Page:Wells - The War in the Air (Boni & Liveright, 1918).djvu/40

Rh woman--misunderstood. I intend to vindicate her, sorr, to the four winds of heaven!"

"I lurve England," he used to say--"lurve England, but Puritanism, sorr, I abhor. It fills me with loathing.  It raises my gorge.  Take my own case."

He insisted relentlessly upon his heart, and upon seeing proofs of the interview. If they had not done justice to his erotic bellowings and gesticulations, he stuck in, in a large inky scrawl, all and more than they had omitted.

It was a strangely embarrassing thing for British journalism. Never was there a more obvious or uninteresting affair; never had the world heard the story of erratic affection with less appetite or sympathy. On the other hand it was extremely curious about Mr. Butteridge's invention. But when Mr. Butteridge could be deflected for a moment from the cause of the lady he championed, then he talked chiefly, and usually with tears of tenderness in his voice, about his mother and his childhood--his mother who crowned a complete encyclopedia of maternal virtue by being "largely Scotch." She was not quite neat, but nearly so. "I owe everything in me to me mother," he asserted--"everything. Eh!" and--"ask any man who's done anything. You'll hear the same story.  All we have we owe to women.  They are the species, sorr. Man is but a dream.  He comes and goes.  The woman's soul leadeth us upward and on!"

He was always going on like that.

What in particular he wanted from the Government