Page:Terminations (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1895).djvu/100

88 Frank Saltram talked to his electors; with the difference in our favor, however, that we had already voted and that our candidate had no antagonist but himself. He had more than once been at Wimbledon,—it was Mrs. Mulville's work, not mine,—and, by the time the claret was served, had seen the god descend. He took more pains to swing his censer than I had expected, but on our way back to town he forestalled any little triumph I might have been so artless as to express by the observation that such a man was—a hundred times!—a man to use and never a man to be used by. I remember that this neat remark humiliated me almost as much as if, virtually, in the fever of broken slumbers, I hadn't often made it myself. The difference was that on Gravener's part a force attached to it that could never attach to it on mine. He was able to use people—he had the machinery; and the irony of Saltram's being made showy at Clockborough came out to me when he said, as if he had no memory of our original talk and the idea were quite fresh to him, "I hate his type, you know, but I'll be hanged if I don't put some of those things in. I can find a place for them; we might even find a place for the fellow himself." I myself should have had some fear, not, I need scarcely say, for the "things" themselves, but for some other things very near them—in fine for the rest of my eloquence.

Later on I could see that the oracle of Wimbledon was not in this case so appropriate as he would