Page:The Outcry (London, Methuen & Co., 1911).djvu/246

232 thing's a pure Moretto—and to declare as much, moreover, with all the weight of his authority, to Bender himself, who of course made a point of seeing him."

"So that Bender"—she followed and wondered—"is, as a consequence, wholly off?"

It made her friend's humour play up in his acuteness. "Bender, Lady Grace, is, by the law of his being, never 'wholly' off—or on!—anything. He lives, like the moon, in mid-air, shedding his silver light on earth; never quite gone, yet never all there—save for inappreciable moments. He would be in eclipse as a peril, I grant," Hugh went on—"if the question had struck him as really closed. But luckily the blessed Press—which is a pure heavenly joy and now quite immense on it—keeps it open as wide as Piccadilly."

"Which makes, however," Lady Grace discriminated, "for the danger of a grab."

"Ah, but all the more for the shame of a surrender! Of course I admit that when it's a question of a life spent, like his, in waiting, acquisitively, for the cat to jump, the only thing for one, at a given moment, as against that signal, is to be found one's self by the