lance, and moved restlessly to where
the passage to the other room appeared to offer his nerves an issue; all
moreover to the effect of suggesting to us that something still other
than what he had said might meanwhile work in him behind and beneath
that quantity. The spectators of his trouble watched him, for the time,
in uncertainty and with a mute but associated comment on the perversity
and oddity he had so suddenly developed; Lord John giving a shrug of
almost bored despair and Lady Sandgate signalling caution and tact for
their action by a finger flourished to her lips, and in fact at once
proceeding to apply these arts. The subject of her attention had still
remained as in worried thought; he had even mechanically taken up a book
from a table--which he then, after an absent glance at it, tossed down.

"You're so detached from reality, you adorable dreamer," she began--"and
unless you stick to _that_ you might as well have done nothing. What
you call the pedantry and priggishness and all the rest of it is exactly
what poor Breckenridge asked almost on his knees, wonderful man, to
be _allowed_ to pay you for; since even if the meddlers and chatterers
haven't settled anything for those who know--though which of the elect
themselves after all _does_ seem to know?--it's a great service rendered
him to have started such a hare to run!"

Lord John took freedom to throw off very much the same idea. "Certainly
his connection with the whole question and agitation makes no end for
his glory."

It didn't, that remark, bring their friend back to him, but it at least
made his indifference flash with derision. "His 'glory'--Mr. Bender's
glory? Why, they quite universally loathe him--judging by the stuff they
print!"

"Oh, here--as a corrupter of our morals and a promoter of our decay,
even though so many are flat on their faces to him--yes! But it's
another affair over there where the eagle screams like a thousand
steam-whistles and the newspapers flap like the leaves of the forest:
_there_ he'll be, if you'll only let him, the biggest thing going; since
sound, in that air, seems to mean size, and size to be all that counts.
If he said of the thing, as you recognise," Lord John went on, "'It's
going to be a Mantovano,' why you can bet your life that it _is_--that
it has _got_ to be some kind of a one."

His fellow-guest, at this, drew nearer again, irritated, you would
have been sure, by the unconscious infelicity of the pa