n affable assumption of amusement, under which he believed that he
detected a genuine respect for his abilities.

Finally, when he had danced attendance upon them for the better part
of two months, he laid before them, at the coffee-and-cigars stage of a
dinner in a private room of the Savoy, the details of his proposition.
They were to form a Syndicate to take over his property, and place it
upon the market; in consideration of their finding the ready money for
this exploitation, they were to have for themselves two-fifths of the
shares in the Company ultimately to be floated. They listened to these
details, and to his enthusiastic remarks about the project itself, with
rather perfunctory patience, but committed themselves that evening to
nothing definite. It took him nearly a week thereafter to get an answer
from any of them. Then he learned that, if they took the matter up at
all, it would be upon the basis of the Syndicate receiving nine-tenths
of the shares.

He conceived the idea, after he had mastered his original amazement,
that they named these preposterous terms merely because they expected
to be beaten down, and he summoned all his good nature and tact for
the task of haggling with them. He misunderstood their first show of
impatience at this, and persevered in the face of their tacit rebuffs.
Then, one day, a couple of them treated him with overt rudeness, and
he, astonished out of his caution, replied to them in kind. Suddenly, he
could hardly tell why or how, they were all enemies of his. They
closed their office doors to him; even their clerks treated him with
contemptuous incivility.

This blow to his pride enraged and humiliated him, curiously enough, as
no other misadventure of his life had done.

Louisa remembered vividly the description he had given to her, at the
time, of this affair. She had hardly understood why it should disturb
him so profoundly: to her mind, these men had done nothing so monstrous
after all. But to him, their offense swallowed up all the other
indignities suffered during the years of his Ishmaelitish wanderings. A
sombre lust for vengeance upon them took root in his very soul. He hated
nobody else as he hated them. How often she had heard him swear, in
solemn vibrating tones, that to the day of his death his most sacred
ambition should be their punishment, their abasement in the dust and
mire!

And now, all at once, as she looked up at him, where he leant against
the mant