Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/377

THE PAPERS "No, not in terror—or it wasn't that when I last saw her. But in mortal disgust. She feels it has gone too far—which is what she wanted me, as an honest, decent, likely young woman, up to my neck in it, as she supposed, to understand from her. My relation with her is now that I do understand and that if an improvement takes place I sha'n't have been the worse for it. Therefore you see," Maud went on, "you simply cut my throat when you prevent improvement."

"Well, my dear," her friend returned, "I won't let you bleed to death." And he showed, with this, as confessedly struck. "She doesn't then, you think, know?"

"Know what?"

"Why, what, about him, there may be to be known. Doesn't know of his flight."

"She didn't—certainly."

"Nor of anything to make it likely?"

"What you call his queer reason? No—she named it to me no more than you have; though she does mention, distinctly, that he himself hates, or pretends to hate, the exhibition daily made of him."

"She speaks of it," Bight asked, "as pretending?"

Maud straightened it out. "She feels him—that she practically told me—as rather ridiculous. She honestly has her feeling; and, upon my word, it's what I like her for. Her stomach has turned and she has made it her condition. 'Muzzle your Press', she says; 'then we'll talk.' She gives him three months—she'll give him even six. And this, meanwhile—when he comes to you—is how you forward the muzzling."

"The Press, my child," Bight said, "is the watchdog of civilization, and the watchdog happens to be—it can't be helped—in a chronic state of rabies. Muzzling is easy talk; one can but keep the animal on the run. Mrs. Chorner, however," he added, "seems a figure of fable." 365