was concerned, it clearly was ; since,
obviously, he was not now to profit by anything she might do.
She seemed to see that, as the last service he could render, he
wished to launch her and leave her. And that came out the
more as he kept it up. " If she likes you, you know, she really
wants you. Go to her as a friend."

" And bruit her abroad as one ? " Maud Blandy asked.

"Oh, as a friend from the Papers — from them and for them,
and with just your half-hour to give her before you rush back to
them. Take it even — oh, you can safely" — the young man
developed — "a little high with her. That's the way — the real
way." And he spoke the next moment as if almost losing his
patience. " You ought by this time, you know, to understand."

There was something in her mind that it still charmed — his
mastery of the horrid art. He could see, always, the superior
way, and it was as if, in spite of herself, she were getting the
truth from him. Only she didn't want the truth — at least not
that one. " And if she simply, for my impudence, chucks me
out of window ? A short way is easy for them, you know, when
one doesn't scream or kick, or hang on to the furniture or the
banisters. And I usually, you see" — she said it pensively —
" don't I've always, from the first, had my retreat prepared for

294 THE BETTER SORT

any occasion, and flattered myself that, whatever hand I might,
or mightn't, become at getting in, no one would ever be able so
beautifully to get out. Like a flash, simply. And if she does,
as I say, chuck me, it's you who fall to the ground."

He listened to her without expression, only saying " If you
feel for her, as you insist, it's your duty." And then later, as if
he had made an impression, "Your duty, I mean, to try. I
admit, if you will, that there's a risk, though I don't, with my
experience, feel it. Nothing venture, at any rate, nothing have ;
and it's all, isn't it? at the worst, in the day's work. There's
but one thing you can go on, but it's enough. The greatest
probability."

She resisted, but she was taking it in. " The probability that
she will throw herself on my neck ? "

" It will be either one thing or the other," he went on as if he
had not heard her. " She'll not receive you, or she will. But if
she does your fortune's made, and you'll be able to look higher
than the mere common form of donkey." She recognised the
reference to Marshal, but that was a thing she needn't mind now,
and he had already continued. " She'll keep nothing back. And
you mustn't either."

" Oh, won't I ? " Maud murmured.

"Then you'll break faith with her."

And, as if to emphasise it, he went on, though without leaving
her an infinite time to decide, for he looked at his watch as they
proceeded, and when they came, in their spacious walk, abreast
of another issue, where the breadth of the avenue, the expanses
of stone, the stretch of the river, the dimness of the distance,
seemed to isolate them, he appeared, by renewing their halt and
looking up afresh toward the town, to desire to speed her on her
way. Many things meanwhile had worked within her, but it was
not till she had kept him on past the Temple Station of the
Underground that she fairly faced her opportunity. Even then
too there were still other things, under the assault of which she
dropped, for the moment, Mrs. Chorner. " Did you really," she
asked, " believe he'd turn up alive ? "

With his hands in his pockets he continued to gloom at her.
"Up there, just now, with Marshal — what did you take me as
believing ? "

" I gave you up. And I do give you. You're beyond me.
Only," she added, " I seem to have made you out since then as
really staggered. Though I don't say it," she ended, " to bear
hard upon you."

" Don't bear hard," said Howard Bight very simply.

THE PAPERS 295

It moved her, for all she could have said ; so that she had for
a moment to wonder if it were bearing hard to mention some
features of the rest of her thought. If she was to have him,
certainly, it couldn't be without knowing, as she said to herself,
something — something she might perhaps mitigate a little the
solitude of his penance by possessing. " There were moments
when I even imagined that, up to a certain point, you were still in
communication with him. Then I seemed to see that you lost
touch — though you braved it out for me ; that you had begun
to be really uneasy and were giving him up. I seemed to see,"
she pursued after a hesitation, "that it was coming home to
you that you had worked him up too high — that you were feeling,
if I may say it, that you had better have stopped short. I mean
short of this!'

" You may say it," Bight answered. " I had better."

She looked at him a moment. " There was more of him than
you believed."

"There was more of him. And now," Bight added, looking
across the river, " here's all of him."

" Which you feel you have on your heart ? "

" I don't know where I have it." He turned his eyes to her.
" I must wait"

" For more facts ? "

" Well," he returned after a pause, " hardly perhaps for ' more '
if — with what we have — this is all. But I've things to think out.
I must wait to see how I feel. I did nothing but what he wanted.
But we were behind a bolting horse — whom neither of us could
have stopped."

" And he" said Maud, " is the one dashed to pieces."

He had his grave eyes on her. "Would you like it to have
been me ? "

" Of course not. But you enjoyed it — the bolt; everything up
to the smash. Then, with that ahead, you were nervous."

" I'm nervous still," said Howard Bight.

Even in his unexpected softness there was something that
escaped her, and it made in her, just a little, for irritation.
"What I mean is that you enjoyed his terror. That was what
led you on."

" No doubt — it was so grand a case. But do you call charging
me with it," the young man asked, " not bearing hard ? "

"No" — she pulled herself up — "it is. I don't charge you.
Only I feel how little — about what has been, all the while, behind
— you tell me. Nothing explains."

"Explains what?"

296 THE BETTER SORT

"Why, his act."

He gave a sign of impatience. " Isn't the explanation what I
offered a moment ago to give you ? "

It came, in effect, back to her. " For use ? "

" For use."

"Only?"

"Only." It was sharp.

They stood a little, on this, face to face ; at the end of which
she turned away. "I'll go to Mrs. Chorner." And she was off
while he called after her to take a cab. It was quite as if she
were to come upon him, in his strange insistence, for the fare.

VIII

IF she kept to herself, from the morrow on, for three days, her
adoption of that course was helped, as she thankfully felt, by the
great other circumstance and the great public commotion under
cover of which it so little mattered what became of private
persons. It was not simply that she had her reasons, but she
couldn't during this time have descended again to Fleet Street
even had she wished, though she said to herself often enough
that her behaviour was rank cowardice. She left her friend alone
with what he had to face, since, as she found, she could in
absence from him a little recover herself. In his presence, the
night of the news, she knew she had gone to pieces, had yielded,
all too vulgarly, to a weakness proscribed by her original view.
Her original view had been that if poor Beadel, worked up, as
she inveterately kept seeing him, should embrace the tragic
remedy, Howard Bight wouldn't be able not to show as practically
compromised. He wouldn't be able not to smell of the wretched
man's blood, morally speaking, too strongly for condonations or
complacencies. There were other things, truly, that, during their
minutes on the Embankment, he had been able to do, but they
constituted just the sinister subtlety to which it was well that she
should not again, yet awhile, be exposed. They were of the
order — from the safe summit of Maida Hill she could make it
out — that had proved corrosive to the muddled mind of the
Frankfort fugitive, deprived, in the midst of them, of any honest
issue. Bight, of course, rare youth, had meant no harm; but
what was precisely queerer, what, when you came to judge, less
human, than to be formed for offence, for injury, by the mere
inherent play of the spirit of observation, of criticism, by the in-
extinguishable flame, in fine, of the ironic passion ? The ironic
passion, in such a world as surrounded one, might assert itself as

THE PAPERS 297

half the dignity, the decency, of life ; yet, none the less, in cases
where one had seen it prove gruesomely fatal (and not to one's
self, which was nothing, but to others, even the stupid and the
vulgar) one was plainly admonished to — well, stand off a little
and think.

This was what Maud Blandy, while the Papers roared and
resounded more than ever with the new meat flung to them,
tried to consider that she was doing ; so that the attitude held
her fast during the freshness of the event. The event grew, as
she had felt it would, with every further fact from Frankfort and
with every extra-special, and reached its maximum, inevitably, in
the light of comment and correspondence. These features, before
the catastrophe, had indubitably, at the last, flagged a little, but
they revived so prodigiously, under the well-timed shock, that, for
the period we speak of, the poor gentleman seemed, with a
continuance, with indeed an enhancement, of his fine old knack,
to have the successive editions all to himself. They had been
always of course, the Papers, very largely about him, but it was
not too much to say that at this crisis they were about nothing
else worth speaking of ; so that our young woman could but groan
in spirit at the direful example set to the emulous. She spared
an occasional moment to the vision of Mortimer Marshal, saw
him drunk, as she might have said, with the mere fragrance of the
wine of glory, and asked herself what art Bight would now use to
furnish him forth as he had promised. The mystery of Beadel's
course loomed, each hour, so much larger and darker that the
plan would have to be consummate, or the private knowledge
alike beyond cavil and beyond calculation, which should attempt
either to sound or to mask the appearances. Strangely enough,
none the less, she even now found herself thinking of her rash
colleague as attached, for the benefit of his surviving victim, to
this idea ; she went in fact so far as to imagine him half-upheld,
while the public wonder spent itself, by the prospect of the fun he
might still have with Marshal. This implied, she was not
unconscious, that his notion of fun was infernal, and would of
course be especially so were his knowledge as real as she supposed
it. He would inflate their foolish friend with knowledge that was
false and so start him as a balloon for the further gape of the
world. This was the image, in turn, that would yield the last
sport — the droll career of the wretched man as wandering forever
through space under the apprehension, in time duly gained, that
the least touch of earth would involve the smash of his car.
Afraid, thus, to drop, but at the same time equally out of conceit
of the chill air of the upper and increasing solitudes to which he

298 THE BETTER SORT

had soared, he would become such a diminishing speck, though
traceably a prey to wild human gyrations, as she might conceive
Bight to keep in view for future recreation.

It wasn't however the future that was actually so much in
question for them all as the immediately near present, offered to
her as the latter was in the haunting light of the inevitably un-
limited character of any real inquiry. The inquiry of the Papers,
immense and ingenious, had yet for her the saving quality that
she didn't take it as real. It abounded, truly, in hypotheses,
most of them lurid enough, but a certain ease of mind as to what
these might lead to was perhaps one of the advantages she owed
to her constant breathing of Fleet Street air. She couldn't quite
have said why, but she felt it wouldn't be the Papers that, pro-
ceeding from link to link, would arrive vindictively at Bight's
connection with his late client. The enjoyment of that consum-
mation would rest in another quarter, and if the young man were
as uneasy now as she thought he ought to be even while she
hoped he wasn't, it would be from the fear in his eyes of such
justice as was shared with the vulgar. The Papers held an inquiry,
but the Authorities, as they vaguely figured to her, would hold an
inquest; which was a matter — even when international, compli-
cated and arrangeable, between Frankfort and London, only on
some system unknown to her — more in tune with possibilities of
exposure. It was not, as need scarce be said, from the exposure
of Beadel that she averted herself; it was from the exposure of
the person who had made of Beadel's danger, Beadel's dread —
whatever these really represented — the use that the occurrence at
Frankfort might be shown to certify. It was well before her, at
all events, that if Howard Bight's reflections, so stimulated, kept
pace at all with her own, he would at the worst, or even at the
best, have been glad to meet her again. It was her knowing that
and yet lying low that she privately qualified as cowardice ; it was
the instinct of watching and waiting till she should see how great
the danger might become. And she had moreover another reason,
which we shall presently learn. The extra-specials meanwhile
were to be had in Kilburnia almost as soon as in the Strand ; the
little ponied and painted carts, tipped at an extraordinary angle,
by which they were disseminated, had for that matter, she
observed, never rattled up the Edgware Road at so furious a
rate. Each evening, it was true, when the flare of Fleet Street
would have begun really to smoke, she had, in resistance to old
habit, a little to hold herself; but for three successive days she
tided over that crisis. It was not till the fourth night that her
reaction suddenly declared itself, determined as it partly was by

THE PAPERS 299

the latest poster that dangled free at the door of a small shop just
out of her own street. The establishment dealt in buttons, pins,
tape, and silver bracelets, but the branch of its industry she
patronised was that of telegrams, stamps, stationery, and the
" Edinburgh rock " offered to the appetite of the several small
children of her next-door neighbour but one. "The Beadel-
Muffet Mystery, Startling Disclosures, Action of the Treasury "
— at these words she anxiously gazed; after which she decided.
It was as if from her hilltop, from her very housetop, to which
the window of her little room was contiguous, she had seen the
red light in the east. It had, this time, its colour. She went on,
she went far, till she met a cab, which she hailed, " regardless,"
she felt, as she had hailed one after leaving Bight by the river.
" To Fleet Street " she simply said, and it took her— that she felt
too — back into life.

Yes, it was life again, bitter, doubtless, but with a taste, when,
having stopped her cab, short of her indication, in Covent Garden,
she walked across southward and to the top of the street in which
she and her friend had last parted with Mortimer Marshal. She
came down to their favoured pothouse, the scene of Bight's high
compact with that worthy, and here, hesitating, she paused, un-
certain as to where she had best look out. Her conviction, on
her way, had but grown ; Howard Bight would be looking out —
that to a certainty ; something more, something portentous, had
happened (by her evening paper, scanned in the light of her little
shop window, she had taken instant possession of it), and this
would have made him know that she couldn't keep up what he
would naturally call her "game." There were places where they
often met, and the diversity of these — not too far apart, however
— would be his only difficulty. He was on the prowl, in fine,
with his hat over his eyes ; and she hadn't known, till this vision
of him came, what seeds of romance were in her soul. Romance,
the other night, by the river, had brushed them with a wing that
was like the blind bump of a bat, but that had been something on
his part, whereas this thought of bringing him succour as to a
Russian anarchist, to some victim of society or subject of extradi-
tion, was all her own, and was of this special moment. She saw
him with his hat over his eyes ; she saw him with his overcoat
collar turned up ; she saw him as a hunted hero cleverly drawn
in one of the serialising weeklies or, as they said, in some popular
" ply," and the effect of it was to open to her on the spot a sort of
happy sense of all her possible immorality. That was the romantic
sense, and everything vanished but the richness of her thrill. She
knew little enough what she might have to do for him, but her

300 THE BETTER SORT

hope, as sharp as a pang, was that, if anything, it would put her
in danger too. The hope, as it happened then, was crowned on
the very spot ; she had never so felt in danger as when, just now,
turning to the glazed door of their cookshop, she saw a man,
within, close behind the glass, still, stiff and ominous, looking at
her hard. The light of the place was behind him, so that his face,
in the dusk of the side-street, was dark, but it was visible that she
showed for him as an object of interest. The next thing, of
course, she had seen more — seen she could be such an object, in
such a degree, only to her friend himself, and that Bight had been
thus sure of her ; and the next thing after that had passed straight
in and been met by him, as he stepped aside to admit her, in
silence. He had his hat pulled down and, quite forgetfully, in
spite of the warmth within, the collar of his mackintosh up.

It was his silence that completed the perfection of these things
— the perfection that came out most of all, oddly, after he had
corrected them by removal and was seated with her, in their
common corner, at tea, with the room almost to themselves and
no one to consider but Marshal's little man in the obvious wig
and the blue spectacles, the great authority on the inner life of the
criminal classes. Strangest of all, nearly, was it, that, though now
essentially belonging, as Maud felt, to this order, they were not
conscious of the danger of his presence. What she had wanted
most immediately to learn was how Bight had known; but he made,
and scarce to her surprise, short work of that. "I've known
every evening — known, that is, that you've wanted to come ; and
I've been here every evening, waiting just there till I should see
you. It was but a question of time. To-night, however, I was
sure — for there's, after all, something of me left. Besides,

besides ! " He had, in short, another certitude. " You've

been ashamed — I knew, when I saw nothing come, that you
would be. But also that that would pass."

Maud found him, as she would have said, all there. "I've
been ashamed, you mean, of being afraid ? "

"You've been ashamed about Mrs. Chorner; that is, about
me. For that you did go to her I know."

"Have you been then yourself?"

" For what do you take me ? " He seemed to wonder. " What
had I to do with her — except for you ? " And then before she
could say : " Didn't she receive you ? "

" Yes, as you said, she ' wanted ' me."

" She jumped at you ? "

"Jumped at me. She gave me an hour."

He flushed with an interest that, the next moment, had flared

THE PAPERS 301

in spite of everything into amusement. " So that I was right,
in my perfect wisdom, up to the hilt ? "

" Up to the hilt. She took it from me."

"That the public wants her?"

" That it won't take a refusal. So she opened up."

"Overflowed?"

" Prattled."

"Gushed?"

"Well, recognised and embraced her opportunity. Kept me
there till midnight. Told me, as she called it, everything about
everything."

They looked at each other long on it, and it determined
in Bight at last a brave clatter of his crockery. "They're
stupendous ! "

" It's you that are," Maud replied, " to have found it out so.
You know them down to the ground."

" Oh, what I've found out ! " But it was more than he

could talk of then. "If I hadn't really felt sure, I wouldn't
so have urged you. Only now, if you please, I don't understand
your having apparently but kept her in your pocket."

"Of course you don't," said Maud Blandy. To which she
added, "And I don't quite myself. I only know that now that
I have her there nothing will induce me to take her out."

" Then you potted her, permit me to say," he answered, " on
absolutely false pretences."

"Absolutely ; which is precisely why I've been ashamed.
I made for home with the whole thing," she explained, "and
there, that night, in the hours till morning, when, turning it over,
I saw all it really was, I knew that I couldn't — that I would rather
choose that shame, that of not doing for her what I had offered,
than the hideous honesty of bringing it out. Because, you see,"
Maud declared, " it was— well, it was too much."

Bight followed her with a sharpness ! "It was so good ? "

" Quite beautiful ! Awful!"

He wondered. " Really charming ? "

" Charming, interesting, horrible. It was true — and it was the
whole thing. It was herself — and it was him, all of him too.
Not a bit made up, but just the poor woman melted and over-
flowing, yet at the same time raging — like the hot-water tap when
it boils. I never saw anything like it ; everything, as you
guaranteed, came out ; it has made me know things. So, to
have come down here with it, to have begun to hawk it, either
through you, as you kindly proposed, or in my own brazen
person, to the highest bidder — well, I felt that I didn't have to,

302 THE BETTER SORT

after all, if I didn't want to, and that if it's the only way I can
get money I would much rather starve."

^1 see." Howard Bight saw all. "And that's why you're
asriamed ? "

She hesitated — she was both so remiss and so firm. " I knew
that by my not coming back to you, you would have guessed,
have found me wanting; just, for that matter, as she has found
me. And I couldn't explain. I can't — I can't to her. So that,"
the girl went on, " I shall have done, so far as her attitude to me
was to be concerned, something more indelicate, something more
indecent, than if I had passed her on. I shall have wormed
it all out of her, and then, by not having carried it to market,
disappointed and cheated her. She was to have heard it cried
like fresh herring."

Bight was immensely taken. " Oh, beyond all doubt. You're
in a fix. You've played, you see, a most unusual game. The
code allows everything but that."

"Precisely. So I must take the consequences. I'm dis-
honoured, but I shall have to bear it. And I shall bear it by
getting out. Out, I mean, of the whole thing. I shall chuck
them."

" Chuck the Papers ? " he asked in his simplicity.

But his wonder, she saw, was overdone — their eyes too frankly
met. " Damn the Papers ! " said Maud Blandy.

It produced in his sadness and weariness the sweetest smile
that had yet broken through. " We shall, between us, if we keep
it up, ruin them ! And you make nothing," he went on, " of
one's having at last so beautifully started you ? Your complaint,"
he developed, "was that you couldn't get in. Then suddenly,
with a splendid jump, you are in. Only, however, to look round
you and say with disgust ' Oh, here 1 ' Where the devil do you
want to be ? "

"Ah, that's another question. At least," she said, "I can
scrub floors. I can take it out perhaps — my swindle of Mrs.
Chorner," she pursued — " in scrubbing hers"

He only, after this, looked at her a little. " She has written
to you ? "

" Oh, in high dudgeon. I was to have attended to the ' press-
cutting ' people as well, and she was to have seen herself, at the
furthest, by the second morning (that was day-before-yesterday)
all over the place. She wants to know what I mean."

" And what do you answer ? "

"That it's hard, of course, to make her understand, but
that I've felt her, since parting with her, simply to be too good."

THE PAPERS 303

" Signifying by it, naturally," Bight amended, " that you've felt
yourself to be so."

" Well, that too if you like. But she was exquisite."

He considered. " Would she do for a ply ? "

"Oh God, no!"

"Then for a tile?"

" Perhaps," said Maud Blandy at last.

He understood, visibly, the shade, as well as the pause ; which,
together, held him a moment. But it was of something else he
spoke. " And you who had found they would never bite ! "

"Oh, I was wrong," she simply answered. "Once they've
tasted blood ! '

"They want to devour," her friend laughed, "not only the bait
and the hook, but the line and the rod and the poor fisherman
himself? Except," he continued, "that poor Mrs. Chorner
hasn't yet even * tasted.' However," he added, " she obviously
will."

Maud's assent was full. " She'll find others. She'll appear."

He waited a moment — his eye had turned to the door of
the street. "Then she must be quick. These are things of
the hour."

" You hear something ? " she asked, his expression having
struck her.

He listened again, but it was nothing. " No — but it's somehow
in the air."

"What is?"

"Well, that she must hurry. She must get in. She must get
out." He had his arms on the table, and, locking his hands and
inclining a little, he brought his face nearer to her. "My sense

to-night's of an openness ! I don't know what's the matter.

Except, that is, that you're great."

She looked at him, not drawing back. "You know everything —
so immeasurably more than you admit or than you tell me. You
mortally perplex and worry me."

It made him smile. " You're great, you're great," he only
repeated. "You know it's quite awfully swagger, what you've
done."

"What I haven't, you mean; what I never shall. Yes," she
added, but now sinking back — "of course you see that too.
What dorit you see, and what, with such ways, is to be the end
of you?"

" You're great, you're great " — he kept it up. " And I like you.
That's to be the end of me."

So, for a minute, they left it, while she came to the thing that,

304 THE BETTER SORT

for the last half-hour, had most been with her. " What is the
* action/ announced to-night, of the Treasury ? "

" Oh, they've sent somebody out, partly, it would seem, at the
request of the German authorities, to take possession."

"Possession, you mean, of his effects?"

" Yes, and legally, administratively, of the whole matter."

" Seeing, you mean, that there's still more in it ? "

"Than meets the eye," said Bight, "precisely. But it won't
be till the case is transferred, as it presently will be, to this
country, that they will see. Then it will be funny."

"Funny?" Maud Blandy asked.

"Oh, lovely."

"Lovely for you?"

" Why not ? The bigger the whole thing grows, the lovelier."

" You've odd notions," she said, " of loveliness. Do you ex-
pect his situation won't be traced to you? Don't you suppose
you'll be forced to speak ? "

"To 'speak' ?"

" Why, if it is traced. What do you make, otherwise, of the
facts to-night ? "

" Do you call them facts ? " the young man asked.

" I mean the Astounding Disclosures."

"Well, do you only read your headlines? 'The most as-
tounding disclosures are expected' — thafs the valuable text.
Is it" he went on, " what fetched you ? "

His answer was so little of one that she made her own scant.
" What fetched me is that I can't rest."

" No more can I," he returned. " But in what danger do you
think me?"

"In any in which you think yourself. Why not, if I don't
mean in danger of hanging ? "

He looked at her so that she presently took him for serious at
last — which was different from his having been either worried or
perverse. "Of public discredit, you mean — for having so un-
mercifully baited him ? Yes," he conceded with a straightness
that now surprised her, " I've thought of that. But how can the
baiting be proved ? "

"If they take possession of his effects won't his effects be
partly his papers, and won't they, among them, find letters from
you, and won't your letters show it ? "

"Well, show what?"

"Why, the frenzy to which you worked him — and thereby
your connection."

" They won't show it to dunderheads."

THE PAPERS 305

" And are they all dunderheads ? "

" Every mother's son of them — where anything so beautiful is
concerned."

11 Beautiful ? " Maud murmured.

"Beautiful, my letters are — gems of the purest ray. I'm
covered."

She let herself go — she looked at him long. "You're a
wonder. But all the same," she added, "you don't like it."

"Well, I'm not sure." Which clearly meant, however, that he
almost was, from the way in which, the next moment, he had
exchanged the question for another. " You haven't anything to
tell me of Mrs. Chorner's explanation ? "

Oh, as to this, she had already considered and chosen.
"What do you want of it when you know so much more? So
much more, I mean, than even she has known."

" Then she hasn't known ? "

"There you are! What," asked Maud, "are you talking
about ? "

She had made him smile, even though his smile was percep-
tibly pale; and he continued. "Of what was behind. Behind
any game of mine. Behind everything."

" So am I then talking of that. No," said Maud, " she hasn't
known, and she doesn't know I judge, to this hour. Her ex-
planation therefore doesn't bear upon that. It bears upon some-
thing else."

"Well, my dear, on what?"

He was not, however, to find out by simply calling her his
dear; for she had not sacrificed the reward of her interview in
order to present the fine flower of it, unbribed, even to him.
" You know how little you've ever told me, and you see how, at
this instant, even while you press me to gratify you, you give me
nothing. I give," she smiled — yet not a little flushed — "nothing
for nothing."

He showed her he felt baffled, but also that she was perverse.
"What you want of me is what, originally, you wouldn't hear of:
anything so dreadful, that is, as his predicament must be. You
saw that to make him want to keep quiet he must have something
to be ashamed of, and that was just what, in pity, you positively
objected to learning. You've grown," Bight smiled, " more inter-
ested since."

" If I have," said Maud, " it's because you have. Now, at
any rate, I'm not afraid."

He waited a moment. "Are you very sure?"

" Yes, for my mystification is greater at last than my delicacy.

306 THE BETTER SORT

I don't know till I do know " — and she expressed this even with
difficulty — " what it has been, all the while, that it was a question
of, and what, consequently, all the while, we've been talking
about."

"Ah, but why should you know?" the young man inquired.
" I can understand your needing to, or somebody's needing to, if
we were in a ply, or even, though in a less degree, if we were in
a tile. But since, my poor child, we're only in the delicious
muddle of life itself ! "

"You may have all the plums of the pudding, and I nothing
but a mouthful of cold suet ? " Maud pushed back her chair ;
she had taken up her old gloves ; but while she put them on she
kept in view both her friend and her grievance. "I don't
believe," she at last brought out, "that there is, or that there
ever was, anything."

" Oh, oh, oh ! " Bight laughed.

"There's nothing," she continued, "'behind.' There's no
horror."

"You hold, by that," said Bight, "that the poor man's deed
is all me ? That does make it, you see, bad for me."

She got up and, there before him, finished smoothing her
creased gloves. "Then we are — if there's such richness — in a
ply."

" Well, we are not, at all events — so far as we ourselves are
concerned — the spectators." And he also got up. "The
spectators must look out for themselves."

" Evidently, poor things ! " Maud sighed. And as he still
stood as if there might be something for him to come from her,
she made her attitude clear — which was quite the attitude now of
tormenting him a little. "If you know something about him
which she doesn't, and also which / don't, she knows something
about him — as I do too — which you don't."

" Surely : when it's exactly what I'm trying to get out of you.
Are you afraid /'//sell it?"

But even this taunt, which she took moreover at its worth,
didn't move her. "You definitely then won't tell me?"

"You mean that if I will you'll tell me?"

She thought again. "Well — yes. But on that condition alone."

" Then you're safe," said Howard Bight. " I can't, really, my
dear, tell you. Besides, if it's to come out ! "

" I'll wait in that case till it does. But I must warn you," she
added, " that my facts won't come out."

He considered. " Why not, since the rush at her is probably
even now being made ? Why not, if she receives others ? "

THE PAPERS 307

Well, Maud could think too. "She'll receive them, but they
won't receive her. Others are like your people — dunderheads.
Others won't understand, won't count, won't exist." And she
moved to the door. " There are no others." Opening the door,
she had reached the street with it, even while he replied, over-
taking her, that there were certainly none such as herself; but
they had scarce passed out before her last remark was, to their
somewhat disconcerted sense, sharply enough refuted. There
was still the other they had forgotten, and that neglected
quantity, plainly in search of them and happy in his instinct of
the chase, now stayed their steps in the form of Mortimer
Marshal.

IX

HE was coming in as they came out ; and his "I hoped I might
find you," an exhalation of cool candour that they took full in
the face, had the effect, the next moment, of a great soft carpet,
all flowers and figures, suddenly unrolled for them to walk upon
and before which they felt a scruple. Their ejaculation, Maud
was conscious, couldn't have passed for a welcome, and it
wasn't till she saw the poor gentleman checked a little, in turn,
by their blankness, that she fully perceived how interesting they
had just become to themselves. His face, however, while, in their
arrest, they neither proposed to re-enter the shop with him nor
invited him to proceed with them anywhere else — his face, gaping
there, for Bight's promised instructions, like a fair receptacle,
shallow but with all the capacity of its flatness, brought back so to
our young woman the fond fancy her companion had last excited
in him that he profited just a little — and for sympathy in spite
of his folly — by her sense that with her too the latter had some-
how amused himself. This placed her, for the brief instant, in a
strange fellowship with their visitor's plea, under the impulse of
which, without more thought, she had turned to Bight. "Your
eager claimant," she, however, simply said, " for the opportunity
now so beautifully created."

"I've ventured," Mr. Marshal glowed back, "to come and
remind you that the hours are fleeting."

Bight had surveyed him with eyes perhaps equivocal. " You're
afraid someone else will step in ? "

"Well, with the place so tempting and so empty ! "

Maud made herself again his voice. " Mr. Marshal sees it
empty itself perhaps too fast."

He acknowledged, in his large, bright way, the help afforded

308 THE BETTER SORT

him by her easy lightness. " I do want to get in, you know,
before anything happens."

" And what," Bight inquired, " are you afraid may happen ? "

" Well, to make sure," he smiled, " I want myself, don't you
see, to happen first."

Our young woman, at this, fairly fell, for her friend, into his
sweetness. " Do let him happen ! "

" Do let me happen ! " Mr. Marshal followed it up.

They stood there together, where they had paused, in their
strange council of three, and their extraordinary tone, in connec-
tion with their number, might have marked them, for some passer
catching it, as persons not only discussing questions supposedly
reserved for the Fates, but absolutely enacting some encounter
of these portentous forces. " Let you — let you ? " Bight gravely
echoed, while on the sound, for the moment, immensities might
have hung. It was as far, however, as he was to have time to
speak, for even while his voice was in the air another, at first
remote and vague, joined it there on an ominous note and hushed
all else to stillness. It came, through the roar of thoroughfares,
from the direction of Fleet Street, and it made our interlocutors
exchange an altered look. They recognised it, the next thing, as
the howl, again, of the Strand, and then but an instant elapsed
before it flared into the night. " Return of Beadel-Muffet !
Tremenjous Sensation ! "

Tremenjous indeed, so tremenjous that, each really turning as
pale with it as they had turned, on the same spot, the other time
and with the other news, they stood long enough stricken and
still for the cry, multiplied in a flash, again to reach them.
They couldn't have said afterwards who first took it up. " Re-
turn ?"

" From the Dead — I say / " poor Marshal piercingly quavered.

"Then he hasn't been ?" Maud gasped it with him at

Bight.

But that genius, clearly, was not less deeply affected. " He's
alive?" he breathed in a long, soft wail in which admiration
appeared at first to contend with amazement and then the sense
of the comic to triumph over both. Howard Bight uncon-
trollably— it might have struck them as almost hysterically —
laughed.

The others could indeed but stare. "Then who's dead?"
piped Mortimer Marshal.

"I'm afraid, Mr. Marshal, that^w are," the young man returned,
more gravely, after a minute. He spoke as if he saw how dead.

Poor Marshal was lost. " But someone was killed ! "

THE PAPERS 309

•

"Someone undoubtedly was, but Beadel somehow has sur-
vived it."

"Has he, then, been playing the game ?" It baffled

comprehension.

Yet it wasn't even that what Maud most wondered. " Have
you all the while really known ? " she asked of Howard Bight

He met it with a look that puzzled her for the instant, but
that she then saw to mean, half with amusement, half with
sadness, that his genius was, after all, simpler. " I wish I had.
I really believed."

"All along?"

" No ; but after Frankfort,"

She remembered things. "You haven't had a notion this
evening ? "

" Only from the state of my nerves."

" Yes, your nerves must be in a state ! " And somehow now
she had no pity for him. It was almost as if she were, frankly,
disappointed. " /," she then boldly said, " didn't believe."

" If you had mentioned that then," Marshal observed to her,
" you would have saved me an awkwardness."

But Bight took him up. " She did believe — so that she might
punish me."

"Punish you ?"

Maud raised her hand at her friend. "He doesn't under-
stand."

He was indeed, Mr. Marshal, fully pathetic now. "No, I
don't understand. Not a wee bit."

" Well," said Bight kindly, " we none of us do. We must give
it up."

"You think /really must ?"

" You, sir," Bight smiled, " most of all. The places seem so
taken."

His client, however, clung. " He won't die again ? "

" If he does he'll again come to life. He'll never die. Only
we shall die. He's immortal."

He looked up and down, this inquirer ; he listened to the howl
of the Strand, not yet, as happened, brought nearer to them by
one of the hawkers. And yet it was as if, overwhelmed by his
lost chance, he knew himself too weak even for their fond aid.
He still therefore appealed. " Will this be a boom for him ? "

" His return ? Colossal. For — fancy ! — it was exactly what we
talked of, you remember, the other day, as the ideal. I mean,"
Bight smiled, "for a man to be lost, and yet at the same
time "

310 THE BETTER SORT

" To be found ? " poor Marshal too hungrily mused.

"To be boomed," Bight continued, "by his smash and yet
never to have been too smashed to know how he was booming."

It was wonderful for Maud too. " To have given it all up, and
yet to have it all."

" Oh, better than that," said her friend : " to have more than
all, and more than you gave up. Beadel," he was careful to
explain to their companion, " will have more."

Mr. Marshal struggled with it. " More than if he were
dead?"

" More," Bight laughed, " than if he weren't ! It's what you
would have liked, as I understand you, isn't it? and what you
would have got. It's what /would have helped you to."

" But who then," wailed Marshal, " helps him ? "

" Nobody. His star. His genius."

Mortimer Marshal glared about him as for some sign of such
aids in his own sphere. It embraced, his own sphere too, the
roaring Strand, yet — mystification and madness ! — it was with
Beadel the Strand was roaring. A hawker, from afar, at sight of
the group, was already scaling the slope. "Ah, but how the
devil ?"

Bight pointed to this resource. " Go and see."

"But don't you want them?" poor Marshal asked as the others
retreated.

" The Papers ? " They stopped to answer. " No, never again.
We've done with them. We give it up."

" I mayn't again see you ? "

Dismay and a last clutch were in Marshal's face, but Maud,
who had taken her friend's meaning in a flash, found the word to
meet them. "We retire from business."

With which they turned again to move in the other sense,
presenting their backs to Fleet Street. They moved together up
the rest of the hill, going on in silence, not arrested by another
little shrieking boy, not diverted by another extra-special, not
pausing again till, at the end of a few minutes, they found them-
selves in the comparative solitude of Covent Garden, encumbered
with the traces of its traffic, but now given over to peace. The
howl of the Strand had ceased, their client had vanished for-
ever, and from the centre of the empty space they could look up
and see stars. One of these was of course Beadel-Muffet's, and
the consciousness of that, for the moment, kept down any
arrogance of triumph. He still hung above them, he ruled,
immortal, the night ; they were far beneath, and he now trans-
cended their world ; but a sense of relief, of escape, of the light,

THE PAPERS 311

still unquenched, of their old irony, made them stand there face
to face. There was more between them now than there had
ever been, but it had ceased to separate them, it sustained them
in fact like a deep water on which they floated closer. Still,
however, there was something Maud needed. " It had been all
the while worked?"

"Ah, not, before God — since I lost sight of him — by me."

"Then by himself?"

"I dare say. But there are plenty for him. He's beyond
me."

"But you thought," she said, " it would be so. You thought,"
she declared, " something."

Bight hesitated. " I thought it would be great if he could.
And as he could — why, it is great. But all the same I too was
sold. I am sold. That's why I give up."

"Then it's why /do. We must do something," she smiled at
him, " that requires less cleverness."

" We must love each other," said Howard Bight.

" But can we live by that ? "

He thought again ; then he decided. " Yes."

"Ah," Maud amended, "we must be 'littery.' We've now got
stuff."

" For the dear old ply, for the rattling good tile ? Ah, they
take better stuff than this — though this too is good."

" Yes," she granted on reflection, " this is good, but it has bad
holes. Who was the dead man in the locked hotel room ? "

" Oh, I don't mean that. That," said Bight, " he'll splendidly
explain."

"But how?"

" Why, in the Papers. To-morrow."

Maud wondered. " So soon ? "

" If he returned to-night, and it's not yet ten o'clock, there's
plenty of time. It will be in all of them — while the universe
waits. He'll hold us in the hollow of his hand. His chance is
just there. And there," said the young man, " will be his
greatness."

" Greater than ever then ? "

"Quadrupled."

She followed ; then it made her seize his arm. "Goto him ! "

Bight frowned. " ' Go ' ? "

" This instant. You explain ! "

He understood, but only to shake his head. "Never again.
I bow to him."

Well, she after a little understood; but she thought again.

312 THE BETTER SORT

" You mean that the great hole is that he really had no reason,
no funk ?"

" I've wondered," said Howard Bight.

"Whether he had done anything to make publicity em-
barrassing ? "

" I've wondered," the young man repeated.

" But I thought you knew ! "

" So did I. But I thought also I knew he was dead. How-
ever," Bight added, " hell explain that too."

"To-morrow?"

" No— as a different branch. Say day after."

" Ah, then," said Maud, " if he explains ! "

" There's no hole ? I don't know ! " — and it forced from him
at last a sigh. He was impatient of it, for he had done with it ;
it would soon bore him. So fast they lived. " It will take," he
only dropped, " much explaining."

His detachment was logical, but she looked a moment at his
sudden weariness. "There's always, remember, Mrs. Chorner."

" Oh yes, Mrs. Chorner ; we luckily invented her"

"Well, if she drove him to his death ?"

Bight, with a laugh, caught at it. " Is that it ? Did she drive
him?"

It pulled her up, and, though she smiled, they stood again, a
little, as on their guard. " Now, at any rate," Maud simply said
at last, " she'll marry him. So you see how right I was."

With a preoccupation that had grown in him, however, he had
already lost the thread. " How right ? "

" Not to sell my Talk."

" Oh yes," — he remembered. " Quite right." But it all came
to something else. " Whom will you marry ? "

She only, at first, for answer, kept her eyes on him. Then she
turned them about the place and saw no hindrance, and then,
further, bending with a tenderness in which she felt so trans-
formed, so won to something she had never been before, that she
might even, to other eyes, well have looked so, she gravely kissed
him. After which, as he took her arm, they walked on together.
" That, at least," she said, "we'll put in the Papers."

THE END

Plymouth : W. Brcndon and Son, Printers.

A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS

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writer. Mrs. Cross's style is picturesque, and the book is more attractive than
many novels. The early difficulties of Australian settlers, life in the towns and
life on the farms are vividly described.

LETTERS FROM A SELF-MADE MERCHANT TO HIS
SON. By GEORGE HORACE LORIMER. Crown Svo. 6s.

This book is a masterpiece of humour and sound sense. It purports to be a collection
of letters written by J. Graham, head of a great packing company in Chicago, to
his son Pierrepont, and it describes in a racy and interesting form the secrets of
success in business and in life.

WHEN I WAS A CHILD. By AN OLD POTTER BOY.
Crown Svo. 6s.

A BOOK OF THE COUNTRY AND THE GARDEN.
By H. M. BATSON. Illustrated by F. CARRUTHERS GOULD and
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SHAKESPEARE'S GARDEN. By the Rev. J. H. BLOOM.

\Vith Illustrations. Fcap. Svo. 35. 6d. ; leather, 3*. 6d. net.

A CONCISE HANDBOOK OF HERBACEOUS PLANTS.

By H. M. BATSON. Fcap. Svo. 3*. 6d.
A very complete and concise guide in alphabetical order.

THE LAND OF THE BLACK MOUNTAIN. Being a de-
scription of Montenegro. By R. WYON and G. PRANCE. With 40
Illustrations. Crown Svo. 6s.

A BOOK OF EXMOOR. ByF.J. SNELL. Illustrated. Crown

Svo. 6s.

This book deals with a variety of topics, embracing legend, folklore, dialect, sport,
biography, history, and natural history, and renders accessible to the public a mass
of particulars hitherto attainable only in expensive monographs or in scattered
periodicals. The author has been at immense pains to consult every known source
of information, both printed and oral ; and his aim has been to produce, not so much
a guide-book, but something more satisfying and substantial, viz. an exhaustive
account of the matters in question. There are numerous illustrations.

THE DEVOTIONS OF BISHOP ANDREWES. By F. E.
BRIGHTMAN, M.A., of Pusey House, Oxford. Crown Svo. 6s.

This elaborate work has been in preparation for many years, and is the most com-
plete edition that has ever been published of the famous devotions. It contains a
long Introduction, with numerous Notes and References.

THE SPIRIT AND ORIGIN OF CHRISTIAN MONASTI-
CISM. By JAMES O. HANNAY, M.A. Crown Svo. 6s.

THE SATIRES OF JUVENAL. Translated by S. G. OWEN.

Crown Svo. 2s. 6d. [Classical Translations.

THE ENGLISH SUNDAY. By E. R. BERNARD, M.A., Canon
of Salisbury. Fcap. Svo. is. 6d.

MESSRS. METHUEN'S ANNOUNCEMENTS

Xittle Xibrarg

Pott &vo, cloth, is. 6d. net ; leather , 2s. 6d. net each volume.
ROMANY RYE. By GEORGE BORROW. With Notes and an
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ESMOND. By W. M. THACKERAY. Edited by STEPHEN

GWYNN.

CHRISTMAS BOOKS. By W. M. THACKERAY. Edited by
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CHRISTMAS BOOKS. By CHARLES DICKENS. Edited by
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A LITTLE BOOK OF ENGLISH SONNETS. Edited by
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THE SCARLET LETTER. By NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

Ht&en Sbafcespeare

General Editor— W. J. CRAIG.

OTHELLO. Edited by H. C. HART. Demy %vo. ^s. 6d.
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OLittle asiograpbiee

Cloth, 35. 6d. ; leather, 4*. net.

THE YOUNG PRETENDER. By C. S. TERRY. With 12
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ROBERT BURNS. By T. F. HENDERSON. With 12 Illustra-

tions.

CHATHAM. By A. S. M'DowALL. With 12 Illustrations.

TENNYSON. By A. C. BENSON, M.A. With 12 Illustrations.

Fcap. 8v0.

Gbe Xittle (BufDes

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CORNWALL. By A. L. SALMON. Illustrated by B. C.
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KENT. By G. CLINCH. Illustrated by F. D. BEDFORD.

HERTFORDSHIRE. By H. W. TOMPKINS, F.R.H.S. Illus-
trated by E. H. NEW.

ROME. By C. G. ELLABY. Illustrated by B. C. BOULTER.

of 2>evotfon

Pott 8vo, cloth, 2s. ; leather, 2s. 6d. net.

GRACE ABOUNDING. By JOHN BUNYAN. Edited by
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MESSRS. METHUEN'S ANNOUNCEMENTS 5

BISHOP WILSON'S SACRA PRIVATA. Edited by A. E
BURN, B.D.

THE DEVOTIONS OF ST. ANSELM. Edited by C. C. J.
WEBB, M.A.

LYRA SACRA : A Book of Sacred Verse. Selected and edited
by H. C. BEECHING, M.A., Canon of Westminster.

Educational Books

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF TEXTILE
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MENSURATION. By C. T. MILLIS, M.I.M.E., Principal of
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THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES. Edited by A. E. RUBIF,
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[Met 'hueri 's Junior School Books.

A JUNIOR FRENCH GRAMMAR. By L. A. SORNET and
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THE STUDENTS' PRAYER BOOK. PART i. MORNING
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FLECKER, M.A., D.C.L., Headmaster of the Dean Close School,
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Fiction

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OUTSIDE AND OVERSEAS. By G. MAKGILL. Crown
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THE SQUIREEN. By SHAN. F. BULLOCK. CrownZvo. 6s.
AUNT BETHIA'S BUTTON. By J.RANDAL. Crown^vo. 6s.

6 MESSRS. METHUEN'S ANNOUNCEMENTS

LOVE IN A LIFE. By ALLAN MONKHOUSE. Crown 8vo. 6s.
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THE RED HOUSE. By Mrs. E. BLAND (E. NESBIT).
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WORLD'S PEOPLE. By JULIEN GORDON. Crown Svo. 6s.

THE CYNIC AND THE SYREN. By J. W. MAYALL.
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A BRANDED NAME. By J. BLOUNDELLE BURTON. Crown
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SILENT DOMINION. By Mrs. E. W. TRAFFORD-TAUNTON.
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THE MACHINATIONS OF THE MYO-OK. By CECIL
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ABRAHAM'S SACRIFICE. By GUSTAF JANSON. CrownZvo.
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PLAIN AND VELDT. By J. H. M. ABBOT, Author of « Tommy
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BY A FINNISH LAKE. By PAUL WAINEMAN. Crown
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A LOST ESTATE. By M. E. MANN. A New Edition.
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THE PARISH OF HILBY. By M. E. MANN. A New Edition.
Crown 8vo. 6s.

LITTLE TU'PENNY. By S. BARING-GOULD. A New Edition
Crown 8v0. 6d.

MESSRS. METHUEN'S ANNOUNCEMENTS 7

FOUR NOVELS TRANSFERRED
New Editions. Crown 8vo. $s. 6d. each.
TALES OF SPACE AND TIME. By H. G. WELLS.
WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES. By H. G. WELLS.
LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM. By H. G. WELLS.
THE INVISIBLE MAN. By H. G. WELLS.

Ube IRoveiist

Messrs. METHUEN are issuing under the above general title a Monthly
Series of Novels by popular authors at the price of Sixpence. Each
Number is as long as the average Six Shilling Novel.

Jan. DRIFT. By L. T. MEADE.

Feb. THE MASTER OF BEECHWOOD. By ADELINE

SERGEANT.

March. CLEMENTINA. By A. E. W. MASON.

April. THE ALIEN. By F. F. MoNTRESOR.

May. THE BROOM SQUIRE. By S. BARING-GOULD.

June. HONEY. By HELEN MATHERS.

July. THE FOOTSTEPS OF A THRONE. By MAX

PEMBERTON.

Additional Volumes and Reprints
in. THE INCA'S TREASURE. By ERNEST GLANVILLE.

Reprint.

IX. A FLASH OF SUMMER. By Mrs. W. K. CLIFFORD,

in place 0/"'The Adventure of Princess Sylvia.'

/IDetbuen's Stepennp SLibrars

New Volumes 1903.

Jan. A STATE SECRET. By B. M. CROKER.
Feb. SAM'S SWEETHEART. By HELEN MATHERS.
March. HANDLEY CROSS. By R. S. SURTEES.
April. ANNE MAULEVERER. By Mrs. CAFFYN.
May. THE ADVENTURERS. By H. B. MARRIOT WATSON.

THE CEDAR STAR. By M. E. MANN.
June. MASTER OF MEN. By E. P. OPPENHEIM.

July. THE TRAIL OF THE SWORD. By GILBERT
PARKER.

A CATALOGUE OF

MESSRS. METHUEN'S

PUBLICATIONS

PART I. — GENERAL LITERATURE

Jacob Abbot. THE BEECHNUT BOOK.

Edited by E. V. LUCAS. Illustrated.

Square Fcap 8vo. 25. 6d.

[Little Blue Books.
W. F. Adeney, M.A. See Bennett and

Adeney.
JEschylus. AGAMEMNON, CHOEPHO-

ROE, EUMENIDES. Translated by

LEWIS CAMPBELL, LL.D., late Professor of

Greek at St. Andrews. $s.

[Classical Translations.

G. A. Aitken. See Swift.

William Alexander, D.D., Archbishop of

Armagh. THOUGHTS AND COUN-
SELS OF MANY YEARS. Selected
from the writings of Archbishop ALEX-
ANDER. Square Pott 8vo. zs. 6d.

Aristophanes. THE FROGS. Translated
into English by E. W. HUNTINGFORD, M.A.,
Professor of Classics in Trinity College,
Toronto. Crown 8v0. zs. 6d.

Aristotle. THE NICOMACHEAN
ETHICS. Edited, with an Introduction
and Notes, by JOHN BURNET, M.A., Pro-
fessor of Greek at St. Andrews. Demy 8vo.
15$. net.

' We have seldom, if ever, seen an edition
of any classical author in which what is held
in common with other commentators is so
clearly put, and what is original is of such
value and interest. ' — Pilot.

J. B. Atkins. THE RELIEF OF LADY-
SMITH. With 16 Plans and Illustrations.
Third Edition. Crown 8v0. 6s.

J. B. Atlay. See R. H. Barham.

St. Augustine, THE CONFESSIONS OF.
Newly Translated, with an Introduction
and Notes, by C. BIGG, D.D., late Student
of Christ Church. Third Edition. Pott
8vo. Cloth, zs; leather, zs. 6d. net.

[Library of Devotion.

1 The translation is an excellent piece of

English, and the introduction is a masterly

exposition. We augur well of a series which

begins so satisfactorily.' — Times.

Jane Austen. PRIDE AND PREJU-
DICE. Edited by E. V. LUCAS. Two
Volumes. Pott 8vo. Each volume^ cloth,
is. f>d.; leather, zs. 6d. net. [Little Library.

NORTHANGER ABBEY. Edited by E.
V.LucAS. PottKoo. Cloth, is. 6d.; leather,
zs. 6d. net. [Little Library.

Constance Bache. BROTHER MUSI-
CIANS. Reminiscences of Edward and
Walter Bache. With 16 Illustrations.
Crown 8z>o. 6s. net.

E. S. S. Baden-Powell, Major-General.
THE DOWNFALL OF PREMPEH. A
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Large Crown 8vo. 6s.

THE MATABELE CAMPAIGN, 1896.
With nearly 100 Illustrations. Fourth and
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Graham Balfour. THE LIFE OF

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. Second
Edition. Two Volumes. Demy 8vo. 25$.
net.

' Mr. Balfour has done his work extremely
well — done it, in fact, as Stevenson himself
would have wished it done, with care and
skill and affectionate appreciation.' — West-
minster Gazette.

S. E. Bally. A FRENCH COMMERCIAL
READER. With Vocabulary. Second
Edition. Crown 8vo. zs.

[Commercial Series.

FRENCH COMMERCIAL CORRE-
SPONDENCE. With Vocabulary. Third
Edition. Crown 8v0. zs.

[Commercial Series.

A GERMAN COMMERCIAL READER.
With Vocabulary. Crown 8z><?. zs.

[Commercial Series.

GERMAN COMMERCIAL CORRE-
SPONDENCE. With Vocabulary. Crojun
810. zs. 6d. [Commercial Series.

Elizabeth L. Banks. THE AUTO-
BIOGRAPHY OF A 'NEWSPAPER

GENERAL LITERATURE

9

GIRL.' With Portrait of the Author and
her Dog. Crown 8z>0. 6s.

1 A picture of a strenuous and busy life,
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A very lively and interesting book.'— Daily
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'A. very amusing, cheery, good-natured
account of a young lady's journalistic
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R. H. Barham. THE INGOLDSBY
LEGENDS. Edited by J. B. Atlay. Two
Volumes. Pott 8v0. Each volume, cloth,
is. 6d. net; leather, as. 6d. net.

[The Little Library.

S. Baring-Gould, Author of ' Mehalah,' etc.
THE LIFE OF NAPOLEON BONA-
PARTE. With over 450 Illustrations in
the Text, and 12 Photogravure Plates.
Gilt top. Large quarto. 36^.

'The main feature of this gorgeous
volume is its great wealth of beautiful
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torial chronicle of Napoleon I.'s personal
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THE TRAGEDY OF THE C^SARS.

With numerous Illustrations from Busts,

Gems, Cameos, etc. Fifth Edition.

Royal 8z>0. 15*.

'A most splendid and fascinating book

on a subject of undying interest. It is

brilliantly written, and the illustrations are

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—Daily Chronicle.
A BOOK OF FAIRY TALES. With

numerous Illustrations and Initial Letters

by ARTHUR J. GASKIN. Second Edition.

Crown 8v0, Buckram, dr.
OLD ENGLISH FAIRY TALES. With

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Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. Buckram. 6s.

'A charming volume.' — Guardian.
THE CROCK OF GOLD. Fairy Stories.

Crown Zvo. 6s.

' Twelve delightful fairy tales.'— Punch.

THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW : A
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A completely new edition of the well-
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DARTMOOR: A Descriptive and Historical
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' A mos^delightful guide, companion and
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THE BOOK OF THE WEST. With
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'Bracing as the air of Dartmoor, the
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A BOOK OF BRITTANY. With numerous
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Uniform in scope and size with Mr.
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Cornwall, and Dartmoor.
BRITTANY. Illustrated by Miss J. WYLIB.
Pott 8v0. Cloth, 3*. ; leather, 3*. 6d. net.

[The Little Guides.

'A dainty representative of "The Little
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'An excellent little guide-book.' — Daily
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OLD COUNTRY LIFE. With 67 Illustra-
tions. Fifth Edition. Large Cr. 8v0. 6s.
AN OLD ENGLISH HOME. With numer-
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HISTORIC ODDITIES AND STRANGE
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YORKSHIRE ODDITIES AND
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STRANGE SURVIVALS AND SUPER-
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A GARLAND OF COUNTRY SONG:
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S. BARING-GOULD and H. F. SHEPPARD.
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SONGS OF THE WEST: Traditional
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BARING - GOULD, M.A., and H. F. SHEP-
PARD, M.A. In 4 Parts. Parts /., //.,
///., 3*. each. Part IV., $s. In One
Volume, French Morocco, 15^.

' A rich collection of humour, pathos,
grace,and poetic fancy.1 — Saturday Review.

W. E. Barnes, D.D. ISAIAH. TWO

Volumes. Fcap. 8v0. zs. net each. Vol. r.
With Map. [Churchman's Bible.

Mrs. P. A. Barnett. A LITTLE BOOK
OF ENGLISH PROSE. Pott 8vo.
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[Little Library.

R. E. N Baron, M.A. FRENCH PROSE
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Key, 35. net.

H. M. Barron, M.A., Wadham College,
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C. F. BastaWe, M.A., Professor of Econ-
omics at Trinity College, Dublin. THE
COMMERCE OF NATIONS. Second
Edition. Crown 8vo zs. 6d.

[Social Questions Series.

H. M. BatSOlL See Edward FitzGerald.

A 2

10

MESSRS. METHUEN'S CATALOGUE

A Hulme Seaman. PONS ASINORUM ;

OR, A GUIDE TO BRIDGE. Second
Edition. Fcap. %vo. vs.
W. S. Beard, Headmaster Modern School,
Farehara. JUNIOR ARITHMETIC
EXAMINATION PAPERS. Fcap. 8vo.
is. [Junior Examination Series.

Peter Beckford. THOUGHTS ON

HUNTING. Edited by J. OTHO PAGET,

and Illustrated by G. H. JALLAND. Demy

8v0. IDS. 6d.
William Beckford. THE HISTORY OF

THE CALIPH VATHEK. Edited by E.

DENISQN Ross. Pott 8vo. Cloth, T.S. 6d.

net; leather, zs 6d. net. [Little Library.
F D. Bedford. See E. V. Lucas.
H. C. BeecMng, M.A. See Tennyson.

Jacob Belimen. THE SUPERSENSUAL
LIFE. Edited by BERNARD HOLLAND.
Fcap. 8v0. 35. 6d.

Hilaire BellOC. PARIS. With Maps and
Illustrations. Crown 8v0. 6s.

H. H. L. Bellot, M.A. THE INNER
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'A vast store of entertaining material.' —
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'A delightful and excellently illustrated
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W. H. Bennett, M.A.. A PRIMER OF
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'The work of an honest, fearless, and
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W. H. Bennett and W. F. Adeney. A

BIBLICAL INTRODUCTION. Crown
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' It makes available to the ordinary reader
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A. C. Benson, M.A. THE LIFE OF
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tions. Fcap. 8v0. Cloth, $s. 6d. ; Leather,
4s. net. [Little Biographies.

E. M. Benson. THE WAY OF HOLI-
NESS : a Devotional Commentary on the
ugth Psalm. Crown 8vo. 5*.

M. Bldez. See Parmentier.

C. Bigg, D.D. See St. Augustine, A Kempis,
and William Law.

C. R. D. Biggs, B.D. THE EPISTLE TO
THE PHILIPPIANS. Edited by. Fcap.
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' Mr. Biggs' work is very thorough, and
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T. Herbert Bindley, B.D. THE OECU-

MENICAL DOCUMENTS OF THE
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Crown 8v0. 6s.

A historical account of the Creeds.
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B. Blaxland, M.A. THE SONG OF

SONGS. Being Selections from ST. BER-
NARD. Pott 8v0. Cloth, 2S. ; leather, zs.
6d. net. [Library of Devotion.

George Body, D.D. THE SOUL'S PIL-
GRIMAGE I Devotional Readings^ from
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Selected and arranged by J. H. BURN,
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Cardinal Bona. A GUIDE TO ETER-
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[Library of Devotion.

F. C. Boon, B.A. A COMMERCIAL
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Commercial Series.

George Borrow. LAVENGRO. Edited

by F. HINDES GROOME. Two Volumes.
Pott 8v0. Each -volume, cloth, is. 6d. net ;
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J. Ritzema Bos. AGRICULTURAL
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WORTH DAVIS, M.A. With an Introduction
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155 Illustrations. Cr. 8v0. 35. 6d.

C G. Sotting, B.A. JUNIOR LATIN

EXAMINATION PAPERS. Fcap.%oo.\s.

[Junior Examination Series.

EASY GREEK EXERCISES. Cr. 8va. zs.

E. M. Bowden. THE EXAMPLE OF
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E. Bowmaker. THE HOUSING OF
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F. G. Brabant, M.A. SUSSEX. Illus-
trated by E. H. NEW. Pott 8v0. Cloth,
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' A charming little book ; as full of sound
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THE ENGLISH LAKES. Illustrated by
E. H. NEW. Pott 8v0. Cloth, 4*. ; leather,
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Miss M. Brotlrick and Miss Anderson
Morton. A CONCISE HANDBOOK
OF EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY.
With many Illustrations. CrownSvo. %s.6d.

E. W. Brooks. See F. J. Hamilton.

C. L. Brownell. THE HEART OF
JAPAN. Illustrated. Crown 8vo. 6s.

'These lively pages are full of portraits
from the life. ' — Morning Post.

GENERAL LITERATURE

ii

' It is the work of one who has lived in
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'A more readable and interesting book
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Robert Browning. SELECTIONS
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O. Browning, M.A. A SHORT HISTORY
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VOL. 1. 1250-1409. — Guelphs and Ghibellines.
VOL. ii. _i409-i53o.— The Age of the Con-
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J. Buchan. See Isaak Walton.

Miss Bulley. See Lady Dilke.

John Bunyan. THE PILGRIM'S PRO-
GRESS. Edited, with an Introduction,
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tions by R. ANNING BELL. Cr. 8vo. 6s.
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Educational Times.

G. J. Bnrch, M.A., F.R.S. A MANUAL
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Crown 8vo. Part I. is. 6J.

PART II. — FICTION

Marie Corelli's Novels.

Crown Svo.

A ROMANCE OF TWO WORLDS.

Twenty-Third Edition.
VENDETTA. Nineteenth Edition.
THELMA. Twenty-Eighth Edition.
ARDATH: THE STORY OF A DEAD

SELF. Fourteenth Edition.
THE SOUL OF LILITH. Eleventh Edit.
WORMWOOD. Twelfth Edition.
BARABBAS: A DREAM OF THE

6s. each.

WORLD'S TRAGEDY. Thirty-Eighth
Edition.

' The tender reverence of the treatment
and the imaginative beauty of the writing
have reconciled us to the daring of the con-
ception. This "Dream of the World's
Tragedy" is a lofty and not inadequate
paraphrase of the supreme climax of the
inspired narrative.' — Dublin Review.

MESSRS. METHUEN'S CATALOGUE

THE SORROWS OF SATAN. Forty-
Sixth Edition.

'A very powerful piece of work. . . .
The conception is magnificent, and is likely
to win an abiding place within the memory
of man. . . . The author has immense com-
mand of language, and a limitless audacity.
. . . This interesting and remarkable romance
will live long after much of the ephemeral
literature of the day is forgotten. ... A
literary phenomenon . . . novel, and even
sublime.— W. T. STEAD in the Review
of Reviews.

THE MASTER CHRISTIAN.

[i6$tk Thousand.

1 It cannot be denied that " The Master
Christian" is a powerful book ; that it is one
likely to raise uncomfortable questions in
all but the most self-satisfied readers, and
that it strikes at the root of the failure of
the Churches — the decay of faith — in a
manner which shows the inevitable disaster
heaping up ... The good Cardinal Bonpr6
is a beautiful figure, fit to stand beside the
good Bishop in " Les Mis&rables." It is a

book with a serious purpose expressed with
absolute unconventionality and passion . . .
And this is to say it is a book worth read-
ing.'— Examiner.

TEMPORAL POWER: A STUDY IN
SUPREMACY.

[150^ Thousand.

' It is impossible to read such a work as
" Temporal Power " without becoming con-
vinced that the story is intended to convey
certain criticisms on the ways of the world
and certain suggestions for the betterment
of humanity. . . . The chief characteristics
of the book are an attack on conventional
prejudices and manners and on certain
practices attributed to the Roman Church
(the policy of M. Combes makes parts of the
novel specially up to date), and the pro-
pounding of theories for the improvement
of the social and political systems. ... If
the chief intention of the book was to hold
the mirror up to shams, injustice, dishonesty,
cruelty, and neglect of conscience, nothing
but praise can be given to that intention.' —
Morning Post.

THE GOD IN THE CAR. Ninth Edition.
' A very remarkable book, deserving of
critical analysis impossible within our limit ;
brilliant, but not superficial ; well con-
sidered, but not elaborated ; constructed
with the proverbial art that conceals, but
yet allows itself to be enjoyed by readers
to whom fine literary method is a keen
pleasure.'- The World.

A CHANGE OF AIR. Sixth Edition.

'A graceful, vivacious comedy, true to
human nature. The characters are traced
with a masterly hand.1 — Times.

A MAN OF MARK. Fifth Edition.

'Of all Mr. Hope's books, "A Man of
Mark" is the one which best compares with
"The Prisoner of Zenda." '—National Ob-
server.

THE CHRONICLES OF COUNT
ANTONIO. Fifth Edition.

'It is a perfectly enchanting story of love
and chivalry, and pure romance. The
Count is the most constant, desperate, and

Anthony Hope's Novels.

Crown 8vo. 6s. each.

modest and tender

of lovers, a peerless
gentleman, an intrepid fighter, a faithful
friend, and a magnanimous foe.' — Guardian.
PHROSO. Illustrated by H. R. MILLAR.
Sixth Edition.

' The tale is thoroughly fresh, quick with
vitality, stirring the blood.1— St. James s
Gazette.

SIMON DALE. Illustrated. Sixth Edition.
'There is searching analysis of human
nature, with a most ingeniously constructed
plot. Mr. Hope has drawn the contrasts
of his women with marvellous subtlety and
d elicacy. ' — Times.

THE KING'S MIRROR. Fourth Edition.
' In elegance, delicacy, and tact it ranks
with the best of his novels, while in the wide
range of its portraiture and the subtilty
of its analysis it surpasses all his earlier
ventures. ' — Spectator.
QUISANTE. Third Edition.

' The book is notable for a very high liter-
ary quality, and an impress of power and
mastery on every page.' — Daily Chronicle.

W. W. Jacobs' Novels.

Crown Quo.

MANY CARGOES. Twenty-Sixth Edition.
SEA URCHINS. Ninth Edition.
A MASTER OF CRAFT. Illustrated.
Fifth Edition.

'Can be unreservedly recommended to
all who have not lost their appetite for
wholesome laughter.' — Spectator.

'The best humorous book published for
many a day.' — Black and White.

Illustrated. Fourth

$s. 6d. each.

LIGHT FREIGHTS.

Edition.

' His wit and humour are perfectly irresis-
tible. Mr. Jacobs writes of skippers, and
mates, and seamen, and his crew are the
jolliest lot that ever sailed. '—Daily News.

' Laughter in every page.' — Daily Mail.

FICTION

33

COLONEL ENDERBY'S WIFE.
Edition.

A COUNSEL OF PERFECTION. New
Edition.

LITTLE PETER. Second Edition. y. 6d.

THE WAGES OF SIN. Thirteenth Edition.

THE CARISSIMA. Fourth Edition.

THE GATELESS BARRIER. Fourth
Edition.

' In " The Gateless Barrier" it is at once
evident that, whilst Lucas Malet has pre-
served her birthright of originality, the
artistry, the actual writing, is above even
the high level of the books that were born

Lucas Malet's Novels.

Crown Sz/0. 6s. each.

Third

before.'— Westminster Gazette.

THE HISTORY OF SIR RICHARD
CALMADY. Seventh Edition. A Limited
Edition in Two Volumes. Crown "$>vo. izs.

'A picture finely and amply conceived.
In the strength and insight in which the
story has been conceived, in the wealth of
fancy and reflection bestowed upon its
execution, and in the moving sincerity of its
pathos throughout, "Sir Richard Calmady"
must rank as the great novel of a great
writer. ' — Literature.

1 The ripest fruit of Lucas Malet's genius.
A picture of maternal love by turns tender
and terrible.' — Spectator.

'A remarkably fine book, with a noble
motive and a sound conclusion.' — Pilot.

PIERRE AND HIS PEOPLE.
tion.

'Stories happily conceived and finely ex-
ecuted. There is strength and genius in
Mr. Parker's style.'— Daily Telegraph.
MRS. FALCHION. Fourth Edition.
' A splendid study of character. ' —

Athenceum.
THE TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE.

Second Edition.

THE TRAIL OF THE SWORD. Illus-
trated. Seventh Edition.

'A rousing and dramatic tale. A book
like this is a joy inexpressible.' —

Daily Chronicle.

WHEN VALMOND CAME TO PONTIAC:
The Story of a Lost Napoleon. Fifth
Edition.

_ 'Here we find romance — real, breathing,
living romance. The character of Valmond
is drawn unerringly. '— Pall Mall Gazette.

Gilbert Parker's Novels.

Croivn $>vo. 6s. each.

Fifth Edi-

AN ADVENTURER OF THE NORTH :
The Last Adventures of 'Pretty Pierre.'
Second Edition.

' The present book is full of fine and mov-
ing stones of the great North.' — Glasgow
Herald.

THE SEATS OF THE MIGHTY. Illus-
trated. Twelfth Edition.

1 Mr. Parker has produced a really fine
historical novel." — Athentcutn.

' A great book.'— Black and White.
THE BATTLE OF THE STRONG: a
Romance of Two Kingdoms. Illustrated.
Fourth Edition.

' Nothing more vigorous or more human
has come from Mr. Gilbert Parker than this
novel. ' — L iterature.

THE POMP OF THE LAVILETTES.
Second Edition, y. 6d.

'Unforced pathos, and a deeper know-
ledge of human nature than he has displayed
before. '—Pall Mall Gazette.

Arthur Morrison's Novels.
Crown %-vo. 6s. each.

TALES OF MEAN STREETS. Fifth
Edition.

' A great book. The author's method is
amazingly effective, and produces a thrilling
sense of reality. The writer lays upon us
a master hand. The book is simply appalling
and irresistible in its interest. It is humorous
also ; without humour it would not make the
mark it is certain to make.'— World.

A CH I LD OF THE JAGO. Fourth Edition.
'The book is a masterpiace.'— Pall Mall
Gazette.

TO LONDON TOWN. Second Edition.

'This is the new Mr. Arthur Morrison,
gracious and tender, sympathetic and
human.'— Daily Telegraph.

CUNNING MURRELL.

'Admirable. . . . Delightful humorous
relief ... a most artistic and satisfactory
achievement. ' — Spectator.
THE HOLE IN THE WALL. Third
Edition.

' A masterpiece of artistic realism. It has
a finality of touch that only a master may
command.' — Daily Chronicle.

'An absolute masterpiece, which any
novelist might be proud to claim.' — Graphic.
/ " The Hole in the Wall" is a masterly
piece of work. His characters are drawn
with amazing skill. Extraordinary power.'
—Daily Telegraph.

34

MESSRS. METHUEN'S CATALOGUE

LYING PROPHETS.
CHILDREN OF THE MIST.
THE HUMAN BOY. With a Frontispiece.
Fourth Edition.

'Mr. Phillpotts knows exactly what
school-boys do, and can lay bare their in-
most thoughts ; likewise he shows an all-
pervading sense of humour.' — Academy.
SONS OF THE MORNING. Second
Edition.

f ' A book of strange power and fascina-
tion. ' — Morning Post.

THE STRIKING HOURS. Second Edition.
1 Tragedy and comedy, pathos and
humour, are blended to a nicety in this
volume.'— World.

( The whole book is redolent of a fresher
and ampler air than breathes in the circum-
scribed life of great towns. ' — Spectator.

Eden Phillpotts' Novels.

Crown Svo. 6s. each.

FANCY FREE.

tion.

Illustrated. Second Edi-

' Of variety and racy humour there is
plenty. ' — Daily Graphic.

THE RIVER. Third Edition.

' "The River" places Mr. Phillpotts in the
front rank of living novelists. ' — Punch.

'Since "Lorna Doone" we have had
nothing so picturesque as this new romance. '
Birmingham Gazette.

' Mr. Phillpotts's new book is a master-
piece which brings him indisputably into
the front rank of English novelists.' — Pall
Mall Gazette.

. ' This great romance of the River Dart.
The finest book Mr. Eden Phillpotts has
written." — Morning Post.

S. Baring-Gould's Novels.

Crown %vo. 6s. each.

ARMINELL. Fifth Edition.

URITH. Fifth Edition.

IN THE ROAR OF THE SEA. Seventh

Edition.
MRS. CURGENVEN OF CURGENVEN.

Fourth Edition.

CHEAP JACK ZITA. Fourth Edition.
THE QUEEN OF LOVE. Fifth Edition.
MARGERY OF QUETHER. Third

Edition.

JACQUETTA. Third Edition.
KITTY ALONE. Fifth Edition.
NOEMI. Illustrated. Fourth Edition.

Third

THE BROOM-SQUIRE. Illustrated.

Fourth Edition.
THE PENNYCOMEQUICKS.

Edition.

DARTMOOR IDYLLS.
GUAVAS THE TINNER. Illustrated.

Second Edition.

BLADYS. Illustrated. Second Edition.
DOMITIA. Illustrated. Second Edition.
PABO THE PRIEST.

WINIFRED. Illustrated. Second Edition.
THE FROBISHERS.
ROYAL GEORGIE. Illustrated.
MISS QUILLET. Illustrated.

IN THE MIDST OF ALARMS.
Edition.

' A book which has abundantly satisfied us
by its capital humour.' — Daily Chronicle.
THE MUTABLE MANY. Second Edition.
' There is much insight in it, and much
excellent humour.' — Daily Chronicle.
THE COUNTESS TEKLA. Third Edition.
' Of these mediaeval romances, which are
now gaining ground "The Countess
Tekla" is the very best we have seen.' — Pall
Mall Gazette.

Robert Barr's Novels.

Crown %vo. 6s. each.

Third

Illustrated. Second

THE STRONG ARM.
Edition.

THE VICTORS.

'Mr. Barr has a rich sense of humour.' —
Onlooker.

' A very convincing study of American
life in its business and political aspects.' —
Pilot.

' Good writing, illuminating sketches of
character, and constant variety of scene and
incident. ' — Times.

F. Anstey, Author of 'Vice Versa. A
BAYARD FROM BENGAL. Illustrated
by BERNARD PARTRIDGE. Third Edition.
Crown t>vo. 3*. 6d.

' A highly amusing story.'—

Pall Mall Gazette.

'A volumeof rollicking irresponsible fun. ' —
Outlook.

' This eminently mirthful narrative." —

Globe.
1 Immensely diverting. ' — Glasgo^v Herald.

Richard Bagot. A ROMAN MYSTERY.

Third Edition. Crown 8v<?. 6s. _

' An admirable story. The plot is sensa-
tional and original, and the book is full of
telling situations." — St, James's Gazette.

FICTION

35

Andrew Balfour. BY STROKE OF

SWORD. Illustrated. Fourth Edition.

Crown 8v0. 6s.

' A recital of thrilling interest, told with

unflagging vigour.' — Globe.

VENGEANCE IS MINE. Illustrated.

Crown 8v0. 6s.

See also Fleur de Lis Novels.
M. C. Balfour. THE FALL OF THE

SPARROW. Crown 8v0. 6s.
S. Baring Gould. See page 34.
Jane Barlow. THE LAND OF THE

SHAMROCK. Crown 8vo. 6s.

FROM THE EAST UNTO THE WEST.

Crown 8z>0. 6s.

THE FOUNDING OF FORTUNES.

Crown 8v0. 6s.

' This interesting and delightful book. Its

author has done nothing better, and it is

scarcely an exaggeration to say that it

would be an injustice to Ireland not to read

it.' — Scotsman.
See also Fleur de Lis Novels.

Robert Barr. See page 34.

J. A. Barry. IN THE GREAT DEEP.

Crown 8r<7. 6s.

George Bartram, Author of ' The People of
Clopton.1 THE THIRTEEN EVEN-
INGS. Crown 8v0. 6s.

Harold Begbie. THE ADVENTURES OF

SIR JOHN SPARROW. Crown 8vo. 6s.
' Mr. Begbie often recalls Stevenson's
manner and makes "Sir John Sparrow"
most diverting writing. Sir John is inspired
with the idea that it is his duty to reform
the world, and launches into the vortex of
faddists. His experiences are traced with
spacious and Rabelaisian humour. Every
character has the salience of a type. Enter-
tainingly and deftly written.1 —

Daily Graphic.

E. F. Benson. DODO : A Detail of the

Day. Crown 8uo. 6s.
THE CAPSINA. Crown 8w. 6s.
See also Fleur de Lis Novels.

Margaret Benson. SUBJECT TO

VANITY. CrcKunZvo. 3*. 6d.

Sir Walter Besant. A FIVE YEARS-
TRYST, and Other Stories. CrownZvo. 6s.

J. Bloundelle Burton, Author of 'The
Clash of Arms.' THE YEAR ONE: A
Page of the French Revolution. Illus-
trated. Crown 8z>0. 6s.
DENOUNCED. Crown 8v0. 6s.
THE CLASH OF ARMS. CrownZvo. 6s.
ACROSS THE SALT SEAS. Crown 8v0.
6s.

SERVANTS OF SIN. Crown Zvo. 6s.
THE FATE OF VALSEC. Crown 8vc.
6s.

' The characters are admirably portrayed.

The book not only arrests and sustains the

attention, but conveys valuable information

in the most pleasant guise.' — Morning Post.

See also Fleur de Lis Novels.

Ada Cambridge, THE DEVASTATORS.

Crown 8vo. 6s. •

PATH AND GOAL. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Bernard Capes, Author of 'The Lake of
Wine.' PLOTS. Crown 8v0. 6s.

'The stories are excellently fanciful and
concentrated and quite worthy of the
author's best work.' — Morning- Leader.

Weatherby Chesney. JOHN TOPP:

PIRATE. Second Edition. CrownZvo. 6s.

THE FOUNDERED GALLEON.

Crown 8vo. 6s.

THE BRANDED PRINCE. Crovm 8vo.

6s.

'Always highly interesting and surpris-
ing.'— Daily Express.

' An ingenious, cleverly-contrived story. ' —
Outlook.

Mrs. W. K. Clifford. A WOMAN ALONE.

Crown 8vo. 3?. 6d.

See also Fleur de Lis Novels.

J. Maclaren Cobban. THE KING OF
ANDAMAN: A Saviour of Society.
Crown 8v0. 6s.

WILT THOU HAVE THIS WOMAN 1
Crown 8v0. 6s.

THE ANGEL OF THE COVENANT.
Crown 8vo. 6s.

E. H. Cooper, Author of ' Mr. Blake of New-
market.' A FOOL'S YEAR. Cronm 8vo. 6s.

Julian Corbett. A BUSINESS IN

GREAT WATERS. Crown 8v0. 6s.

Marie Corelli. See page 31.
L. Cope Cornford. CAPTAIN JACOBUS:
A Romance of the Road. Cr. 8v0. 6s.
See also Fleur de Lis Novels.

Stephen Crane. WOUNDS IN THE

RAIN. Crown 8v0. 6s.
S. R. Crockett, Author of ' The Raiders, 'etc.
LOCH INVAR. Illustrated. Second
Edition. Crown 8v0. 6s.

' Full of gallantry and pathos, of the
clash of arms, and brightened by episodes of
humour and love.' — Westminster Gazette.
THE STANDARD BEARER. Cr. 8v0. 6s.

' Mr. Crockett at his best.' — Literature.

B. ML Croker, Author of ' Peggy of the
Bartons.' ANGEL. Third Edition.
Crown 8v0. 6s.

'An excellent story. Clever pictures of
Anglo-Indian life abound. The heroine is
delightful. ' — Manchester Guardian.
PEGGY OF THE BARTONS. Crown
8v0. 6s.

A STATE SECRET. Crown 87*0. 35. 6d.
Hope Dawlish. A SECRETARY OF
LEGATION. Crown 8vo. 6s.

A. J. Dawson. DANIEL WHYTE. Crown

8vo. 6s.

C. E, Denny. THE ROMANCE OF UP-
FOLD MANOR. Crown %vo. 6s.

Evelyn Dickinson. A VICAR'S WIFE.

Crown 8vo. 6s.

THE SIN OF ANGELS. Crown 8vo.
s. 6J.

MESSRS. METHUEN'S CATALOGUE

Harris Dickson. THE BLACK WOLF'S

BREED. Illustrated. Second Edition.

Crown 8vo. 6s.
A. Conan Doyle, Author of 'Sherlock

Holmes,' 'The White Company," etc.

ROUND THE RED LAMP. Eighth

Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s.
( The book is far and away the best view

that has been vouchsafed us behind the

scenes of the consulting-room.' — Illustrated

London News.

Sara Jeannette Duncan (Mrs. Everard

Cotes), Author of 'A Voyage of Consola-
tion.1 THOSE DELIGHTFUL
AMERICANS. Illustrated. Third Edi-
tion, Crown 8vo. 6s.

1 A rattling picture of American life,
bright and good-tempered throughout.' —
Scotsman.

THE PATH OF A STAR. Illustrated.
Second Edition. Crown Quo, 6s.

See also Fleur de Lis Novels.
C. F. Embree. A HEART OF FLAME.
Crown 8vo. 6s.

G. Manville Fenn. AN ELECTRIC

SPARK. Crown 8v0. 6s.
ELI'S CHILDREN. Crown 8v0. 2S.6d.
A DOUBLE KNOT. Crown 8vo. ss. 6d.
See also Fleur de Lis Novels.

J. H. Findlater. THE GREEN GRAVES
OF BALGOWRIE. Fourth Edition
Crown 8vo. 6s.

1 A powerful and vivid story.' — Standard.

'A beautiful story, sad and strange as
truth itself.' — Vanity Fair.

' A singularly original, clever, and beauti-
ful story.' — Guardian.
A DAUGHTER OF STRIFE. Crown
8vo. 6s.

See also Fleur de Lis Novels.

Mary Findlater. OVER THE HILLS.

Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s.
BETTY MUSGRAVE. Second Edition.
Crown 8vo. 6s.

A NARROW WAY. Third Edition.
Crown 8v0. 6s.

J. s. Fletcher. THE BUILDERS. Crown

8v0. 6s.

See also Fleur de Lis Novels.
M. E. Francis. MISS ERIN. Second

Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Tom Gallon, Author of 'Kiddy.' RICK-

ERBY'S FOLLY. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Mary Gaunt. DEADMAN'S. Crown ^vo.

THE MOVING FINGER. Crown 8v0.
3S. 6d.

See also Fleur de Lis Novels.
Dorothea Gerard, Author of ' Lady Baby. '
THE MILLION. Crown 8v0. 6s.
THE CONQUEST OF LONDON.
Second1 Edition. Crown 8v0. 6s.
THE SUPREME CRIME. Cr. 8vo. 6s.
HOLY MATRIMONY. Second Edition.
Crown 8v0. 6r.

' The love story which it enshrines is a

very pretty and tender one.' — Morning-
Leader.

' Distinctly interesting. ' — A themeum.
THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED.
Crown 8vo. 6s.

R. Murray GUchrist. WILLOWBRAKE.

Crown 8vo. 6s.
Algernon Gissing. THE KEYS OF THE

HOUSE. Crown 8z'0. 6s.
George GiSSing, Author of 'Demos,' ' In the
Year of Jubilee,' etc. THE TOWN

TRAVELLER. Second Edition. Crown

8vo. 6s.

THE CROWN OF LIFE. CrownBva. 6s.
Ernest GlanviUe. THE KLOOF BRIDE.

Crown 8vo. is. 6d.

THE LOST REGIMENT. Crown 8vo.

3*. 6d.

THE DESPATCH RIDER Crown 8vo.

3*. 6d.

THE INCA'S TREASURE. Illustrated.

Crown 8vo. 3$. 6d.

' No lack of exciting incident.' — Scotsman.

' Most thrilling and exciting.' —

Glasgow Herald.

Charles Gleig. BUNTER-S CRUISE.

Illustrated. Crown 8vo. js. 6d.
Julien Gordon. MRS. CLYDE. Crown
8vo. 6s.

'A clever picture of many phases of
feminine and American life.' —

Daily Express.

' Full of vivacity, with many excruciatingly
clever and entertaining scenes.' — Pilot.
S. Gordon. A HANDFUL OF EXOTICS.

Crown 8vo. 3$. 6d.

C. F. GOBS. THE REDEMPTION OF
DAVID CORSON. Third Edition.
Crown 8vo. 6s.

E. M'Queen Gray. ELSA. Crown 8vo. 6s.

MY STEWARDSHIP. CrovmBvo. 2s.6d.

A. G. Hales. JAIR THE APOSTATE.

Illustrated. Crown 8vo. 6s.

1 An extraordinarily vivid story.' — World.

'Mr. Hales has a vivid pen, and the

scenes are described with vigour and colour. ' —

Morning- Post.

Lord Ernest Hamilton. MARY HAMIL-
TON. Third Edition. Crown 8z>0. 6s.

Mrs. Burton Harrison. A PRINCESS
OF THE HILLS. Illustrated. Crown 8vo.
6s.

'Vigorous, swift, exciting.' — Outlook.

' A singularly pleasantstoryof the Tyrol.' —
Morning Post.

Robert Hichens, Author of 'Flames,'
etc. THE PROPHET OF BERKELEY
SQUARE. Second Edition. Crown 8vo.
6s.

' One continuous sparkle. Mr. Hichens
is witty, satirical, caustic, irresistibly hum-
orous. ' — Birmingham Gazette.
TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. Second
Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s.
FELIX. Fourth Edition. Crmvn 8vo. 6s.

' Firm in texture, sane, sincere, and

FICTION

37

natural. "Felix" is a clever book, and in
many respects a true one. ' —Daily Chronicle.

'A really powerful book.' —

Morning Leader.

'The story is related with unflagging
spirit.' — World.

' " Felix" will undoubtedly add to a con-
siderable reputation.' — Daily Mail.

See also Fleur de Lis Novels.
John Oliver HobbeS, Author of 'Robert
Orange.' THE SERIOUS WOOING.
Crown 8v0. 6s.

' Mrs. Craigie is as brilliant as she ever
has been ; her characters are all illuminated
with sparkling gems of description, and the
conversation scintillates with an almost
bewildering blaze.' — Atheneeunt.

Anthony Hope. See page 32.

I. Hooper. THE SINGER OF MARLY.

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Violet Hunt. THE HUMAN IN-
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C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, Author of 'Captain

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MR. HORROCKS, PURSER. Crown

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W. W. Jacobs. See page 32.
Henry James, Author of 'What Maisie

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THE SOFT SIDE. Second Edition.

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3*. 64.

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' Wholly delightful ; a very beautiful and
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THE TWICKENHAM PEERAGE.
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' It is a long time since my Baronite read
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Helen Mathers, Author of 'Comin' thro'
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'A vigorously written story, full of clever
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Arthur Morrison. See page 33.

MESSRS. METHUEN'S CATALOGUE

W. E. Norris. THE CREDIT OF THE
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THE EMBARRASSING ORPHAN.
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HIS GRACE. Third Edition. Crown
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A DEPLORABLE AFFAIR. Crown 8vo.
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Mrs. Oliphant. THE TWO MARYS.

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I CROWN THEE KING. With Illus-
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' A romance of high adventure, of love and
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Mrs. F. E. Penny. A FOREST OFFICER.

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Every story is an accomplished romance
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' The story is an interesting and animated

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' A simple, delicate bit of work, which

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A SON OF THE STATE. Crown 8vo.

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W. Satchel!. THE LAND OF THE LOST.
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A VENDETTA OF THE DESERT.
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THE MASTER OF BEECHWOOD.

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BARBARA'S MONEY. Second Edition.

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' Full of life and incident, and Barbara is
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W. F. Shannon. THE MESS DECK.

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JIM TWELVES. Second Edition. Crown

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FICTION

39

' Full of quaint humour, wise saws, and
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R. N. Stephens. A GENTLEMAN

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CHRISTALLA- Crown 8vo. 6s.
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AND THE NEXT. Third Edition.

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SORDON. Crown 8vo. 6s.
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Paul Waineman. A HEROINE FROM

FINLAND. Crown 8vo. 6s.

' A lovely tale.' — Manchester Guardian.

' A vivid picture of pastoral life in a
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Victor Waite. CROSS TRAILS. Crown

H. B? Marriott Watson. THE SKIRTS

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THE PLATTNER STORY AND OTHERS.

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THE SEA LADY. Crown 8vo. 6s.

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WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES.
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Stanley Weyman, Author of ' A Gentleman
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X.L. AUT DIABOLUS AUT NIHIL.
I Crown 8v0. 2s- &?•

Ube ffleur fce 3Lfs Bevels

Crown 8vo. 3*. 6d.

MESSRS. METHUEN are now publishing a cheaper issue of some of their popular
Novels in a new and most charming style of binding.

Andrew Balfour.

TO ARMS!

Jane Barlow.

A CREEL OF IRISH STORIES.

E. F. Benson.

THE VINTAGE.

J. Bloundelle-Burton.
IN THE DAY OF ADVERSITY.

Mrs. Caffyn (Iota).

ANN-E MAULEVERER.

Mrs. W. K Cliftord.
A FLASH OF SUMMER.

L. Cope Cornford.
SONS OF ADVERSITY.

Menie Muriel Dowie.
THE CROOK OF THE BOUGH.

Mrs. Dudeney.
THE THIRD FLOOR.

Sara Jeannette Duncan.

A VOYAGE OF CONSOLATION.

G. ManviUe Fenn.

THE STAR GAZERS.

Jane H. Findlater.

RACHEL.

Jane H. and Mary Findlater.

TALES THAT ARE TOLD.

J. S. Fletcher.

THE PATHS OF THE PRUDENT.

Mary Gaunt.

KIRKHAM'S FIND.

Robert Hichens.

BYEWAYS.

MESSRS. METHUEN'S CATALOGUE

Emily Lawless.
HURRISH.
MAELCHO.

W. E. Norris.

MATTHEW AUSTIN.

Mrs. Oliphant.

SIR ROBERT'S FORTUNE.

Mary A. Owen.

THE DAUGHTER OF ALOUETTE.

Mary L. Tendered.

AN ENGLISHMAN.

Morley Roberts.
THE PLUNDERERS.

R. N. Stephens.
AN ENEMY TO THE KING.

Mrs. Walford.
SUCCESSORS TO THE TITLE.

Percy White.
A PASSIONATE PILGRIM.

tor

Crown 8z/0.

. 6d.

THE ICELANDER'S SWORD. By s. Baring-Gould.
Two LITTLE CHILDREN AND CHING. By Edith E.

Cuthell.

TODDLEBEN'S HERO. By M. M. Blake.
ONLY A GUARD-ROOM DOG. By Edith E. Cuthell.
THE DOCTOR OF THE JULIET. By Harry Colling-

wood.
MASTER ROCKAFELLAR'S VOYAGE. By W. Clark

Russell.

£be

SYD BELTON : Or, the Boy who would not go to Sea

By G. Manville Perm.

THE RED GRANGE. By Mrs. Molesworth.
THE SECRET OF MADAME DE MONLUC. By the

Author of Mdle. Mori.'
DUMPS. By Mrs. Parr.
A GIRL OF THE PEOPLE. By L. T. Meade.
HEPSY GIPSY. By L. T. Meade. 2s. f>d.

THE HONOURABLE Miss. By L. T. Meade.

MESSRS. METHUEN are issuing under the above general title a Monthly Series
of Novels by popular authors at thejDrice of Sixpence. Each number is as long as
the average Six Shilling Novel,
follows : —

The first numbers of ' THE NOVELIST ' are as

I. DEAD MEN TELL NO; TALES. By E. w.

Hornung.

II. JENNIE BAXTER, JOURNALIST. By Robert
Barr.

III. THE INCA'S TREASURE. By Ernest Glanville.

IV. A SON OF THE STATE. By W. Pett Ridge.
V. FURZE BLOOM. By S. Baring-Gould.

VI. BUNTER'S CRUISE. By C. Gleig.

VII. THE GAY DECEIVERS. By Arthur Moore.
VIII. PRISONERS OF WAR. By A. Boyson Weekes.
IX. Out of print.
X. VELDT AND LAAGER: Tales of the Transvaal.

By E. S. Valentine.
XL THE NIGGER KNIGHTS. By F. Norreys

Connel.
XII. A MARRIAGE AT SEA. By w. Clark Russell.

XIII. THE POMP OF THE LAVILETTES. By

Gilbert Parker.

XIV. A MAN OF MARK. By Anthony Hope.
XV. THE CARISSIMA. By Lucas Malet.

XVI. THE LADY'S WALK. By Mrs. Oliphant.
XVII. DERRICK VAUGHAN. By Edna Lyall.
XVIII. IN THE MIDST OF ALARMS. By Robert
Barr.

.flfcetbuen's

THE MATABELE CAMPAIGN. By Major-General

Baden-Powell.

THE DOWNFALL OF PREMPEH. By Major-General
Baden-Powell.

MY DANISH SWEETHEART. By w. Clark Russell.

IN THE ROAR OF THE SEA. By S. Baring-
Gould.

PEGGY OF THE BARTONS. By B. M. Croker.

THE GREEN GRAVES OF BALGOWRIE. By Jane
H. Findlater.

THE STOLEN BACILLUS. By H. G. Wells.

MATTHEW AUSTIN. By W. E. Norris.

THE CONQUEST OF LONDON. By Dorothea
Gerard.

A VOYAGE OF CONSOLATION. By Sara J. Duncan.

THE MUTABLE MANY. By Robert Barr.

BEN HUR. By General Lew Wallace.

SIR ROBERT'S FORTUNE. By Mrs. Oliphant.

XIX. HIS GRACE. By W. E. Norris.
XX. DODO. By E. F. Benson.
XXI. CHEAP JACK ZITA. By S. Baring-Gould.
XXII. WHEN VALMOND CAME 7-0 PONTIAC. By
Gilbert Parker.

XXIII. THE HUMAN BOY. By Eden Phillpotts.

XXIV. THE CHRONICLES OF COUNT ANTONIO.

By Anthony Hope.
XXV. BY STROKE OF SWORD. By Andrew

Balfour.

XXVI. KITTY ALONE. By S. Baring-Gould.
XXVII. GILES INGILBY. By W. E. Norris.
XXVIII. URITH. By S. Baring-Gould.
XXIX. THE TOWN TRAVELLER. By George

Gissing.

XXX. MR. SMITH. By Mrs. Walford.
XXXI. A CHANGE OF AIR. By Anthony Hope.
XXXII. THE KLOOF BRIDE. By Ernest Glanville

XXXIII. ANGEL. By B. M. Croker.

XXXIV. A COUNSEL OF PERFECTION. By Lucas

Malet.
XXXV. THE BABY'S GRANDMOTHER. By Mrs.

L. B. Walford.
XXXVI. THE COUNTESS TEKLA. By Robert Barr

OLibrarg

THE FAIR GOD. By General Lew Wallace.

CLARISSA FURIOSA. By W. E. Norris.

CRANFORD. By Mrs. Gaskell.

NOEMI. By S. Baring-Gould.

THE THRONE OF DAVID. By J. H. Ingr.iham.

ACROSS THE SALT SEAS. By J. Bloundelle

Burton.

THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. By George Eliot.
PETER SIMPLE. By Captain Marryat.
MARY BARTON. By Mrs. Gaskell.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. By Jane Austen.
NORTH AND SOUTH. By Mrs. Gaskell.
JACOB FAITHFUL. By Captain Marryat.
SHIRLEY. By Charlotte Bronte.
FAIRY TALES RE- TOLD. By S. Baring Gould.
THE TRUE HISTORY OF JOSHUA DAVIDSON. By

Mrs. Lynn Linton.

9 O

it if