Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/246

238 grand position. Your position would be grand,' I hastened to add as I looked at him, 'because it would be so admirably false.' Then, more seriously, I felt the impulse even to warn him. 'I don't think you're quite aware of what you'd make it. Are you really quite conscious?' I went on with a benevolence that struck him, I was presently to learn, as a depth of fatuity.

He was to show once more that he was a rock. 'Conscious? Why should I be? Nobody's conscious.'

He was splendid; yet before I could control it I had risked the challenge of a 'Nobody?'

'Who's anybody? The public isn't!'

'Then why are you afraid of it?' Miss Delavoy demanded.

'Don't ask him that,' I answered; 'you expose yourself to his telling you that, if the public isn't anybody, that's still more the case with your brother.'

Mr. Beston appeared to accept as a convenience this somewhat inadequate protection; he at any rate under cover of it again addressed us lucidly. 'There's only one false position—the one you seem so to wish to put me in.'

I instantly met him. 'That of losing?'

'That of losing!'

'Oh, fifty thousand—yes. And they wouldn't see anything the matter?'

'With the position,' said Mr. Beston, 'that you qualify, I neither know nor care why, as false.' Suddenly, in a different tone, almost genially, he continued: 'For what do you take them?'

For what indeed?—but it didn't signify. 'It's enough that I take you—for one of the masters.' It's literal that as he stood there in his florid beauty and complete command I felt his infinite force, and, with a gush of admiration, wondered how, for our young lady, there could be at such a moment another man. 'We represent different sides,' I rather lamely said. However, I picked up. 'It isn't a question of where we are, but of what. You're not on a side—you are a side.