Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/357

THE PAPERS air of having lived overmuch on swagger. She could scarce have said at this moment what, for a good while, she had really lived on, and she didn't let him know now to complain either of her privation or of her disappointments. She did it to show why she couldn't go with him when he was so awfully sweeping. There were at any rate apparently, all over, two wholly different sets of people. If everyone rose to his bait no creature had ever risen to hers; and that was the grim truth of her position, which proved at the least that there were two quite different kinds of luck. They told two different stories of human vanity; they couldn't be reconciled. And the poor girl put it in a nutshell. "There's but one person I've ever written to who has so much as noticed my letter."

He wondered, painfully affected—it rather overwhelmed him; he took hold of it at the easiest point. "One person?"

"The misguided man we had tea with. He alone—he rose."

"Well then, you see that when they do rise they are misguided. In other words they're donkeys."

"What I see is that I don't strike the right ones and that I haven't therefore your ferocity; that is my ferocity, if I have any, rests on a different ground. You'll say that I go for the wrong people; but I don't, God knows—witness Mortimer Marshal—fly too high. I picked him out, after prayer and fasting, as just the likeliest of the likely—not anybody a bit grand and yet not quite a nobody; and by an extraordinary chance I was justified. Then I pick out others who seem just as good, I pray and fast, and no sound comes back. But I work through my ferocity too," she stiffly continued, "though at first it was great, feeling as I did that when my bread and butter was in it people had no right not to oblige me. It was their duty—what they were prominent for—to be interviewed, so as to keep me going; 345