Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/302

THE BETTER SORT Gedge continued to think. "The words he used were that I give away the Show and that, from several sources, it has come round to Them."

"As of course a baby would have known!" And then as her husband said nothing: "Were those the words he used?"

"Absolutely. He couldn't have used better ones."

"Did he call it," Mrs. Gedge inquired, "the 'Show'?"

"Of course he did. The Biggest on Earth."

She winced, looking at him hard—she wondered, but only for a moment. "Well, it is."

"Then it's something," Gedge went on, "to have given that away. But," he added, "I've taken it back."

"You mean you've been convinced?"

"I mean I've been scared."

"At last, at last!" she gratefully breathed.

"Oh, it was easily done. It was only two words. But here I am."

Her face was now less hard for him. "And what two words?"

"'You know, Mr. Gedge, that it simply won't do.' That was all. But it was the way such a man says them."

"I'm glad, then," Mrs. Gedge frankly averred, "that he is such a man. How did you ever think it could do?"

"Well, it was my critical sense. I didn't ever know I had one—till They came and (by putting me here) waked it up in me. Then I had, somehow, don't you see? to live with it; and I seemed to feel that, somehow or other, giving it time and in the long run, it might, it ought to, come out on top of the heap. Now that's where, he says, it simply won't do. So I must put it—I have put it—at the bottom."

"A very good place, then, for a critical sense!" And Isabel, more placidly now, folded her work. "If, that is, you can only keep it there. If it doesn't struggle up again." 290