ate hunger of many months,
apparent in his lean face and shrunken figure. And after all could any
dinner be worth the pain of dressing for it? When at the last moment
he discovered a loose button on his trousers, he felt that there was
no motive, no power on earth that could urge him to the task of
securing it. And when it broke from its thread and fell, and hid
itself under the skirting board in a sort of malignant frenzy, he took
its behaviour as a sign that he would do well to forego that dinner at
Rankin's. He had hardly acquiesced in this decision when reason
reasserted itself and told him that everything depended on that dinner
and that the dinner depended on the button; therefore that in all
God's universe there was nothing so important, so essential to him as
that button. He went down on his knees and dislodged the button with a
penknife, after an agonizing search. He sat feebly on the edge of his
bed, and with many sad, weak blasphemies bowed himself to a miserable,
ignominious struggle. All malign and adverse fortunes seemed to be
concentrated in the rolling, slippery, ungovernable thing.

The final victory was his, such a victory as amounted to a resurgence
of the spiritual will.

CHAPTER LXX

All things seemed to work together to create an evening of
misunderstanding rather than of reconciliation. To begin with he
arrived at the Rankins' half an hour after the time appointed. Rankin
lived in Sussex Square, which seemed to him an interminably long way
off. The adventure with the trouser button, and a certain dizziness
which precluded all swift and decided movement, would have been enough
to make him late, even if he had not miscalculated the distance
between Hyde Park and Bloomsbury.

He had also miscalculated the distance between Rankin the junior
journalist and Rankin the celebrity. Rankin had achieved celebrity in
a way he had not meant. There was a time when even Jewdwine was
outdone by the young men of _The Planet_ in honest contempt for the
taste and judgement of the many; when it had been Rankin's task to
pursue with indefatigable pleasantry the figures of popular renown.
And now he was popular himself. The British public had given to him
its fatal love.

At first he looked on himself as a man irretrievably disgraced.
However proudly he might bear himself in the company of strangers, he
approached his colleagues with the air of a man made absurd by
unsolicited attentions, persecuted and