tory." He paused, and with
half-closed eyes studied the effect of his announcement.

"You mean--?" asked Burnaby.

"Exactly." Sir John spoke with a certain cool eagerness. "He sat up
before all those people and told the inner secrets of his life; and of
them all I was the only one who suspected the truth. Of course, he was
comparatively safe, none of them knew him well except myself, but think
of it! The bravado--the audacity! Rather magnificent, wasn't it?" He
sank back once more in his chair.

Mrs. Malcolm agreed. "Yes," she said. "Magnificent and insulting."

Sir John smiled. "My dear lady," he asked, "doesn't life consist largely
of insults from the strong to the weak?"

"And were all these people so weak, then?"

"No, in their own way they were fairly important, I suppose, but
compared to Morton they were weak--very weak--Ah, yes! I like this
custom of smoking at table. Thanks!" He selected a cigarette
deliberately, and stooped toward the proffered match. The flame
illumined the swarthy curve of his beard and the heavy lines of his dark
face. "You see," he began, straightening up in his chair, "the whole
thing--that part of it, and the part I'm to tell--is really, if you
choose, an allegory of strength, of strength and weakness. On the one
side Morton--there's strength, sheer, undiluted power, the thing that
runs the world; and on the other Bewsher, the ordinary man, with all his
mixed-up ideas of right and wrong and the impossible, confused thing he
calls a 'code'--Bewsher, and later on the girl. She too is part of the
allegory. She represents--what shall I say? A composite portrait of the
ordinary young woman? Religion, I suppose. Worldly religion. The
religion of most of my good friends in England. A vague but none the
less passionate belief in a heaven populated by ladies and gentlemen who
dine out with a God who resembles royalty. And coupled with this
religion the girl had, of course, as have most of her class, a very
distinct sense of her own importance in the world; not that
exactly--personally she was over-modest; a sense rather of her
importance as a unit of an important family, and a deep-rooted
conviction of the fundamental necessity of unimportant things: parties,
and class-worship, and the whole jumbled-up order as it is. The usual
young woman, that is, if you lay aside her unusual beauty. And, you see,
people like Bewsher and the girl haven't much chance against a man like
Morton, have they? D