Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/398

THE BETTER SORT if you can think of the impression so made as worth the purchase. Naturally, naturally, there's but the impression you make. You don't receive any. You can't. You've only your confidence—so far as that's an impression. Oh, it is indeed a nice point; and I only put it to you," Bight wound up, "because, you know, you do like to be recognised."

Mr. Marshal was bewildered, but he was not so bewildered as not to be able, a trifle coyly, but still quite bravely, to confess to that. Maud, with her eyes on her friend, found herself thinking of him as of some plump, innocent animal, more or less of the pink-eyed rabbit or sleek guinea-pig order, involved in the slow spell of a serpent of shining scales. Bight's scales, truly, had never so shone as this evening, and he used to admiration—which was just a part of the lustre—the right shade of gravity. He was neither so light as to fail of the air of an attractive offer, nor yet so earnest as to betray a jibe. He might conceivably have been, as an undertaker of improvements in defective notorieties, placing before his guest a practical scheme. It was really quite as if he were ready to guarantee the "murmur" if Mr. Marshal was ready to pay the price. And the price wouldn't of course be only Mr. Marshal's existence. All this, at least, if Mr. Marshal felt moved to take it so. The prodigious thing, next, was that Mr. Marshal was so moved—though, clearly, as was to be expected, with important qualifications. "Do you really mean," he asked, "that one would excite this delightful interest?"

"You allude to the charged state of the air on the subject of Beadel?" Bight considered, looking volumes. "It would depend a good deal upon who one is."

He turned, Mr. Marshal, again to Maud Blandy, and his eyes seemed to suggest to her that she should 386