Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/371

THE PAPERS every day in the week. He's all right, and he's all ready. And who, after all, can do him so well as the partner of his flat? It's like making, in one of those big domestic siphons, the luxury of the poor, your own soda-water. It comes cheaper, and it's always on the sideboard. 'Vichy chez soi.' The interviewer at home."

Her companion took it in. "Your place is on my sideboard—you're really a first-class fizz! He steps then, at any rate, into Beadel-Muffet's place."

"That," Maud assented, "is what he would like to do." And she knew more than ever there was something to wait for.

"It's a lovely opening," Bight returned. But he still said, for the moment, nothing else; as if, charged to the brim though he had originally been, she had rather led his thought away.

"What have you done with poor Beadel?" she consequently asked. "What is it, in the name of goodness, you're doing to him? It's worse than ever."

"Of course it's worse than ever."

"He capers," said Maud, "on every housetop—he jumps out of every bush." With which her anxiety really broke out. "Is it you that are doing it?"

"If you mean am I seeing him, I certainly am. I'm seeing nobody else. I assure you he's spread thick."

"But you're acting for him?"

Bight waited. "Five hundred people are acting for him; but the difficulty is that what he calls the 'terrific forces of publicity'—by which he means ten thousand other persons—are acting against him. We've all in fact been turned on—to turn everything off, and that's exactly the job that makes the biggest noise. It appears everywhere, in every kind of connection and every kind of type, that Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., desires to cease to appear anywhere; and then it appears that his desiring to cease to appear is observed 359