Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/337

THE PAPERS to him straight, I did him 'at home,' somewhere, as I've surely mentioned to you before, three years ago. He liked, I believe—for he's really a delightful old ass—the way I did it; he knows my name and has my address, and has written me three or four times since, with his own hand, a request to be so good as to make use of my (he hopes) still close connection with the daily Press to rectify the rumour that he has reconsidered his opinion on the subject of the blankets supplied to the Upper Tooting Workhouse Infirmary. He has reconsidered his opinion on no subject whatever—which he mentions, in the interest of historic truth, without further intrusion on my valuable time. And he regards that sort of thing as a commodity that I can dispose of—thanks to my 'close connection'—for several shillings."

"And can you?"

"Not for several pence. They're all tariffed, but he's tariffed low—having a value, apparently, that money doesn't represent. He's always welcome, but he isn't always paid for. The beauty, however, is in his marvellous memory, his keeping us all so apart and not muddling the fellow to whom he has written that he hasn't done this, that or the other with the fellow to whom he has written that he has. He'll write to me again some day about something else about his alleged position on the date of the next school-treat of the Chelsea Cabmen's Orphanage. I shall seek a market for the precious item, and that will keep us in touch; so that if the complication you have the sense of it in your bones does come into play—the thought's too beautiful!—he may once more remember me. Fancy his coming to one with a 'What can you do for me now?'" Bight lost himself in the happy vision; it gratified so his cherished consciousness of the "irony of fate"—a consciousness so cherished that he never could write ten lines without use of the words. 325