Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/427

THE PAPERS having carried it to market, disappointed and cheated her. She was to have heard it cried like fresh herring."

Bight was immensely taken. "Oh, beyond all doubt. You're in a fix. You've played, you see, a most unusual game. The code allows everything but that."

"Precisely. So I must take the consequences. I'm dishonoured, but I shall have to bear it. And I shall bear it by getting out. Out, I mean, of the whole thing. I shall chuck them."

"Chuck the Papers?" he asked in his simplicity.

But his wonder, she saw, was overdone—their eyes too frankly met. "Damn the Papers!" said Maud Blandy.

It produced in his sadness and weariness the sweetest smile that had yet broken through. "We shall, between us, if we keep it up, ruin them! And you make nothing," he went on, "of one's having at last so beautifully started you? Your complaint," he developed, "was that you couldn't get in. Then suddenly, with a splendid jump, you are in. Only, however, to look round you and say with disgust ' Oh, here?' Where the devil do you want to be?"

"Ah, that's another question. At least," she said, "I can scrub floors. I can take it out perhaps—my swindle of Mrs. Chorner," she pursued—"in scrubbing hers."

He only, after this, looked at her a little. "She has written to you?"

"Oh, in high dudgeon. I was to have attended to the 'press-cutting' people as well, and she was to have seen herself, at the furthest, by the second morning (that was day-before-yesterday) all over the place. She wants to know what I mean."

"And what do you answer?"

"That it's hard, of course, to make her understand, 415