Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/402

THE BETTER SORT you see—and who can keep his discovery to himself!—will make his everlasting fortune, as well, no doubt, as that of a few others. It's our branch, our preoccupation, in fact, Miss Blandy's and mine—this pursuit of the incalculable, this study, to that end, of the great forces of publicity. Only, of course, it must be remembered," Bight went on, "that in the case we're speaking of—the man disappearing as Beadel has now disappeared, and supplanting for the time every other topic—must have someone on the spot for him, to keep the pot boiling, someone acting, with real intelligence, in his interest. I mean if he's to get the good of it when he does turn up. It would never do, you see, that that should be flat!"

"Oh no, not flat, never!" Marshal quailed at the thought. Held as in a vise by his host's high lucidity, he exhaled his interest at every pore. "It wouldn't be flat for Beadel, would it?—I mean if he were to come."

"Not much! It wouldn't be flat for Beadel—I think I can undertake." And Bight undertook so well that he threw himself back in his chair with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat and his head very much up. "The only thing is that for poor Beadel it's a luxury, so to speak, wasted—and so dreadfully, upon my word, that one quite regrets there's no one to step in."

"To step in?" His visitor hung upon his lips.

"To do the thing better, so to speak—to do it right: to—having raised the whirlwind—really ride the storm. To seize the psychological hour."

Marshal met it, yet he wondered. "You speak of the reappearance? I see. But the man of the reappearance would have, wouldn't he?—or perhaps I don't follow?—to be the same as the man of the disappearance. It wouldn't do as well—would it?—for somebody else to turn up?" 390