Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/316

THE BETTER SORT "Heavy. They brought me down. That's why"

"Why you are down?" Mrs. Hayes sweetly demanded.

"Ah, but my dear man," her husband interposed, "you're not down; you're up! You're only up a different tree, but you're up at the tip-top."

"You mean I take it too high?"

"That's exactly the question," the young man answered; "and the possibility, as matching your first danger, is just what we felt we couldn't, if you didn't mind, miss the measure of."

Gedge looked at him. "I feel that I know what you at bottom hoped."

"We at bottom 'hope,' surely, that you're all right."

"In spite of the fool it makes of every one?"

Mr. Hayes of New York smiled. "Say because of that. We only ask to believe that everyone is a fool!"

"Only you haven't been, without reassurance, able to imagine fools of the size that my case demands?" And Gedge had a pause, while, as if on the chance of some proof, his companion waited. "Well, I won't pretend to you that your anxiety hasn't made me, doesn't threaten to make me, a bit nervous; though I don't quite understand it if, as you say, people but rave about me."

"Oh, that report was from the other side; people in our country so very easily rave. You've seen small children laugh to shrieks when tickled in a new place. So there are amiable millions with us who are but small children. They perpetually present new places for the tickler. What we've seen in further lights," Mr. Hayes good-humouredly pursued, "is your people here—the Committee, the Board, or whatever the powers to whom you're responsible."

"Call them my friend Grant-Jackson then—my original backer, though I admit, for that reason, perhaps my most formidable critic. It's with him, practically, 304