Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/351

THE PAPERS you see, whole different classes of them, and his is the opposite to Beadel-Muffet's."

Howard Bight gave a grunt. "Why the opposite if you also pity him? I'll be hanged," he added, "if you won't save him too."

But she shook her head. She knew. "No; but it's nearly, in its way, as lurid. Do you know," she asked, "what he has done?"

"Why, the difficulty appears to be that he can't have done anything. He should strike once more—hard, and in the same place. He should bring out another ply."

"Why so? You can't be more than prominent, and he is prominent. You can't do more than subscribe, in your prominence, to thirty-seven press cutting agencies in England and America, and, having done so, you can't do more than sit at home with your ear on the postman's knock, looking out for results. There comes in the tragedy—there are no results. Mortimer Marshal's postman doesn't knock; the press-cutting agencies can't find anything to cut. With thirty-seven, in the whole English-speaking world, scouring millions of papers for him in vain, and with a big slice of his private income all the while going to it, the 'irony' is too cruel, and the way he looks at one, as in one's degree responsible, does make one wince. He expected, naturally, most from the Americans, but it's they who have failed him worst. Their silence is that of the tomb, and it seems to grow, if the silence of the tomb can grow. He won't admit that the thirty-seven look far enough or long enough, and he writes them, I infer, angry letters, wanting to know what the deuce they suppose he has paid them for. But what are they either, poor things, to do?"

"Do? They can print his angry letters. That, at least, will break the silence, and he'll like it better than nothing." 339