Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/345

THE PAPERS her the effect of a chill in the air. "I hope," she said, "you're going at least to be decent to him."

"Well, you'll judge. Nothing at all can be done—it's too ridiculously late. And it serves him right. I sha'n't deceive him, certainly, but I might as well enjoy him."

The fiddles were still going, and Maud had a pause. "Well, you know you've more or less lived on him. I mean it's the kind of thing you are living on."

"Precisely—that's just why I loathe it."

Again she hesitated. "You mustn't quarrel, you know, with your bread and butter."

He looked straight before him, as if she had been consciously, and the least bit disagreeably, sententious. "What in the world's that but what I shall just be not doing? If our bread and butter is the universal push I consult our interest by not letting it trifle with us. They're not to blow hot and cold—it won't do. There he is—let him get out himself. What I call sport is to see if he can."

"And not—poor wretch—to help him?"

But Bight was ominously lucid. "The devil is that he can't be helped. His one idea of help, from the day he opened his eyes, has been to be prominently—damn the word!—mentioned: it's the only kind of help that exists in connection with him. What therefore is a fellow to do when he happens to want it to stop—wants a special sort of prominence that will work like a trap in a pantomime and enable him to vanish when the situation requires it? Is one to mention that he wants not to be mentioned—never, never, please, any more? Do you see the success of that, all over the place, do you see the headlines in the American papers? No, he must die as he has lived—the Principal Public Person of his time."

"Well," she sighed, "it's all horrible." And then without a transition: "What do you suppose has happened to him?" 333