Henry James

The Papers

(1903)

     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 professional, far afield from the Strand, but the curiosity with which they came back was mostly greater than any other, the Strand being for them, with its ampler alternative Fleet Street, overwhelmingly the Papers, and the Papers being, at a rough guess, all the furniture of their consciousness.
     The Daily Press played for them the part played by the embowered 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 journalistic, 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 morning, 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 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 thoroughfare, the club, the suburban train and the humble home; though it must honestly be added that petticoats were not of her essence. This was one of the reasons, in an age of ‘emancipations’, of her 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 be – her superiority to sex. Nature, constitution, accident, whatever we happen to call it, had relieved her of this care; the struggle for life, the competition with men, the taste of the day, the fashion of the hour had made her superior, or had at any rate made her indifferent, and she had no difficulty in remaining so. The thing was therefore, with the aid of an extreme general flatness of person, directness of step and simplicity of motive, quietly enough done, without a grace, a weak inconsequence, a stray reminder to interfere with the success; and it is not too much to say that the success – by which I mean the plainness of the type – would probably never have struck you as so great as at the moments of our young lady’s chance comradeship with Howard Bight. For the young man, though his personal signs had not, like his friend’s, especially the effect of one of the stages of an evolution, might have been noted as not so fiercely or so freshly a male as to distance Maud in the show.
     She presented him in truth, while they sat together, as comparatively girlish. She fell naturally into gestures, tones, expressions, 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, judgement 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 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, thankless, expressionless face, a countenance equipped with eyes, ears, an uplifted nose and a gaping mouth – all convenient if they could only be reached. The ladder groaned meanwhile, swayed and shook with the weight of the close-pressed climbers, tier upon tier, occupying the upper, the middle, the nethermost rounds and quite preventing, for young persons placed as our young friends were placed, any view of the summit. It was meanwhile moreover only Howard 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 distinctions by that time so blurred in her that she might as easily have been christened John. She had recognised truly, most of all, that if they came to talk they both were nowhere; yet this was compatible with her insisting that Howard had as yet comparatively had the luck. When he wrote to people they consented, or at least they answered; 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 established; a celebrity of the day enjoying, uncontested, a glass case all to himself, more conspicuous than any other, before which the arrested visitor might rebound from surprised recognition. Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., stood forth there as large as life, owing indeed his particular place to the shade of direct acquaintance with him that Howard Bight could boast, yet with his eminent presence in such a collection but too generally and notoriously justified. He was universal and ubiquitous, commemorated, 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 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 the undoings, the intentions and retractations of Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., were in their degree a part of that solemnity. The Papers, taken together the glory of the age, were, though superficially 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 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 meaning, the original artless error with the subsequent earnest truth – allowing in fine for the statement still to come that the visit would have to be relinquished in consequence of the visitor’s other 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 altogether 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 confirmed in that conviction. It isn’t only that if one holds out the mere tip of the perch they jump at it like starving fish; it is that they leap straight out of the water themselves, leap in their thousands 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 carpe? It suggests the eyes that 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 way 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, destitute 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 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 everything, over everything, under everything, that has taken place for the last twenty years. He’s always present, and, though he never makes a speech, he never fails to get alluded to in the speeches of others. That’s doing it cheaper than 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 can’t 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. “Something perhaps could be done with it – only it would take imagination.”
     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 himself may. That’s what I meant just now,” she explained, “by my having a creepy sense of what may happen for him. It has 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.
     “I see him having for some reason, very imperative, to seek retirement, lie low, to hide, in fact, like a man ‘wanted’, but pursued all the while by the lurid glare that he has himself so started and kept up, and at last literally devoured (‘like Frankenstein’, of course!) by the monster he has created.”
     “I say, you have got it!” – and the young man flushed, visibly, artistically, with the recognition of 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 it for us. I mean for him to want us to help him somehow to get out.”
     “Oh, ‘us’!” the girl mournfully sighed.
     “Why not, when he comes to us to get in?”
     Maud Blandy stared. “Do you mean to you 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 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. I 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?”
     “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.”

     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 the rosy, glossy, kindly, but discernibly troubled personage whom she had waited on ‘at home’ at her own suggestion – promptly welcomed – and the sympathetic element in whose ‘personality’, the Chippendale, the 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 make of Kodak, she had touched upon his favourite manner of spending his Sundays and had extorted from him the shy confession that he preferred after all the novel of adventure to the novel of subtlety. Her embarrassment was 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 behalf, for money, if she could get it, about his luck. She hadn’t in fact got money, hadn’t so much as managed to work in her stuff anywhere; a practical comment sharp enough on her having 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, that he did love praise; for just the right way he was sure he could trust to her taste.
     She had promised to send him the interview in proof, but she had been able, after all, to send it but in type-copy. If she, after all, had had a flat adorned – as to the drawing-room alone – with eighty-three 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; fortunately, 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 business; hurrying from one appointment to another he might have time but for a single act. He had seen each of the others by itself, and the way he now crammed in the third, after having previously snatched the fourth, brought home again to the girl that he was leading the real life. Her own was a dull imitation of it. Yet it happened at the same time that before the curtain rose again he had, with a “Who’s your fat friend?” professed to have caught 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 I 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? 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.”
     “Then why isn’t it the old game?”
     “Because it isn’t. He wants to gather from me, as I have served him before, if something can’t be done. On a souvent besoin d’un plus petit que soi. Keep quiet, and we shall see something.”
     This was very well; only his manner visibly had for 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 of 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.”
     “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 impression, so generally prevailing, that Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet has expressed an objection to flowers in connection with the late Hon. Lady Beadel-Muffet’s obsequies, rests on a misapprehension of Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet’s markedly individual views. The floral tributes already delivered in Queen’s Gate Gardens, and remarkable for number and variety, have been a 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 ‘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 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.”
     “You do,” Maud declared. “You’ll kill him.”
     He just turned a flushed cheek to her, and she saw that she had touched something that lived in him. “We can,” he consciously smiled, “deal death. And the beauty is that it’s in a perfectly straight way. We can lead them on. But have you ever seen Beadel-Muffet for yourself?” he continued.
     “No. How often, please, need I tell you that I’ve seen nobody and nothing?”
     “Well, if you had you’d understand.”
     “You mean he’s so fetching?”
     “Oh, he’s great. He’s not ‘all’ self-advertisement – or at least he doesn’t seem to be: that’s his pull. But I see, you female humbug,” Bight pursued, “how much you’d like him yourself.”
     “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 matinées 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 herself 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 required something to start with, which has got somehow to be provided. There must have been a noise made, don’t you see? to make him prominent; and in order to remain prominent, he has got to go for his enemies. The hostility to his ply, and all because it’s ‘littery’, we can do nothing without that; but it’s uphill 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 prominence, to thirty-seven ‘press-cutting’ agencies in England and America, and, having done so, you can’t do more than sit at home with your ear on the postman’s knock, looking out for results. There comes in the tragedy – there are no results. Mortimer 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 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 I would do. And it’s what I 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.

     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 the 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 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, and wouldn’t if it hadn’t been for her companion. Her companion was increasingly sardonic – which was the way in which, at best, she now increasingly saw him; he was shameless in acceptance, since, as she knew, as she felt at his side, he had come only, at bottom, to mislead and to mystify. He was, as she wasn’t, on the Papers and of them, and their baffled entertainer knew it without either a hint on the subject from herself or a need, on the young man’s own lips, of the least vulgar allusion. Nothing was so much as named, the whole connection was sunk; they talked about clubs, muffins, afternoon performances, the effect of the Finnish soul upon the appetite, quite as if they had met in society. Nothing could have been less like society – she innocently supposed at least – than the real spirit of their meeting; yet Bight did nothing that he might do to keep the affair within bounds. When looked at by their friend so hard and so hintingly, he only looked back, just as dumbly, but just as intensely and, as might be said, portentously; ever so impenetrably, in fine, and ever so wickedly. He didn’t smile – as if to cheer – the least little bit; which he might be abstaining from on purpose to make his promises solemn: so, as he tried to smile – she couldn’t, it was all too dreadful – she wouldn’t meet her friend’s eyes, but kept looking, heartlessly, at the ‘notes’ of the place, the hats of the ladies, the tints of the rugs, the intenser Chippendale, here and there, of the chairs and tables, of the very guests, of the very waitresses. It had come to her early: “I’ve done him, poor man, at home, and the obvious thing now will be to do him at his club.” But this inspiration plumped against her fate even as an imprisoned insect against the 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 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 Sunday, 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 Sunday, 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 scorching, was in the air for them; it was made sharp, rather abruptly, by a vivid outbreak from Maud. It was very well, she observed, for her friend to be clever at the expense of the general ‘greed’; he saw it in the light of his own jolly luck, and what she saw, as it happened, was nothing but the 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 disappointments. 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 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 to say to them it was your little all?”
     “Not vulgarly – I know how. There are ways of saying it’s ‘important’; and I hint it just enough to see that the importance fetches them no more than 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 instinct the others. But it makes me more tolerant.”
     “More tolerant of what?” her friend asked.
     “Well, of what you described to me. Of what you rail at.”
     “Thank you for me!” Bight laughed.
     “Why not? Don’t you live on it?”
     “Not in such luxury – you surely must see for 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 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 experience has – a lovely tip too.”
     “And what’s that?”
     “I’ve told you before – the tip of pity. I’m so much sorrier for them all – panting and gasping for it like fish out of water – than I am anything else.”
     He wondered. “But I thought that was what just isn’t your experience.”
     “Oh, I mean then,” she said impatiently , “that my tip is from yours. It’s only a different tip. I want to save them.”
     “Well,” the young man replied, and as if the idea had had a meaning for him, “saving them may perhaps work out as a branch. The question is can you be paid for it?”
     “Beadel-Muffet would pay me,” Maud suddenly suggested.
     “Why, that’s just what I’m expecting,” her 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 have first, I recognize, 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 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 introduction 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 familiarity to linger and too little in that of vulgarity to drop. It had had no form, but the mild air kept perhaps thereby the better the taste of it. This was sensibly moreover in what the girl found to reply. “I think, you know, that he’d be no such bad friend. I mean that, with his appetite, there would be something to be done. He doesn’t half hate me.”
     “Ah, my dear,” her friend ejaculated, “don’t, for God’s sake, be low.”
     But she kept it up. “He clings to me. You saw. It’s hideous, the way he’s able to ‘do’ himself.”
     Bight lay quiet, then spoke as with a recall of the Chippendale Club. “Yes, I couldn’t ‘do’ you as he could. But if you don’t bring it off—?”
     “Why then does he cling? Oh, because, all the same, I’m potentially the Papers still. I’m at any rate the nearest he has got to them. And then I’m other things.”
     “I see.”
     “I’m so awfully attractive,” said Maud Blandy. She got up with this and, shaking out her frock, looked at her resting bicycle, looked at the distances possibly still to be gained. Her companion paused, but at last also rose, and by that time she was awaiting him, a little gaunt and still not quite cool, as an illustration of her last remark. He stood there watching her, and she followed this remark up. “I do, you know, really pity him.”
     It had almost a feminine fineness, and their eyes continued to meet. “Oh, you’ll work it!” And the young man went to his machine.

     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 got itself taken before she went to bed; which indeed was what had happened to the extent of her writing, on the spot, a meditated letter. She sat down to it by the light of the guttering candle that awaited her on the dining-room table and in the stale air of family food that only had been – a residuum so at the mercy of mere ventilation that she didn’t so much as peep into a cupboard; after which she had been on the point of nipping over, as she would have said, to drop it into that opposite pillar-box whose vivid maw, opening out through thick London nights, had received so many of her fruitless little ventures. But she had checked herself and waited, waited to be sure, with the morning, that her fancy wouldn’t fade; posting her note in the end, however, with a confident jerk, as soon as she was up. She had, later on, had business, or at least had sought it, among the haunts that she had taught herself to regard as professional; but neither on the Monday nor on either of the days that directly followed had she encountered there the friend whom it would take a difference in more matters than could as yet be dealt with to enable her to regard, with proper assurance or with proper modesty, as a lover. Whatever he was, none the less, it couldn’t otherwise have come to her that it was possible to feel lonely in the Strand. That showed, after all, how thick they must constantly have been – which was perhaps a thing to begin to think of in a new, in a steadier light. But it showed doubtless still more that her companion was probably up to something rather 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 announcements, 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 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 if 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 gentleman’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 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 glimpse, rather fearful, of the subject. It was no joke, the subject, clearly, and her friend had fairly gained age, and he had certainly lost weight, in his recent dealings with it. It struck her even, with everything else, that this was positively the way he would have liked him to show if their union had taken the form they hadn’t reached the point of discussing; wearily coming back to her from the thick of things, wanting to put on his slippers and have his tea, all prepared by her and in their place, and beautifully to be trusted to regale her in his turn. He was excited, disavowedly, and it took more disavowal still after she had opened her budget – which she did, in truth, by saying to him as her first alternative: “What did you do him for, poor Mortimer Marshal? It isn’t that he’s not in the seventh heaven—!”
     “He is in the seventh heaven!” Bight quickly broke in. “He doesn’t want my blood?”
     “Did you do him,” she asked, “that he should want it? It’s splendid how you could – simply on that show.”
     “That show? Why,” said Howard Bight, “that show was an immensity. That show was volumes, stacks, abysses.”
     He said it in such at 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 if 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.”
      “You feel,” he presently asked, “quite differently – so differently that I’ve missed my chance? I don’t care for that serpent, but there’s something else that you don’t tell me.” The young man, detached and a little spent, with his shoulder against the wall and a hand vaguely playing over the knives, forks and spoons, dropped his succession of sentences without an apparent direction. “Something else has come up, and you’re 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 bathroom, the refrigerator, and the machines for stretching his trousers. He has nine, and in constant use.”
     “Nine?” said Bight gravely.
     “Nine.”
     “Nine trousers?”
     “Nine machines. I don’t know how many 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 – 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 everything 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 disappearing. 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 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 themselves. He came to me with it,” the young man presently added. “I didn’t go to him.”
     “And he trusted you,” Maud replied.
     “Well, you see what I have given him – the very flower of my genius. What more do you want? I’m spent, seedy, sore. I’m sick,” Bight declared, “of his beastly funk.”
     Maud’s eyes, in spite of it, were still a little hard. “Is he thoroughly sincere?”
     “Good God, no! How can he be? Only trying it – as a cat, for a jump, tries too smooth a wall. He drops straight back.”
     “Then isn’t his funk real?”
     “As real as he himself is.”
     Maud wondered. “Isn’t his flight—?”
     “That’s what we shall see!”
     “Isn’t,” she continued, “his reason?”
     “Ah,” he laughed out, “there you are again!”
     But she had another thought and was not 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?”
     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 engaged.”
     “She told you so? Then there you are!”
     “It all depends,” Maud went on; “and you don’t know where I am at all. I 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