st, but my frequent plea that such favours
weren't politic never found him, when in other connections there was an
opportunity to give me a lift, anything but indifferent to the danger
of the association. He let them have me in a word whenever he could;
sometimes in periodicals in which he had credit, sometimes only at
dinner. He talked about me when he couldn't get me in, but it was
always part of the bargain that I shouldn't make him a topic. "How can
I successfully serve you if you do?" he used to ask: he was more afraid
than I thought he ought to have been of the charge of tit for tat. I
didn't care, for I never could distinguish tat from tit; but as I have
intimated I dropped into silence really more than anything else because
there was a certain fascinated observation of his course which was
quite testimony enough and to which in this huddled conclusion of it he
practically reduced me.

I see it all foreshortened, his wonderful remainder--see it from the end
backward, with the direction widening toward me as if on a level with
the eye. The migration to the country promised him at first great
things--smaller expenses, larger leisure, conditions eminently conducive
on each occasion to the possible triumph of the next time. Mrs.
Stannace, who altogether disapproved of it, gave as one of her reasons
that her son-in-law, living mainly in a village on the edge of a
goose-green, would be deprived of that contact with the great world
which was indispensable to the painter of manners. She had the showiest
arguments for keeping him in touch, as she called it, with good society;
wishing to know with some force where, from the moment he ceased to
represent it from observation, the novelist could be said to be. In
London fortunately a clever man was just a clever man; there were
charming houses in which a person of Ray's undoubted ability, even
though without the knack of making the best use of it, could always be
sure of a quiet corner for watching decorously the social kaleidoscope.
But the kaleidoscope of the goose-green, what in the world was that,
and what such delusive thrift as drives about the land (with a fearful
account for flys from the inn) to leave cards on the country magnates?
This solicitude for Limbert's subject-matter was the specious colour
with which, deeply determined not to affront mere tolerance in a
cottage, Mrs. Stannace overlaid her indisposition to place herself under
the heel of Cecil Highmore. She