Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/286

THE BETTER SORT She stopped, however, changing it. "I'll tell them exactly the opposite. And I'll find out what you say—it won't take long—to do it. If we tell different stories, that possibly may save us."

"I see what you mean. It would perhaps, as an oddity, have a success of curiosity. It might become a draw. Still, they but want broad masses." And he looked at her sadly. "You're no more than one of Them."

"If it's being no more than one of them to love it," she answered, "then I certainly am. And I am not ashamed of my company."

"To love what?" said Morris Gedge.

"To love to think He was born there."

"You think too much. It's bad for you." He turned away with his chronic moan. But it was without losing what she called after him.

"I decline to let the place down." And what was there indeed to say? They were there to keep it up.

 V

kept it up through the summer, but with the queerest consciousness, at times, of the want of proportion between his secret rage and the spirit of those from whom the friction came. He said to himself—so sore as his sensibility had grown—that They were gregariously ferocious at the very time he was seeing Them as individually mild. He said to himself that They were mild only because he was—he flattered himself that he was divinely so, considering what he might be; and that he should, as his wife had warned him, soon enough have news of it were he to deflect by a hair's breath from the line traced for him. That was the collective fatuity—that it was capable of turning, on the instant, both to a general and to a particular resentment. Since the least breath of discrimination would get him 274