e could buy them, as a carpenter buys tools. His
attitude was that of the genuine bourgeois towards the artist:
possessive, incurious, and contemptuous. Dayson, however, ignored George
Cannon's attitude, perhaps did not even perceive what it was. He gloried
in his performance. Accustomed to dictate extempore speeches on any
subject whatever to his shorthand pupils, he was quite at his ease,
quite master of his faculties, and self-satisfaction seemed to stand out
on his brow like genial sweat while the banal phrases poured glibly from
the cavern behind his jagged teeth; and each phrase was a perfect model
of provincial journalese. George Cannon had to sit and listen,--to
approve, or at worst to make tentative suggestions.

The first phrase which penetrated through the outer brain of the
shorthand writer to the secret fastness where Hilda sat in judgment on
the world was this:

"The campaign of vulgar vilification inaugurated yesterday by our
contemporary _The Staffordshire Signal_ against our esteemed
fellow-townsman Mr. Richard Enville..."

This phrase came soon after such phrases as "Our first bow to the
public"... "Our solemn and bounden duty to the district which it is our
highest ambition to serve..." etc. Phrases which had already occurred in
the leading article dictated on the previous day.

Hilda soon comprehended that in twenty-four hours Mr. Enville, from
being an unscrupulous speculator who had used his official position to
make illicit profits out of the sale of land to the town for town
improvements, had become the very mirror of honesty and high fidelity to
the noblest traditions of local government. Without understanding the
situation, and before even she had formulated to herself any criticism
of the persons concerned, she felt suddenly sick. She dared not look at
George Cannon, but once when she raised her head to await the flow of a
period that had been arrested at a laudatory superlative, she caught
Dayson winking coarsely at him. She hated Dayson for that; George Cannon
might wink at Dayson (though she regretted the condescending
familiarity), but Dayson had no right to presume to wink at George
Cannon. She hoped that Mr. Cannon had silently snubbed him.

As the article proceeded there arose a crying from the Square below. A
_Signal_ boy, one of the earliest to break the silent habit of the
Square, was bawling a fresh edition of Arthur Dayson's contemporary, and
across the web of the dictator's v