Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/404

THE BETTER SORT Wonderment sat in his eyes—an anguish of doubt and desire. "But wouldn't you prepare me?"

"Would you prepare me—that's the point," Bight laughed—"to prepare you?"

There was a minute's mutual gaze, but Marshal took it in. "I don't know what you're making me say; I 1 don't know what you're making me feel. When one is with people so up in these things" and he turned to his companions, alternately, a look as of conscious doom lighted with suspicion, a look that was like a cry for mercy—"one feels a little as if one ought to be saved from one's self. For I dare say one's foolish enough with one's poor little wish"

"The little wish, my dear sir"—Bight took him up—"to stand out in the world! Your wish is the wish of all high spirits."

"It's dear of you to say it." Mr. Marshal was all response. "I shouldn't want, even if it were weak or vain, to have lived wholly unknown. And if what you ask is whether I understand you to speak, as it were, professionally"

"You do understand me?" Bight pushed back his chair.

"Oh, but so well!—when I've already seen what you can do. I need scarcely say, that having seen it, I sha'n't bargain."

"Ah, then, I shall," Bight smiled. "I mean with the Papers. It must be half profits."

"'Profits'?" His guest was vague.

"Our friend," Maud explained to Bight, "simply wants the position."

Bight threw her a look. "Ah, he must take what I give him."

"But what you give me," their friend handsomely contended, "is the position."

"Yes; but the terms that I shall get! I don't produce you, of course," Bight went on, "till I've 392