Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/161

 should have to barricade the place and put up a machinegun.

He stood looking down at her, whimsical and fatherly.

"Curiosity. That's a good sign."

"How?"

"I do believe that you are just a little bit curious as to whether people will come and stare."

"Perhaps I am."

"Yes,—one must have an audience. If we can't pose before other people, we have to pose before ourselves."

"That's rather horrid of you."

"Not in the least. I'm one of those persons who poses to himself. I find it most important that I should look well in my own mirror. While—you"

"But do I pose? I've always tried"

"My dear little lady, I did not say you posed. You are one of those fortunate persons who cannot help doing the natural thing. That's the secret."

"Of what?"

"Of your fame. You get half the world tumbling over itself to see a little woman whose naturalness is not a pose. Most of us are swathed up like mummies. But you must have your audience. Why not?"

So the embargo was removed, and on the second day the Pelican's nest was full, and some thirty people had to be turned away. It would appear that the little lady had slipped a magic nest-egg into the circle of Thomas Roland's enterprise and that the fortune that was to be hatched from it was to be neither transient nor illusive.

And yet, as Roland said to Sorrell, afterwards—"It wasn't our thoroughness or our hard work, Stephen, that saved us, but luck, and the noise made by a section of a sensation-mongering press."

Sorrell thought it over, and was moved to disagree with him.

"No,—I think it was the human touch. It is always the human touch that matters."

"Yes,—my dear chap,—but that was our luck. That it should have happened here to Ethel. Thousands of people might have been smashed up—and have died here—and the great public would not have cared a damn."

"But why should they?"