Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/216

208 may please her—which, though my first, my only duty is to please my subscribers and shareholders, is a thing I should rather like to do. I'll take from you something of the kind you mention, but only if she's favourably impressed by it.'

I just hesitated, and it was not without a grain of hypocrisy that I artfully replied: 'I would much rather you were!'

'Well, I shall be if she is.' Mr. Beston spoke with gravity. 'She can give you a good deal, don't you know?—all sorts of leads and glimpses. She naturally knows more about him than any one. Besides, she's charming herself.'

To dip so deep could only be an enticement; yet I already felt so saturated, felt my cup so full, that I almost wondered what was left to me to learn, almost feared to lose, in greater waters, my feet and my courage. At the same time I welcomed without reserve the opportunity my patron offered, making as my one condition that if Miss Delavoy assented he would print my article as it stood. It was arranged that he should tell her that I would, with her leave, call upon her, and I begged him to let her know in advance that I was prostrate before her brother. He had all the air of thinking that he should have put us in a relation by which The Cynosure would largely profit, and I left him with the peaceful consciousness that if I had baited my biggest hook he had opened his widest mouth. I wondered a little, in truth, how he could care enough for Delavoy without caring more than enough, but I may at once say that I was, in respect to Mr. Beston, now virtually in possession of my point of view. This had revealed to me an intellectual economy of the rarest kind. There was not a thing in the world—with a single exception, on which I shall presently touch—that he valued for itself, and not a scrap he knew about anything save whether or no it would do. To 'do' with Mr. Beston, was to do for The Cynosure. The wonder was that he could know that of things of which he knew nothing else whatever.

There are a hundred reasons, even in this most private