Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/359

THE PAPERS. Then, in time, you'll also get out of it. But then you'll have had it, as I have, and the good of it."

"But what, really, if it breeds nothing but disgust," she asked, "do you call the good of it?"

"Well, two things. First the bread and butter, and then the fun. I repeat it—sit tight."

"Where's the fun," she asked again, "of learning to despise people?"

"You'll see when it comes. It will all be upon you, it will change for you any day. Sit tight, sit tight."

He expressed such confidence that she might for a minute have been weighing it. "If you get out of it, what will you do?"

"Well, imaginative work. This job has made me at least see. It has given me the loveliest tips."

She had still another pause. "It has given me—my experience has—a lovely tip too."

"And what's that?"

"I've told you before—the tip of pity. I'm so much sorrier for them all—panting and gasping for it like fish out of water—than I am anything else."

He wondered. "But I thought that was what just isn't your experience."

"Oh, I mean then," she said impatiently, "that my tip is from yours. It's only a different tip. I want to save them."

"Well," the young man replied, and as if the idea had had a meaning for him, "saving them may perhaps work out as a branch. The question is can you be paid for it?"

"Beadel-Muffet would pay me," Maud suddenly suggested.

"Why, that's just what I'm expecting," her companion laughed, "that he will, after to-morrow—directly or indirectly—do me."

"Will you take it from him then only to get him in 347