to be established.  The former were half-distraught between the desire to “cut” him and the difficulty of finding a crevice for their shears; and when a volume on this or that portentous subject was proposed to the latter they suggested alternative titles which, as reported to our friend, brought into his face the noble blank melancholy that sometimes made it handsome.  The title of an unwritten book didn’t after all much matter, but some masterpiece of Saltram’s may have died in his bosom of the shudder with which it was then convulsed.  The ideal solution, failing the fee at Kent Mulville’s door, would have been some system of subscription to projected treatises with their non-appearance provided for—provided for, I mean, by the indulgence of subscribers.  The author’s real misfortune was that subscribers were so wretchedly literal.  When they tastelessly enquired why publication hadn’t ensued I was tempted to ask who in the world had ever been so published.  Nature herself had brought him out in voluminous form, and the money was simply a deposit on borrowing the work.

V

I was doubtless often a nuisance to my friends in those years; but there were sacrifices I declined to make, and I never passed the hat to George Gravener.  I never forgot our little discussion in Ebury Street, and I think it stuck in my throat to have to treat him to the avowal I had found so easy to Mss Anvoy.  It had cost me nothing to confide to this charming girl, but it would have cost me much to confide to the friend of my youth, that the character of the “real gentleman” wasn’t an attribute of the man I took such pains for.  Was this because I had already generalised to the point of perceiving that women are really the unfastidious sex?  I knew at any rate that Gravener, already quite in view but still hungry and frugal, had naturally enough more ambition than charity.  He had sharp aims for stray sovereigns, being in view most from the tall steeple of Clockborough.  His immediate ambition was to occupy à lui seul the field of vision of that smokily-seeing city, and all his movements and postures were calculated for the favouring angle.  The movement of the hand as to the pocket had thus to alternate gracefully with the posture of the hand on the heart.  He talked to Clockborough in short only less beguilingly than Frank Saltram talked to his electors; with the difference to our credit, however, that we had already voted and that our candidate had no antagonist but himself.  He had more than once been at Wimbledon—it was Mrs. Mulville’s work not mine—and by the time the claret was served had seen the god descend.  He took more pains to swing his censer than I had expected, but on our way back to town he forestalled any little triumph I might have been so artless as to express by the observation that such a man was—a hundred times!—a man to use and never a man to be used by.  I remember that this neat remark humiliated me almost as much as if virtually, in the fever of broken slumbers, I hadn’t often made it myself.  The difference was that on Gravener’s part a force attached to it that could never attach to it on mine.  He was able to use people—he had the machinery; and the irony of Saltram’s being made showy at Clockborough came out to me when he said, as if he had no memory of our original talk and the idea were quite fresh to him: “I hate his type, you know, but I’ll be hanged if I don’t put some of those things in.  I can find a place for them: we might even find a place for the fellow himself.”  I myself should have had some fear—not, I need scarcely say, for the “things” themselves, but for some other things very near them; in fine for the rest of my eloquence.

Later on I could see that the oracle of Wimbledon was not in this case so appropriate as he would have been had the polities of the gods only coincided more exactly with those of the party.  There was a distinct moment when, without saying anything more definite to me, Gravener entertained the idea of annexing Mr. Saltram.  Such a project was delusive, for the discovery of analogies between his body of doctrine and that pressed from headquarters upon Clockborough—the bottling, in a word, of the air of those lungs for convenient public uncorking in corn-exchanges—was an experiment for which no one had the leisure.  The only thing would have been to carry him massively about, paid, caged, clipped; to turn him on for a particular occasion in a particular channel.  Frank Saltram’s channel, however, was essentially not calculable, and there was no knowing what disastrous floods might have ensued.  For what there would have been to do The Empire, the great newspaper, was there to look to; but it was no new misfortune that there were delicate situations in which The Empire broke down.  In fine there was an instinctive apprehension that a clever young journalist commissioned to report on Mr. Saltram might never come back from the errand.  No one knew better than George Gravener that that was a time when prompt returns counted double.  If he therefore found our friend an exasperating waste of orthodoxy it was because of his being, as he said, poor Gravener, up in the clouds, not because he was down in the dust.  The man would have been, just as he was, a real enough gentleman if he could have helped to put in a real gentleman.  Gravener’s great objection to the actual member was that he was not one.

Lady Coxon had a fine old house, a house with “grounds,” at Clockborough, which she had let; but after she returned from abroad I learned from Mrs. Saltram that the lease had fallen in and that she had gone down to resume possession.  I could see the faded red livery, the big square shoulders, the high-walled garden of this decent abode.  As the rumble of dissolution grew louder the suitor would have pressed his suit, and I found myself hoping the politics of the late Mayor’s widow wouldn’t be such as to admonish her to ask him to dinner; perhaps indeed I went so far as to pray, they would naturally form a bar to any contact.  I tried to focus the many-buttoned page, in the daily airing, as he perhaps even pushed the Bath-chair over somebody’s toes.  I was destined to hear, none the less, through Mrs. Saltram—who, I afterwards learned, was in correspondence with Lady Coxon’s housekeeper—that Gravener was known to have spoken of the habitation I had in my eye as the pleasantest thing at Clockborough.  On his part, I was sure, this was the voice not of envy but of experience.  The vivid scene was now peopled, and I could see him in the old-time garden with Miss Anvoy, who would be certain, and very justly, to think him good-looking.  It would be too much to describe myself as troubled by this play of surmise; but I occur to remember the relief, singular enough, of feeling it suddenly brushed away by an annoyance really much greater; an annoyance the result of its happening to come over me about that time with a rush that I was simply ashamed of Frank Saltram.  There were limits after all, and my mark at last had been reached.

I had had my disgusts, if I may allow myself to-day such an expression; but this was a supreme revolt.  Certain things cleared up in my mind, certain values stood out.  It was all very well to have an unfortunate temperament; there was nothing so unfortunate as to have, for practical purposes, nothing else.  I avoided George Gravener at this moment and reflected that at such a time I should do so most effectually by leaving England.  I wanted to forget Frank Saltram—that was all.  I didn’t want to do anything in the world to him but that.  Indignation had withered on the stalk, and I felt that one could pity him as much as one ought only by never thinking of him again.  It wasn’t for anything he had done to me; it was for what he had done to the Mulvilles.  Adelaide cried about it for a week, and