The Coxon Fund ..................................................................................................................................................1

"They've got him for life!" I said to myself that evening on my way back to the station; but later on, alone in

the compartment (from Wimbledon to Waterloo, before the glory of the District Railway) I amended this

declaration in the light of the sense that my friends would probably after all not enjoy a monopoly of Mr.

Saltram. I won't pretend to have taken his vast measure on that first occasion, but I think I had achieved a

glimpse of what the privilege of his acquaintance might mean for many persons in the way of charges

accepted. He had been a great experience, and it was this perhaps that had put me into the frame of foreseeing

how we should all, sooner or later, have the honour of dealing with him as a whole. Whatever impression I

then received of the, amount of this total, I had a full enough vision of the patience of the Mulvilles. He was

to stay all the winter: Adelaide dropped it in a tone that drew the sting from the inevitable emphasis. These

excellent people might indeed have been content to give the circle of hospitality a diameter of six months; but

if they didn't say he was to stay all summer as well it was only because this was more than they ventured to

hope. I remember that at dinner that evening he wore slippers, new and predominantly purple, of some queer

carpetstuff; but the Mulvilles were still in the stage of supposing that he might be snatched from them by

higher bidders. At a later time they grew, poor dears, to fear no snatching; but theirs was a fidelity which

needed no help from competition to make them proud. Wonderful indeed as, when all was said, you

inevitably pronounced Frank Saltram, it was not to be overlooked that the Kent Mulvilles were in their way

still more extraordinary: as striking an instance as could easily be encountered of the familiar truth that

They had sent for me from Wimbledon to come out and dine, and there had been an implication in Adelaide's

notejudged by her notes alone she might have been thought sillythat it was a case in which something

momentous was to be determined or done. I had never known them not be in a "state" about somebody, and I

dare say I tried to be droll on this point in accepting their invitation. On finding myself in the presence of

their latest discovery I had not at first felt irreverence droopand, thank heaven, I have never been

absolutely deprived of that alternative in Mr. Saltram's company. I saw, howeverI hasten to declare

itthat compared to this specimen their other phoenixes had been birds of inconsiderable feather, and I

afterwards took credit to myself for not having even in primal bewilderments made a mistake about the

essence of the man. He had an incomparable gift; I never was blind to itit dazzles me still. It dazzles me

perhaps even more in remembrance than in fact, for I'm not unaware that for so rare a subject the imagination

goes to some expense, inserting a jewel here and there or giving a twist to a plume. How the art of portraiture

would rejoice in this figure if the art of portraiture had only the canvas! Nature, in truth, had largely rounded

it, and if memory, hovering about it, sometimes holds her breath, this is because the voice that comes back

Though the great man was an inmate and didn't dress, he kept dinner on this occasion waiting, and the first

words he uttered on coming into the room were an elated announcement to Mulville that he had found out

something. Not catching the allusion and gaping doubtless a little at his face, I privately asked Adelaide what

he had found out. I shall never forget the look she gave me as she replied: "Everything!" She really believed

it. At that moment, at any rate, he had found out that the mercy of the Mulvilles was infinite. He had

previously of course discovered, as I had myself for that matter, that their dinners were soignes. Let me not

indeed, in saying this, neglect to declare that I shall falsify my counterfeit if I seem to hint that there was in

his nature any ounce of calculation. He took whatever came, but he never plotted for it, and no man who was

so much of an absorbent can ever have been so little of a parasite. He had a system of the universe, but he had

no system of spongingthat was quite handtomouth. He had fine gross easy senses, but it was not his

goodnatured appetite that wrought confusion. If he had loved us for our dinners we could have paid with our

dinners, and it would have been a great economy of finer matter. I make free in these connexions with the

plural possessive because if I was never able to do what the Mulvilles did, and people with still bigger houses

and simpler charities, I met, first and last, every demand of reflexion, of emotionparticularly perhaps those

of gratitude and of resentment. No one, I think, paid the tribute of giving him up so often, and if it's rendering

honour to borrow wisdom I've a right to talk of my sacrifices. He yielded lessons as the sea yields fishI

lived for a while on this diet. Sometimes it almost appeared to me that his massive monstrous failureif

failure after all it washad been designed for my private recreation. He fairly pampered my curiosity; but

the history of that experience would take me too far. This is not the large canvas I just now spoke of, and I

wouldn't have approached him with my present hand had it been a question of all the features. Frank

Saltram's features, for artistic purposes, are verily the anecdotes that are to be gathered. Their name is legion,

and this is only one, of which the interest is that it concerns even more closely several other persons. Such

episodes, as one looks back, are the little dramas that made up the innumerable facets of the big

It is furthermore remarkable that though the two stories are distinctmy own, as it were, and this

otherthey equally began, in a manner, the first night of my acquaintance with Frank Saltram, the night I

came back from Wimbledon so agitated with a new sense of life that, in London, for the very thrill of it, I

could only walk home. Walking and swinging my stick, I overtook, at Buckingham Gate, George Gravener,

and George Gravener's story may be said to have begun with my making him, as our paths lay together, come

home with me for a talk. I duly remember, let me parenthesise, that it was still more that of another person,

and also that several years were to elapse before it was to extend to a second chapter. I had much to say to

him, none the less, about my visit to the Mulvilles, whom he more indifferently knew, and I was at any rate

so amusing that for long afterwards he never encountered me without asking for news of the old man of the

sea. I hadn't said Mr. Saltram was old, and it was to be seen that he was of an age to outweather George

Gravener. I had at that time a lodging in Ebury Street, and Gravener was staying at his brother's empty house

in Eaton Square. At Cambridge, five years before, even in our devastating set, his intellectual power had

seemed to me almost awful. Some one had once asked me privately, with blanched cheeks, what it was then

that after all such a mind as that left standing. "It leaves itself!" I could recollect devoutly replying. I could

smile at present for this remembrance, since before we got to Ebury Street I was struck with the fact that,

save in the sense of being well set up on his legs, George Gravener had actually ceased to tower. The

universe he laid low had somehow bloomed againthe usual eminences were visible. I wondered whether he

had lost his humour, or only, dreadful thought, had never had anynot even when I had fancied him most

Aristophanesque. What was the need of appealing to laughter, however, I could enviously enquire, where you

might appeal so confidently to measurement? Mr. Saltram's queer figure, his thick nose and hanging lip, were

fresh to me: in the light of my old friend's fine cold symmetry they presented mere success in amusing as the

refuge of conscious ugliness. Already, at hungry twentysix, Gravener looked as blank and parliamentary as

if he were fifty and popular. In my scrap of a residencehe had a worldling's eye for its futile conveniences,

but never a comrade's jokeI sounded Frank Saltram in his ears; a circumstance I mention in order to note

that even then I was surprised at his impatience of my enlivenment. As he had never before heard of the

personage it took indeed the form of impatience of the preposterous Mulvilles, his relation to whom, like

mine, had had its origin in an early, a childish intimacy with the young Adelaide, the fruit of multiplied ties in

the previous generation. When she married Kent Mulville, who was older than Gravener and I and much

more amiable, I gained a friend, but Gravener practically lost one. We reacted in different ways from the

form taken by what he called their deplorable social actionthe form (the term was also his) of nasty

secondrate gush. I may have held in my 'for interieur' that the good people at Wimbledon were beautiful

fools, but when he sniffed at them I couldn't help taking the opposite line, for I already felt that even should

we happen to agree it would always be for reasons that differed. It came home to me that he was admirably

British as, without so much as a sociable sneer at my bookbinder, he turned away from the serried rows of my

"Clear 'enough' is just what it isn't," I replied; "if it only were!" That ejaculation on my part must have been

the beginning of what was to be later a long ache for final frivolous rest. Gravener was profound enough to

remark after a moment that in the first place he couldn't be anything but a Dissenter, and when I answered

that the very note of his fascination was his extraordinary speculative breadth my friend retorted that there

was no cad like your cultivated cad, and that I might depend upon discoveringsince I had had the levity not

already to have enquiredthat my shining light proceeded, a generation back, from a Methodist

cheesemonger. I confess I was struck with his insistence, and I said, after reflexion: "It may beI admit it

may be; but why on earth are you so sure?"asking the question mainly to lay him the trap of saying that it

was because the poor man didn't dress for dinner. He took an instant to circumvent my trap and come blandly

"Because the Kent Mulvilles have invented him. They've an infallible hand for frauds. All their geese are

swans. They were born to be duped, they like it, they cry for it, they don't know anything from anything, and

they disgust oneluckily perhaps! with Christian charity." His vehemence was doubtless an accident, but

it might have been a strange foreknowledge. I forget what protest I dropped; it was at any rate something that

led him to go on after a moment: "I only ask one thingit's perfectly simple. Is a man, in a given case, a real

"Not so soon when he isn't! If they've got hold of one this time he must be a great rascal!"

"I might feel injured," I answered, "if I didn't reflect that they don't rave about ME."

"Don't be too sure! I'll grant that he's a gentleman," Gravener presently added, "if you'll admit that he's a

My friend coloured at this, but he didn't change the subject. "Where did they pick him up?"

"That of course wasn't to be endured, so they jumped at the privilege of paying his debts!" I professed that I

knew nothing about his debts, and I reminded my visitor that though the dear Mulvilles were angels they

were neither idiots nor millionaires. What they mainly aimed at was reuniting Mr. Saltram to his wife. "I was

expecting to hear he has basely abandoned her," Gravener went on, at this, "and I'm too glad you don't

I tried to recall exactly what Mrs. Mulville had told me. "He didn't leave herno. It's she who has left him."

"Left him to US?" Gravener asked. "The monstermany thanks! I decline to take him."

"You'll hear more about him in spite of yourself. I can't, no, I really can't resist the impression that he's a big

man." I was already masteringto my shame perhaps be it saidjust the tone my old friend least liked.

"It's doubtless only a trifle," he returned, "but you haven't happened to mention what his reputation's to rest

"Possibly in his writings, but certainly in his talk, which is far and away the richest I ever listened to."

"My dear fellow, don't ask me! About everything!" I pursued, reminding myself of poor Adelaide. "About his

ideas of things," I then more charitably added. "You must have heard him to know what I meanit's unlike

anything that ever WAS heard." I coloured, I admit, I overcharged a little, for such a picture was an

anticipation of Saltram's later development and still more of my fuller acquaintance with him. However, I

really expressed, a little lyrically perhaps, my actual imagination of him when I proceeded to declare that, in a

cloud of tradition, of legend, he might very well go down to posterity as the greatest of all great talkers.

Before we parted George Gravener had wondered why such a row should be made about a chatterbox the

more and why he should be pampered and pensioned. The greater the windbag the greater the calamity. Out

of proportion to everything else on earth had come to be this wagging of the tongue. We were drenched with

talkour wretched age was dying of it. I differed from him here sincerely, only going so far as to concede,

and gladly, that we were drenched with sound. It was not however the mere speakers who were killing usit

was the mere stammerers. Fine talk was as rare as it was refreshingthe gift of the gods themselves, the one

starry spangle on the ragged cloak of humanity. How many men were there who rose to this privilege, of how

many masters of conversation could he boast the acquaintance? Dying of talk?why we were dying of the

lack of it! Bad writing wasn't talk, as many people seemed to think, and even good wasn't always to be

compared to it. From the best talk indeed the best writing had something to learn. I fancifully added that we

too should peradventure be gilded by the legend, should be pointed at for having listened, for having actually

heard. Gravener, who had glanced at his watch and discovered it was midnight, found to all this a retort

"There's one little fact to be borne in mind in the presence equally of the best talk and of the worst." He

looked, in saying this, as if he meant great things, and I was sure he could only mean once more that neither

of them mattered if a man wasn't a real gentleman. Perhaps it was what he did mean; he deprived me however

of the exultation of being right by putting the truth in a slightly different way. "The only thing that really

counts for one's estimate of a person is his conduct." He had his watch still in his palm, and I reproached him

with unfair play in having ascertained beforehand that it was now the hour at which I always gave in. My

pleasantry so far failed to mollify him that he promptly added that to the rule he had just enunciated there was

"Trust me then to try to be good at any price!" I laughed as I went with him to the door. "I declare I will be, if

If that first night was one of the liveliest, or at any rate was the freshest, of my exaltations, there was another,

four years later, that was one of my great discomposures. Repetition, I well knew by this time, was the secret

of Saltram's power to alienate, and of course one would never have seen him at his finest if one hadn't seen

him in his remorses. They set in mainly at this season and were magnificent, elemental, orchestral. I was

quite aware that one of these atmospheric disturbances was now due; but none the less, in our arduous

attempt to set him on his feet as a lecturer, it was impossible not to feel that two failures were a large order, as

we said, for a short course of five. This was the second time, and it was past nine o'clock; the audience, a

muster unprecedented and really encouraging, had fortunately the attitude of blandness that might have been

looked for in persons whom the promise of (if I'm not mistaken) An Analysis of Primary Ideas had drawn to

the neighbourhood of Upper Baker Street. There was in those days in that region a petty lecturehall to be

secured on terms as moderate as the funds left at our disposal by the irrepressible question of the maintenance

of five small SaltramsI include the motherand one large one. By the time the Saltrams, of different

sizes, were all maintained we had pretty well poured out the oil that might have lubricated the machinery for

It was I, the other time, who had been forced into the breach, standing up there for an odious lamplit moment

to explain to half a dozen thin benches, where earnest brows were virtuously void of anything so cynical as a

suspicion, that we couldn't so much as put a finger on Mr. Saltram. There was nothing to plead but that our

scouts had been out from the early hours and that we were afraid that on one of his walks abroadhe took

one, for meditation, whenever he was to address such a companysome accident had disabled or delayed

him. The meditative walks were a fiction, for he never, that any one could discover, prepared anything but a

magnificent prospectus; hence his circulars and programmes, of which I possess an almost complete

collection, are the solemn ghosts of generations never born. I put the case, as it seemed to me, at the best; but

I admit I had been angry, and Kent Mulville was shocked at my want of public optimism. This time therefore

I left the excuses to his more practised patience, only relieving myself in response to a direct appeal from a

young lady next whom, in the hall, I found myself sitting. My position was an accident, but if it had been

calculated the reason would scarce have eluded an observer of the fact that no one else in the room had an

approach to an appearance. Our philosopher's "tail" was deplorably limp. This visitor was the only person

who looked at her ease, who had come a little in the spirit of adventure. She seemed to carry amusement in

her handsome young head, and her presence spoke, a little mystifyingly, of a sudden extension of Saltram's

sphere of influence. He was doing better than we hoped, and he had chosen such an occasion, of all

occasions, to succumb to heaven knew which of his fond infirmities. The young lady produced an impression

of auburn hair and black velvet, and had on her other hand a companion of obscurer type, presumably a

waitingmaid. She herself might perhaps have been a foreign countess, and before she addressed me I had

beguiled our sorry interval by finding in her a vague recall of the opening of some novel of Madame Sand. It

didn't make her more fathomable to pass in a few minutes from this to the certitude that she was American; it

simply engendered depressing reflexions as to the possible check to contributions from Boston. She asked me

if, as a person apparently more initiated, I would recommend further waiting, and I answered that if she

considered I was on my honour I would privately deprecate it. Perhaps she didn't; at any rate our talk took a

turn that prolonged it till she became aware we were left almost alone. I presently ascertained she knew Mrs.

Saltram, and this explained in a manner the miracle. The brotherhood of the friends of the husband was as

nothing to the brotherhood, or perhaps I should say the sisterhood, of the friends of the wife. Like the Kent

Mulvilles I belonged to both fraternities, and even better than they I think I had sounded the abyss of Mrs.

Saltram's wrongs. She bored me to extinction, and I knew but too well how she had bored her husband; but

there were those who stood by her, the most efficient of whom were indeed the handful of poor Saltram's

backers. They did her liberal justice, whereas her mere patrons and partisans had nothing but hatred for our

philosopher. I'm bound to say it was we, howeverwe of both camps, as it were who had always done

I thought my young lady looked richI scarcely knew why; and I hoped she had put her hand in her pocket.

I soon made her out, however, not at all a fine fanaticshe was but a generous, irresponsible enquirer. She

had come to England to see her aunt, and it was at her aunt's she had met the dreary lady we had all so much

on our mind. I saw she'd help to pass the time when she observed that it was a pity this lady wasn't

intrinsically more interesting. That was refreshing, for it was an article of faith in Mrs. Saltram's circleat

least among those who scorned to know her horrid husbandthat she was attractive on her merits. She was

in truth a most ordinary person, as Saltram himself would have been if he hadn't been a prodigy. The question

of vulgarity had no application to him, but it was a measure his wife kept challenging you to apply. I hasten

to add that the consequences of your doing so were no sufficient reason for his having left her to starve. "He

doesn't seem to have much force of character," said my young lady; at which I laughed out so loud that my

departing friends looked back at me over their shoulders as if I were making a joke of their discomfiture. My

joke probably cost Saltram a subscription or two, but it helped me on with my interlocutress. "She says he

drinks like a fish," she sociably continued, "and yet she allows that his mind's wonderfully clear." It was

amusing to converse with a pretty girl who could talk of the clearness of Saltram's mind. I expected next to

hear she had been assured he was awfully clever. I tried to tell herI had it almost on my consciencewhat

was the proper way to regard him; an effort attended perhaps more than ever on this occasion with the usual

effect of my feeling that I wasn't after all very sure of it. She had come tonight out of high curiosityshe

had wanted to learn this proper way for herself. She had read some of his papers and hadn't understood them;

but it was at home, at her aunt's, that her curiosity had been kindledkindled mainly by his wife's

remarkable stories of his want of virtue. "I suppose they ought to have kept me away," my companion

dropped, "and I suppose they'd have done so if I hadn't somehow got an idea that he's fascinating. In fact Mrs.

"In the extraordinary effects of it; his possession, that is, of some quality or other that condemns us in

advance to forgive him the humiliation, as I may call it, to which he has subjected us."

"Why mine, for instance, as one of his guarantors, before you as the purchaser of a ticket."

She let her charming gay eyes rest on me. "You don't look humiliated a bit, and if you did I should let you

off, disappointed as I am; for the mysterious quality you speak of is just the quality I came to see."

My hilarity may have struck her as excessive, but I confess it broke out afresh. Had she acted only in

obedience to this singular plea, so characteristic, on Mrs. Saltram's part, of what was irritating in the

narrowness of that lady's point of view? "Mrs. Saltram," I explained, "undervalues him where he's strongest,

so that, to make up for it perhaps, she overpraises him where he's weak. He's not, assuredly, superficially

"Yes, his great eyes," said my young lady attentively. She had evidently heard all about his great eyesthe

"They're tragic and splendidlights on a dangerous coast. But he moves badly and dresses worse, and

My companion, who appeared to reflect on this, after a moment appealed. "Do you call him a real

I started slightly at the question, for I had a sense of recognising it: George Gravener, years before, that first

flushed night, had put me face to face with it. It had embarrassed me then, but it didn't embarrass me now, for

I had lived with it and overcome it and disposed of it. "A real gentleman? Emphatically not!"

My promptitude surprised her a little, but I quickly felt how little it was to Gravener I was now talking. "Do

"Not a bit. His father was a country schoolmaster and his mother the widow of a sexton, but that has nothing

Again she had a meditative moment. "And is his magnificent vitality the cause of his vices?"

"Your questions are formidable, but I'm glad you put them. I was thinking of his noble intellect. His vices, as

you say, have been much exaggerated: they consist mainly after all in one comprehensive defect."

"On the contrary, he recognises them with effusion, especially in public: he smiles and bows and beckons

across the street to them. But when they pass over he turns away, and he speedily loses them in the crowd.

The recognition's purely spiritualit isn't in the least social. So he leaves all his belongings to other people

to take care of. He accepts favours, loans, sacrificesall with nothing more deterrent than an agony of

shame. Fortunately we're a little faithful band, and we do what we can." I held my tongue about the natural

children, engendered, to the number of three, in the wantonness of his youth. I only remarked that he did

make effortsoften tremendous ones. "But the efforts," I said, "never come to much: the only things that

"You're right to put it as if we had a big bill to pay, but, as I've told you before, your questions are rather

terrible. They come, these mere exercises of genius, to a great sum total of poetry, of philosophy, a mighty

mass of speculation, notation, quotation. The genius is there, you see, to meet the surrender; but there's no

"In the way of achievement recognised and reputation established?" I asked. "To 'show' if you will, there isn't

much, since his writing, mostly, isn't as fine, isn't certainly as showy, as his talk. Moreover twothirds of his

work are merely colossal projects and announcements. 'Showing' Frank Saltram is often a poor business," I

went on: "we endeavoured, you'll have observed, to show him tonight! However, if he HAD lectured he'd

I was conscious of some ineffectiveness, as well perhaps as of a little impatience, as I replied: "The exhibition

of a splendid intellect." My young lady looked not quite satisfied at this, but as I wasn't prepared for another

question I hastily pursued: "The sight of a great suspended swinging crystalhuge lucid lustrous, a block of

This gave her something to turn over till we had passed out to the dusky porch of the hall, in front of which

the lamps of a quiet brougham were almost the only thing Saltram's treachery hadn't extinguished. I went

with her to the door of her carriage, out of which she leaned a moment after she had thanked me and taken

her seat. Her smile even in the darkness was pretty. "I do want to see that crystal!"

She became grave. "Not unless he really comes!" At which the brougham started off, carrying her away too

Mrs. Saltram made a great affair of her right to be informed where her husband had been the second evening

he failed to meet his audience. She came to me to ascertain, but I couldn't satisfy her, for in spite of my

ingenuity I remained in ignorance. It wasn't till much later that I found this had not been the case with Kent

Mulville, whose hope for the best never twirled the thumbs of him more placidly than when he happened to

know the worst. He had known it on the occasion I speak ofthat is immediately after. He was impenetrable

then, but ultimately confessed. What he confessed was more than I shall now venture to make public. It was

of course familiar to me that Saltram was incapable of keeping the engagements which, after their separation,

he had entered into with regard to his wife, a deeply wronged, justly resentful, quite irreproachable and

insufferable person. She often appeared at my chambers to talk over his lapses; for if, as she declared, she had

washed her hands of him, she had carefully preserved the water of this ablution, which she handed about for

analysis. She had arts of her own of exciting one's impatience, the most infallible of which was perhaps her

assumption that we were kind to her because we liked her. In reality her personal fall had been a sort of social

risesince I had seen the moment when, in our little conscientious circle, her desolation almost made her the

fashion. Her voice was grating and her children ugly; moreover she hated the good Mulvilles, whom I more

and more loved. They were the people who by doing most for her husband had in the long run done most for

herself; and the warm confidence with which he had laid his length upon them was a pressure gentle

compared with her stiffer persuadability. I'm bound to say he didn't criticise his benefactors, though

practically he got tired of them; she, however, had the highest standards about eleemosynary forms. She

offered the odd spectacle of a spirit puffed up by dependence, and indeed it had introduced her to some

excellent society. She pitied me for not knowing certain people who aided her and whom she doubtless

patronised in turn for their luck in not knowing me. I dare say I should have got on with her better if she had

had a ray of imaginationif it had occasionally seemed to occur to her to regard Saltram's expressions of his

nature in any other manner than as separate subjects of woe. They were all flowers of his character, pearls

strung on an endless thread; but she had a stubborn little way of challenging them one after the other, as if she

never suspected that he HAD a character, such as it was, or that deficiencies might be organic; the irritating

effect of a mind incapable of a generalisation. One might doubtless have overdone the idea that there was a

general licence for such a man; but if this had happened it would have been through one's feeling that there

I recognised her superiority when I asked her about the aunt of the disappointed young lady: it sounded like a

sentence from an EnglishFrench or other phrasebook. She triumphed in what she told me and she may

have triumphed still more in what she withheld. My friend of the other evening, Miss Anvoy, had but lately

come to England; Lady Coxon, the aunt, had been established here for years in consequence of her marriage

with the late Sir Gregory of that name. She had a house in the Regent's Park, a Bathchair and a fernery; and

above all she had sympathy. Mrs. Saltram had made her acquaintance through mutual friends. This vagueness

caused me to feel how much I was out of it and how large an independent circle Mrs. Saltram had at her

command. I should have been glad to know more about the disappointed young lady, but I felt I should know

most by not depriving her of her advantage, as she might have mysterious means of depriving me of my

knowledge. For the present, moreover, this experience was stayed, Lady Coxon having in fact gone abroad

accompanied by her niece. The niece, besides being immensely clever, was an heiress, Mrs. Saltram said; the

only daughter and the light of the eyes of some great American merchant, a man, over there, of endless

indulgences and dollars. She had pretty clothes and pretty manners, and she had, what was prettier still, the

great thing of all. The great thing of all for Mrs. Saltram was always sympathy, and she spoke as if during the

absence of these ladies she mightn't know where to turn for it. A few months later indeed, when they had

come back, her tone perceptibly changed: she alluded to them, on my leading her up to it, rather as to persons

in her debt for favours received. What had happened I didn't know, but I saw it would take only a little more

or a little less to make her speak of them as thankless subjects of social countenancepeople for whom she

had vainly tried to do something. I confess I saw how it wouldn't be in a mere week or two that I should rid

myself of the image of Ruth Anvoy, in whose very name, when I learnt it, I found something secretly to like.

I should probably neither see her nor hear of her again: the knight's widow (he had been mayor of

Clockborough) would pass away and the heiress would return to her inheritance. I gathered with surprise that

she had not communicated to his wife the story of her attempt to hear Mr..Saltram, and I founded this

reticence on the easy supposition that Mrs. Saltram had fatigued by overpressure the spring of the sympathy

of which she boasted. The girl at any rate would forget the small adventure, be distracted, take a husband;

We clung to the idea of the brilliant course, delivered without an accident, that, as a lecturer, would still make

the paying public aware of our great man, but the fact remained that in the case of an inspiration so unequal

there was treachery, there was fallacy at least, in the very conception of a series. In our scrutiny of ways and

means we were inevitably subject to the old convention of the synopsis, the syllabus, partly of course not to

lose the advantage of his grand free hand in drawing up such things; but for myself I laughed at our playbills

even while I stickled for them. It was indeed amusing work to be scrupulous for Frank Saltram, who also at

moments laughed about it, so far as the comfort of a sigh so unstudied as to be cheerful might pass for such a

sound. He admitted with a candour all his own that he was in truth only to be depended on in the Mulvilles'

drawingroom. "Yes," he suggestively allowed, "it's there, I think, that I'm at my best; quite late, when it gets

toward elevenand if I've not been too much worried." We all knew what too much worry meant; it meant

too enslaved for the hour to the superstition of sobriety. On the Saturdays I used to bring my portmanteau, so

as not to have to think of eleven o'clock trains. I had a bold theory that as regards this temple of talk and its

altars of cushioned chintz, its pictures and its flowers, its large fireside and clear lamplight, we might really

arrive at something if the Mulvilles would but charge for admission. Here it was, however, that they

shamelessly broke down; as there's a flaw in every perfection this was the inexpugnable refuge of their

egotism. They declined to make their saloon a market, so that Saltram's golden words continued the sole coin

that rang there. It can have happened to no man, however, to be paid a greater price than such an enchanted

hush as surrounded him on his greatest nights. The most profane, on these occasions, felt a presence; all

minor eloquence grew dumb. Adelaide Mulville, for the pride of her hospitality, anxiously watched the door

or stealthily poked the fire. I used to call it the musicroom, for we had anticipated Bayreuth. The very gates

of the kingdom of light seemed to open and the horizon of thought to flash with the beauty of a sunrise at sea.

In the consideration of ways and means, the sittings of our little board, we were always conscious of the creak

of Mrs. Saltram's shoes. She hovered, she interrupted, she almost presided, the state of affairs being mostly

such as to supply her with every incentive for enquiring what was to be done next. It was the pressing pursuit

of this knowledge that, in concatenations of omnibuses and usually in very wet weather, led her so often to

my door. She thought us spiritless creatures with editors and publishers; but she carried matters to no great

effect when she personally pushed into backshops. She wanted all moneys to be paid to herself: they were

otherwise liable to such strange adventures. They trickled away into the desertthey were mainly at best,

alas, a slender stream. The editors and the publishers were the last people to take this remarkable thinker at

the valuation that has now pretty well come to be established. The former were halfdistraught 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

forprovided 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,

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 e lui seul the field of vision of that smokilyseeing

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 Wimbledonit was Mrs. Mulville's work not mineand 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 wasa 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 peoplehe 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

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 Clockboroughthe bottling, in a word, of the air of those lungs for convenient

public uncorking in cornexchangeswas 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

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 highwalled 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 manybuttoned page, in the daily airing, as he perhaps even pushed the Bathchair over somebody's toes.

I was destined to hear, none the less, through Mrs. Saltramwho, I afterwards learned, was in

correspondence with Lady Coxon's housekeeperthat 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 oldtime 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

I had had my disgusts, if I may allow myself today 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 Saltramthat 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 her husband, profiting by the example so signally given

him of the fatal effect of a want of character, left the letter, the drop too much, unanswered. The letter, an

incredible one, addressed by Saltram to Wimbledon during a stay with the Pudneys at Ramsgate, was the

central feature of the incident, which, however, had many features, each more painful than whichever other

we compared it with. The Pudneys had behaved shockingly, but that was no excuse. Base ingratitude, gross

indecencyone had one's choice only of such formulas as that the more they fitted the less they gave one

rest. These are dead aches now, and I am under no obligation, thank heaven, to be definite about the business.

There are things which if I had had to tell themwell, would have stopped me off here altogether.

I went abroad for the general election, and if I don't know how much, on the Continent, I forgot, I at least

know how much I missed, him. At a distance, in a foreign land, ignoring, abjuring, unlearning him, I

discovered what he had done for me. I owed him, oh unmistakeably, certain noble conceptions; I had lighted

my little taper at his smoky lamp, and lo it continued to twinkle. But the light it gave me just showed me how

much more I wanted. I was pursued of course by letters from Mrs. Saltram which I didn't scruple not to read,

though quite aware her embarrassments couldn't but be now of the gravest. I sacrificed to propriety by simply

putting them away, and this is how, one day as my absence drew to an end, my eye, while I rummaged in my

desk for another paper, was caught by a name on a leaf that had detached itself from the packet. The allusion

was to Miss Anvoy, who, it appeared, was engaged to be married to Mr. George Gravener; and the news was

two months old. A direct question of Mrs. Saltram's had thus remained unansweredshe had enquired of me

in a postscript what sort of man this aspirant to such a hand might be. The great other fact about him just then

was that he had been triumphantly returned for Clockborough in the interest of the party that had swept the

countryso that I might easily have referred Mrs. Saltram to the journals of the day. Yet when I at last wrote

her that I was coming home and would discharge my accumulated burden by seeing her, I but remarked in

I had almost avoided the general election, but some of its consequences, on my return, had smartly to be

faced. The season, in London, began to breathe again and to flap its folded wings. Confidence, under the new

Ministry, was understood to be reviving, and one of the symptoms, in a social body, was a recovery of

appetite. People once more fed together, and it happened that, one Saturday night, at somebody's house, I fed

with George Gravener. When the ladies left the room I moved up to where he sat and begged to congratulate

him. "On my election?" he asked after a moment; so that I could feign, jocosely, not to have heard of that

triumph and to be alluding to the rumour of a victory still more personal. I dare say I coloured however, for

his political success had momentarily passed out of my mind. What was present to it was that he was to

marry that beautiful girl; and yet his question made me conscious of some discomposureI hadn't intended

to put this before everything. He himself indeed ought gracefully to have done so, and I remember thinking

the whole man was in this assumption that in expressing my sense of what he had won I had fixed my

thoughts on his "seat." We straightened the matter out, and he was so much lighter in hand than I had lately

seen him that his spirits might well have been fed from a twofold source. He was so good as to say that he

hoped I should soon make the acquaintance of Miss Anvoy, who, with her aunt, was presently coming up to

town. Lady Coxon, in the country, had been seriously unwell, and this had delayed their arrival. I told him I

had heard the marriage would be a splendid one; on which, brightened and humanised by his luck, he laughed

and said "Do you mean for HER?" When I had again explained what I meant he went on: "Oh she's an

American, but you'd scarcely know it; unless, perhaps," he added, "by her being used to more money than

most girls in England, even the daughters of rich men. That wouldn't in the least do for a fellow like me, you

know, if it wasn't for the great liberality of her father. He really has been most kind, and everything's quite

satisfactory." He added that his eldest brother had taken a tremendous fancy to her and that during a recent

visit at Coldfield she had nearly won over Lady Maddock. I gathered from something he dropped later on that

the freehanded gentleman beyond the seas had not made a settlement, but had given a handsome present and

was apparently to be looked to, across the water, for other favours. People are simplified alike by great

contentments and great yearnings, and, whether or no it was Gravener's directness that begot my own, I seem

to recall that in some turn taken by our talk he almost imposed it on me as an act of decorum to ask if Miss

Anvoy had also by chance expectations from her aunt. My enquiry drew out that Lady Coxon, who was the

oddest of women, would have in any contingency to act under her late husband's will, which was odder still,

saddling her with a mass of queer obligations complicated with queer loopholes. There were several dreary

people, Coxon cousins, old maids, to whom she would have more or less to minister. Gravener laughed,

without saying no, when I suggested that the young lady might come in through a loophole; then suddenly, as

if he suspected my turning a lantern on him, he declared quite dryly: "That's all rotone's moved by other

A fortnight later, at Lady Coxon's own house, I understood well enough the springs one was moved by.

Gravener had spoken of me there as an old friend, and I received a gracious invitation to dine. The Knight's

widow was again indisposedshe had succumbed at the eleventh hour; so that I found Miss Anvoy bravely

playing hostess without even Gravener's help, since, to make matters worse, he had just sent up word that the

House, the insatiable House, with which he supposed he had contracted for easier terms, positively declined

to release him. I was struck with the courage, the grace and gaiety of the young lady left thus to handle the

fauna and flora of the Regent's Park. I did what I could to help her to classify them, after I had recovered

from the confusion of seeing her slightly disconcerted at perceiving in the guest introduced by her intended

the gentleman with whom she had had that talk about Frank Saltram. I had at this moment my first glimpse of

the fact that she was a person who could carry a responsibility; but I leave the reader to judge of my sense of

the aggravation, for either of us, of such a burden, when I heard the servant announce Mrs. Saltram. From

what immediately passed between the two ladies I gathered that the latter had been sent for posthaste to fill

the gap created by the absence of the mistress of the house. "Good!" I remember crying, "she'll be put by

ME;" and my apprehension was promptly justified. Mrs. Saltram taken in to dinner, and taken in as a

consequence of an appeal to her amiability, was Mrs. Saltram with a vengeance. I asked myself what Miss

Anvoy meant by doing such things, but the only answer I arrived at was that Gravener was verily fortunate.

She hadn't happened to tell him of her visit to Upper Baker Street, but she'd certainly tell him tomorrow; not

indeed that this would make him like any better her having had the innocence to invite such a person as Mrs.

Saltram on such an occasion. It could only strike me that I had never seen a young woman put such ignorance

into her cleverness, such freedom into her modesty; this, I think, was when, after dinner, she said to me

frankly, with almost jubilant mirth: "Oh you don't admire Mrs. Saltram?" Why should I? This was truly a

young person without guile. I had briefly to consider before I could reply that my objection to the lady named

was the objection often uttered about people met at the social boardI knew all her stories. Then as Miss

"His fluctuations don't matter", I returned, "for at night all cats are grey. You saw the shade of this one the

Miss Anvoy, who had been introducing with her American distinctness, looked encouragingly round at some

"Utterly. But that won't prevent his being planted there again, to bloom like a rose, within a month or two."

Miss Anvoy thought a moment. Then, "I should like to see them," she said with her fostering smile.

"I'll make George take me," she went on as Mrs. Saltram came up to interrupt us. She sniffed at this

unfortunate as kindly as she had smiled at me and, addressing the question to her, continued: "But the chance

of a lectureone of the wonderful lectures? Isn't there another course announced?"

"Another? There are about thirty!" I exclaimed, turning away and feeling Mrs. Saltram's little eyes in my

back. A few days after this I heard that Gravener's marriage was near at handwas settled for Whitsuntide;

but as no invitation had reached me I had my doubts, and there presently came to me in fact the report of a

postponement. Something was the matter; what was the matter was supposed to be that Lady Coxon was now

critically ill. I had called on her after my dinner in the Regent's Park, but I had neither seen her nor seen Miss

Anvoy. I forget today the exact order in which, at this period, sundry incidents occurred and the particular

stage at which it suddenly struck me, making me catch my breath a little, that the progression, the

acceleration, was for all the world that of fine drama. This was probably rather late in the day, and the exact

order doesn't signify. What had already occurred was some accident determining a more patient wait. George

Gravener, whom I met again, in fact told me as much, but without signs of perturbation. Lady Coxon had to

be constantly attended to, and there were other good reasons as well. Lady Coxon had to be so constantly

attended to that on the occasion of a second attempt in the Regent's Park I equally failed to obtain a sight of

her niece. I judged it discreet in all the conditions not to make a third; but this didn't matter, for it was through

Adelaide Mulville that the sidewind of the comedy, though I was at first unwitting, began to reach me. I

went to Wimbledon at times because Saltram was there, and I went at others because he wasn't. The Pudneys,

who had taken him to Birmingham, had already got rid of him, and we had a horrible consciousness of his

wandering roofless, in dishonour, about the smoky Midlands, almost as the injured Lear wandered on the

stormlashed heath. His room, upstairs, had been lately done up (I could hear the crackle of the new chintz)

and the difference only made his smirches and bruises, his splendid tainted genius, the more tragic. If he

wasn't barefoot in the mire he was sure to be unconventionally shod. These were the things Adelaide and I,

who were old enough friends to stare at each other in silence, talked about when we didn't speak. When we

spoke it was only about the brilliant girl George Gravener was to marry and whom he had brought out the

other Sunday. I could see that this presentation had been happy, for Mrs. Mulville commemorated it after her

sole fashion of showing confidence in a new relation. "She likes meshe likes me": her native humility

exulted in that measure of success. We all knew for ourselves how she liked those who liked her, and as

One of the consequences, for the Mulvilles, of the sacrifices they made for Frank Saltram was that they had to

give up their carriage. Adelaide drove gently into London in a onehorse greenish thing, an early Victorian

landau, hired, near at hand, imaginatively, from a brokendown jobmaster whose wife was in

consumptiona vehicle that made people turn round all the more when her pensioner sat beside her in a soft

white hat and a shawl, one of the dear woman's own. This was his position and I dare say his costume when

on an afternoon in July she went to return Miss Anvoy's visit. The wheel of fate had now revolved, and amid

silences deep and exhaustive, compunctions and condonations alike unutterable, Saltram was reinstated. Was

it in pride or in penance that Mrs. Mulville had begun immediately to drive him about? If he was ashamed of

his ingratitude she might have been ashamed of her forgiveness; but she was incorrigibly capable of liking

him to be conspicuous in the landau while she was in shops or with her acquaintance. However, if he was in

the pillory for twenty minutes in the Regent's ParkI mean at Lady Coxon's door while his companion paid

her callit wasn't to the further humiliation of any one concerned that she presently came out for him in

person, not even to show either of them what a fool she was that she drew him in to be introduced to the

bright young American. Her account of the introduction I had in its order, but before that, very late in the

season, under Gravener's auspices, I met Miss Anvoy at tea at the House of Commons. The member for

Clockborough had gathered a group of pretty ladies, and the Mulvilles were not of the party. On the great

terrace, as I strolled off with her a little, the guest of honour immediately exclaimed to me: "I've seen him,

We went no further; I fancied she had become aware Gravener was looking at us. She turned back toward the

knot of the others, and I said: "Dislike him as much as you willI see you're bitten."

"I hope I shan't die of anything before I've seen more of Mrs. Mulville." I rejoiced with her over plain

Adelaide, whom she pronounced the loveliest woman she had met in England; but before we separated I

remarked to her that it was an act of mere humanity to warn her that if she should see more of Frank

Saltramwhich would be likely to follow on any increase of acquaintance with Mrs. Mulvilleshe might

find herself flattening her nose against the clear hard pane of an eternal questionthat of the relative, that of

the opposed, importances of virtue and brains. She replied that this was surely a subject on which one took

everything for granted; whereupon I admitted that I had perhaps expressed myself ill. What I referred to was

what I had referred to the night we met in Upper Baker Streetthe relative importance (relative to virtue) of

other gifts. She asked me if I called virtue a gifta thing handed to us in a parcel on our first birthday; and I

declared that this very enquiry proved to me the problem had already caught her by the skirt. She would have

help however, the same help I myself had once had, in resisting its tendency to make one cross.

She HAD helped himI had his own word for it that at Clockborough her bedevilment of the voters had

really put him in. She would do so doubtless again and again, though I heard the very next month that this

fine faculty had undergone a temporary eclipse. News of the catastrophe first came to me from Mrs. Saltram,

and it was afterwards confirmed at Wimbledon: poor Miss Anvoy was in trouble great disasters in

America had suddenly summoned her home. Her father, in New York, had suffered reverses, lost so much

money that it was really vexatious as showing how much he had had. It was Adelaide who told me she had

I'm afraid I cursed the House of Commons: I was so much interested. Of course he'd follow her as soon as he

was free to make her his wife; only she mightn't now be able to bring him anything like the marriageportion

of which he had begun by having the virtual promise. Mrs. Mulville let me know what was already said: she

was charming, this American girl, but really these American fathers! What was a man to do? Mr. Saltram,

according to Mrs. Mulville, was of opinion that a man was never to suffer his relation to money to become a

spiritual relationhe was to keep it exclusively material. "Moi pas comprendre!" I commented on this; in

rejoinder to which Adelaide, with her beautiful sympathy, explained that she supposed he simply meant that

the thing was to use it, don't you know? but not to think too much about it. "To take it, but not to thank you

for it?" I still more profanely enquired. For a quarter of an hour afterwards she wouldn't look at me, but this

didn't prevent my asking her what had been the result, that afternoonin the Regent's Park, of her taking our

"Oh so charming!" she answered, brightening. "He said he recognised in her a nature he could absolutely

"It was very handsome." Now at last she met my eyes, though I could see it was with an effort. "Thirty

"Out of the drawer of a table at which she had been writing. She just slipped the folded notes into my hand.

He wasn't looking; it was while he was going back to the carriage." "Oh," said Adelaide reassuringly, "I take

care of it for him!" The dear practical soul thought my agitation, for I confess I was agitated, referred to the

employment of the money. Her disclosure made me for a moment muse violently, and I dare say that during

that moment I wondered if anything else in the world makes people so gross as unselfishness. I uttered, I

suppose, some vague synthetic cry, for she went on as if she had had a glimpse of my inward amaze at such

But I wasn't thinking of that. "Truly indeed these Americans!" I said. "With her father in the very act, as it

Mrs. Mulville stared. "Oh I suppose Mr. Anvoy has scarcely gone bankruptor whatever he has doneon

purpose. Very likely they won't be able to keep it up, but there it was, and it was a very beautiful impulse."

"And I know what YOU'VE enjoyed." After a moment I added: "Had he peradventure caught a glimpse of

At this my companion honestly flushed. "How can you be so cruel when you know how little he calculates?"

"Forgive me, I do know it. But you tell me things that act on my nerves. I'm sure he hadn't caught a glimpse

Mrs. Mulville brightly concurred. "And perhaps even of her beautiful listening face."

"His talk? It was apropos of her engagement, which I had told him about: the idea of marriage, the

philosophy, the poetry, the sublimity of it." It was impossible wholly to restrain one's mirth at this, and some

rude ripple that I emitted again caused my companion to admonish me. "It sounds a little stale, but you know

"Of what other great men can you equally say it?and that he has never, but NEVER, had a deflexion?"

I tried to think of some other great man, but I had to give it up. "Didn't Miss Anvoy express her satisfaction in

any less diffident way than by her charming present?" I was reduced to asking instead.

"Oh yes, she overflowed to me on the steps while he was getting into the carriage." These words somehow

brushed up a picture of Saltram's big shawled back as he hoisted himself into the green landau. "She said she

"He looked very nice, and you know he's really clean. Miss Anvoy used such a remarkable expressionshe

"Suspended in the moral worldswinging and shining and flashing there. She's monstrously clever, you

George Gravener didn't follow her, for late in September, after the House had risen, I met him in a

railwaycarriage. He was coming up from Scotland and I had just quitted some relations who lived near

Durham. The current of travel back to London wasn't yet strong; at any rate on entering the compartment I

found he had had it for some time to himself. We fared in company, and though he had a blue book in his

lap and the open jaws of his bag threatened me with the white teeth of confused papers, we inevitably, we

even at last sociably conversed. I saw things weren't well with him, but I asked no question till something

dropped by himself made, as it had made on another occasion, an absence of curiosity invidious. He

mentioned that he was worried about his good old friend Lady Coxon, who, with her niece likely to be

detained some time in America, lay seriously ill at Clockborough, much on his mind and on his hands.

I waited, after expressing due concern, but I eventually said: "I hope that raises no objection to your

"None whatever; moreover it's my trade to meet objections. But it may create tiresome delays, of which there

have been too many, from various causes, already. Lady Coxon got very bad, then she got much better. Then

Mr. Anvoy suddenly began to totter, and now he seems quite on his back. I'm afraid he's really in for some

big reverse. Lady Coxon's worse again, awfully upset by the news from America, and she sends me word that

"She's everything to her wretched father. She writes me every posttelling me to smooth her aunt's pillow.

I've other things to smooth; but the old lady, save for her servants, is really alone. She won't receive her

Coxon relationsshe's angry at so much of her money going to them. Besides, she's hopelessly mad," said

I don't remember whether it was this, or what it was, that made me ask if she hadn't such an appreciation of

He gave me a cold glance, wanting to know what had put Mrs. Saltram into my head, and I replied that she

was unfortunately never out of it. I happened to remember the wonderful accounts she had given me of the

kindness Lady Coxon had shown her. Gravener declared this to be false; Lady Coxon, who didn't care for

her, hadn't seen her three times. The only foundation for it was that Miss Anvoy, who used, poor girl, to

chuck money about in a manner she must now regret, had for an hour seen in the miserable womanyou

could never know what she'd see in peoplean interesting pretext for the liberality with which her nature

overflowed. But even Miss Anvoy was now quite tired of her. Gravener told me more about the crash in New

York and the annoyance it had been to him, and we also glanced here and there in other directions; but by the

time we got to Doncaster the principal thing he had let me see was that he was keeping something back. We

stopped at that station, and, at the carriagedoor, some one made a movement to get in. Gravener uttered a

sound of impatience, and I felt sure that but for this I should have had the secret. Then the intruder, for some

reason, spared us his company; we started afresh, and my hope of a disclosure returned. My companion held

his tongue, however, and I pretended to go to sleep; in fact I really dozed for discouragement. When I

reopened my eyes he was looking at me with an injured air. He tossed away with some vivacity the remnant

of a cigarette and then said: "If you're not too sleepy I want to put you a case." I answered that I'd make every

effort to attend, and welcomed the note of interest when he went on: "As I told you a while ago, Lady Coxon,

poor dear, is demented." His tone had much behind itwas full of promise. I asked if her ladyship's

misfortune were a trait of her malady or only of her character, and he pronounced it a product of both. The

case he wanted to put to me was a matter on which it concerned him to have the impression the judgement,

he might also sayof another person. "I mean of the average intelligent man, but you see I take what I can

get." There would be the technical, the strictly legal view; then there would be the way the question would

strike a man of the world. He had lighted another cigarette while he talked, and I saw he was glad to have it to

handle when he brought out at last, with a laugh slightly artificial: "In fact it's a subject on which Miss Anvoy

"In advancethat's quite right. That's how I decided when I proposed to her. But my story will interest you

only so far as your mind isn't made up." Gravener puffed his cigarette a minute and then continued: "Are you

"Some earnest and 'loyal' seeker," Gravener said. "It was a sketchy design of her late husband's, and he

handed it on to her; setting apart in his will a sum of money of which she was to enjoy the interest for life, but

of which, should she eventually see her opportunitythe matter was left largely to her discretionshe

would best honour his memory by determining the exemplary public use. This sum of money, no less than

thirteen thousand pounds, was to be called The Coxon Fund; and poor Sir Gregory evidently proposed to

himself that The Coxon Fund should cover his name with glorybe universally desired and admired. He left

his wife a full declaration of his views, so far at least as that term may be applied to views vitiated by a

vagueness really infantine. A little learning's a dangerous thing, and a good citizen who happens to have been

an ass is worse for a community than bad sewerage. He's worst of all when he's dead, because then he can't be

stopped. However, such as they were, the poor man's aspirations are now in his wife's bosom, or fermenting

rather in her foolish brain: it lies with her to carry them out. But of course she must first catch her hare."

"The flower that blushes unseen for want of such a pecuniary independence as may aid the light that's in it to

shine upon the human race. The individual, in a word, who, having the rest of the machinery, the spiritual, the

I burst out laughing. "Delightful munificent Sir Gregory! It's a charming idea."

"Not that I know ofand she's perfectly reasonable about it. But Lady Coxon has put the matter before her,

"Talk that, as you've so interestingly intimated, has landed you in a disagreement."

"It seems to me a piece of solemn twaddlewhich can't fail to be attended with consequences certainly

grotesque and possibly immoral. To begin with, fancy constituting an endowment without establishing a

"I'm not competentI hate the thing. Besides, she hasn't," my friend went on. "The real history of the matter,

I take it, is that the inspiration was originally Lady Coxon's own, that she infected him with it, and that the

flattering option left her is simply his tribute to her beautiful, her aboriginal enthusiasm. She came to England

forty years ago, a thin transcendental Bostonian, and even her odd happy frumpy Clockborough marriage

never really materialised her. She feels indeed that she has become very Britishas if that, as a process, as a

'Werden,' as anything but an original sign of grace, were conceivable; but it's precisely what makes her cling

"Do you mean how can she act in the matter?" Gravener asked. "That's precisely the question. She can't! As

she has never yet caught her hare, never spied out her lucky impostorhow should she, with the life she has

led?her husband's intention has come very near lapsing. His idea, to do him justice, was that it SHOULD

lapse if exactly the right person, the perfect mixture of genius and chill penury, should fail to turn up. Ah the

I found all this quite thrillingI took it in with avidity. "And if she dies without doing anything, what

"Her hands are not tied. She has a grand discretion. The proof is that three months ago she offered to make

"For Miss Anvoy's own useon the occasion of her prospective marriage. She was discouragedthe

earnest seeker required so earnest a search. She was afraid of making a mistake; every one she could think of

seemed either not earnest enough or not poor enough. On the receipt of the first bad news about Mr. Anvoy's

affairs she proposed to Ruth to make the sacrifice for her. As the situation in New York got worse she

"On the head of the deserving object, the great man frustrated," said Gravener. "She only consents to act in

My tone couldn't have been harsh, but he coloured a little and there was a queer light in his eye. "My dear

fellow, if I 'blamed' the young lady I'm engaged to I shouldn't immediately say it even to so old a friend as

you." I saw that some deep discomfort, some restless desire to be sided with, reassuringly, approvingly

mirrored, had been at the bottom of his drifting so far, and I was genuinely touched by his confidence. It was

inconsistent with his habits; but being troubled about a woman was not, for him, a habit: that itself was an

inconsistency. George Gravener could stand straight enough before any other combination of forces. It

amused me to think that the combination he had succumbed to had an American accent, a transcendental aunt

and an insolvent father; but all my old loyalty to him mustered to meet this unexpected hint that I could help

him. I saw that I could from the insincere tone in which he pursued: "I've criticised her of course, I've

contended with her, and it has been great fun." Yet it clearly couldn't have been such great fun as to make it

improper for me presently to ask if Miss Anvoy had nothing at all settled on herself. To this he replied that

she had only a trifle from her mothera mere four hundred a year, which was exactly why it would be

convenient to him that she shouldn't decline, in the face of this total change in her prospects, an accession of

income which would distinctly help them to marry. When I enquired if there were no other way in which so

rich and so affectionate an aunt could cause the weight of her benevolence to be felt, he answered that Lady

Coxon was affectionate indeed, but was scarcely to be called rich. She could let her project of the Fund lapse

for her niece's benefit, but she couldn't do anything else. She had been accustomed to regard her as

tremendously provided for, and she was up to her eyes in promises to anxious Coxons. She was a woman of

an inordinate conscience, and her conscience was now a distress to her, hovering round her bed in

irreconcilable forms of resentful husbands, portionless nieces and undiscoverable philosophers.

We were by this time getting into the whirr of fleeting platforms, the multiplication of lights. "I think you'll

find," I said with a laugh, "that your predicament will disappear in the very fact that the philosopher is

He began to gather up his papers. "Who can set a limit to the ingenuity of an extravagant woman?"

"Yes, after all, who indeed?" I echoed as I recalled the extravagance commemorated in Adelaide's anecdote

The thing I had been most sensible of in that talk with George Gravener was the way Saltram's name kept out

of it. It seemed to me at the time that we were quite pointedly silent about him; but afterwards it appeared

more probable there had been on my companion's part no conscious avoidance. Later on I was sure of this,

and for the best of reasonsthe simple reason of my perceiving more completely that, for evil as well as for

good, he said nothing to Gravener's imagination. That honest man didn't fear himhe was too much

disgusted with him. No more did I, doubtless, and for very much the same reason. I treated my friend's story

as an absolute confidence; but when before Christmas, by Mrs. Saltram, I was informed of Lady Coxon's

death without having had news of Miss Anvoy's return, I found myself taking for granted we should hear no

more of these nuptials, in which, as obscurely unnatural, I now saw I had never TOO disconcertedly believed.

I began to ask myself how people who suited each other so little could please each other so much. The charm

was some material charm, some afffinity, exquisite doubtless, yet superficial some surrender to youth and

beauty and passion, to force and grace and fortune, happy accidents and easy contacts. They might dote on

each other's persons, but how could they know each other's souls? How could they have the same prejudices,

how could they have the same horizon? Such questions, I confess, seemed quenched but not answered when,

one day in February, going out to Wimbledon, I found our young lady in the house. A passion that had

brought her back across the wintry ocean was as much of a passion as was needed. No impulse equally strong

indeed had drawn George Gravener to America; a circumstance on which, however, I reflected only long

enough to remind myself that it was none of my business. Ruth Anvoy was distinctly different, and I felt that

the difference was not simply that of her marks of mourning. Mrs. Mulville told me soon enough what it was:

it was the difference between a handsome girl with large expectations and a handsome girl with only four

hundred a year. This explanation indeed didn't wholly content me, not even when I learned that her mourning

had a double causelearned that poor Mr. Anvoy, giving way altogether, buried under the ruins of his

"So she has come out to marry George Gravener?" I commented. "Wouldn't it have been prettier of him to

"Hasn't the House just met?" Adelaide replied. "And for Mr. Gravener the House!" Then she added: "I

gather that her having come is exactly a sign that the marriage is a little shaky. If it were quite all right a

I noted that they were already Ruth and Adelaide, but what I said was: "Do you mean she'll have had to

"No, I mean that she must have come out for some reason independent of it." Adelaide could only surmise,

however, as yet, and there was more, as we found, to be revealed. Mrs. Mulville, on hearing of her arrival,

had brought the young lady out in the green landau for the Sunday. The Coxons were in possession of the

house in Regent's Park, and Miss Anvoy was in dreary lodgings. George Gravener had been with her when

Adelaide called, but had assented graciously enough to the little visit at Wimbledon. The carriage, with Mr.

Saltram in it but not mentioned, had been sent off on some errand from which it was to return and pick the

ladies up. Gravener had left them together, and at the end of an hour, on the Saturday afternoon, the party of

three had driven out to Wimbledon. This was the girl's second glimpse of our great man, and I was interested

in asking Mrs. Mulville if the impression made by the first appeared to have been confirmed. On her replying

after consideration, that of course with time and opportunity it couldn't fail to be, but that she was

disappointed, I was sufficiently struck with her use of this last word to question her further.

"Yes; I hoped for a greater effect last evening. We had two or three people, but he scarcely opened his

"He'll be all the better tonight," I opined after a moment. Then I pursued: "What particular importance do

Adelaide turned her mild pale eyes on me as for rebuke of my levity. "Why the importance of her being as

I'm afraid that at this my levity grew. "Oh that's a happiness almost too great to wish a person!" I saw she

hadn't yet in her mind what I had in mine, and at any rate the visitor's actual bliss was limited to a walk in the

garden with Kent Mulville. Later in the afternoon I also took one, and I saw nothing of Miss Anvoy till

dinner, at which we failed of the company of Saltram, who had caused it to be reported that he was

indisposed and lying down. This made us, most of usfor there were other friends present convey to each

other in silence some of the unutterable things that in those years our eyes had inevitably acquired the art of

expressing. If a fine little American enquirer hadn't been there we would have expressed them otherwise, and

Adelaide would have pretended not to hear. I had seen her, before the very fact, abstract herself nobly; and I

knew that more than once, to keep it from the servants, managing, dissimulating cleverly, she had helped her

husband to carry him bodily to his room. Just recently he had been so wise and so deep and so high that I had

begun to get nervousto wonder if by chance there were something behind it, if he were kept straight for

instance by the knowledge that the hated Pudneys would have more to tell us if they chose. He was lying low,

but unfortunately it was common wisdom with us in this connexion that the biggest splashes took place in the

quietest pools. We should have had a merry life indeed if all the splashes had sprinkled us as refreshingly as

the waters we were even then to feel about our ears. Kent Mulville had been up to his room, but had come

back with a face that told as few tales as I had seen it succeed in telling on the evening I waited in the

lectureroom with Miss Anvoy. I said to myself that our friend had gone out, but it was a comfort that the

presence of a comparative stranger deprived us of the dreary duty of suggesting to each other, in respect of

his errand, edifying possibilities in which we didn't ourselves believe. At ten o'clock he came into the

drawingroom with his waistcoat much awry but his eyes sending out great signals. It was precisely with his

entrance that I ceased to be vividly conscious of him. I saw that the crystal, as I had called it, had begun to

Even when I was told afterwards that he had, as we might have said today, broken the record, the manner in

which that attention had been rewarded relieved me of a sense of loss. I had of course a perfect general

consciousness that something great was going on: it was a little like having been etherised to hear Herr

Joachim play. The old music was in the air; I felt the strong pulse of thought, the sink and swell, the flight,

the poise, the plunge; but I knew something about one of the listeners that nobody else knew, and Saltram's

monologue could reach me only through that medium. To this hour I'm of no use when, as a witness, I'm

appealed tofor they still absurdly contend about itas to whether or no on that historic night he was

drunk; and my position is slightly ridiculous, for I've never cared to tell them what it really was I was taken

up with. What I got out of it is the only morsel of the total experience that is quite my own. The others were

shared, but this is incommunicable. I feel that now, I'm bound to say, even in thus roughly evoking the

occasion, and it takes something from my pride of clearness. However, I shall perhaps be as clear as is

absolutely needful if I remark that our young lady was too much given up to her own intensity of observation

to be sensible of mine. It was plainly not the question of her marriage that had brought her back. I greatly

enjoyed this discovery and was sure that had that question alone been involved she would have stirred no

step. In this case doubtless Gravener would, in spite of the House of Commons, have found means to rejoin

her. It afterwards made me uncomfortable for her that, alone in the lodging Mrs. Mulville had put before me

as dreary, she should have in any degree the air of waiting for her fate; so that I was presently relieved at

hearing of her having gone to stay at Coldfield. If she was in England at all while the engagement stood the

only proper place for her was under Lady Maddock's wing. Now that she was unfortunate and relatively poor,

There would be much to say, if I had space, about the way her behaviour, as I caught gleams of it, ministered

to the image that had taken birth in my mind, to my private amusement, while that other night I listened to

George Gravener in the railwaycarriage. I watched her in the light of this queer possibilitya formidable

thing certainly to meetand I was aware that it coloured, extravagantly perhaps, my interpretation of her

very looks and tones. At Wimbledon for instance it had appeared to me she was literally afraid of Saltram, in

dread of a coercion that she had begun already to feel. I had come up to town with her the next day and had

been convinced that, though deeply interested, she was immensely on her guard. She would show as little as

possible before she should be ready to show everything. What this final exhibition might be on the part of a

girl perceptibly so able to think things out I found it great sport to forecast. It would have been exciting to be

approached by her, appealed to by her for advice; but I prayed to heaven I mightn't find myself in such a

predicament. If there was really a present rigour in the situation of which Gravener had sketched for me the

elements, she would have to get out of her difficulty by herself. It wasn't I who had launched her and it wasn't

I who could help her. I didn't fail to ask myself why, since I couldn't help her, I should think so much about

her. It was in part my suspense that was responsible for this; I waited impatiently to see whether she wouldn't

have told Mrs. Mulville a portion at least of what I had learned from Gravener. But I saw Mrs. Mulville was

still reduced to wonder what she had come out again for if she hadn't come as a conciliatory bride. That she

had come in some other character was the only thing that fitted all the appearances. Having for family reasons

to spend some time that spring in the west of England, I was in a manner out of earshot of the great oceanic

rumbleI mean of the continuous hum of Saltram's thoughtand my uneasiness tended to keep me quiet.

There was something I wanted so little to have to say that my prudence surmounted my curiosity. I only

wondered if Ruth Anvoy talked over the idea of The Coxon Fund with Lady Maddock, and also somewhat

why I didn't hear from Wimbledon. I had a reproachful note about something or other from Mrs. Saltram, but

it contained no mention of Lady Coxon's niece, on whom her eyes had been much less fixed since the recent

Poor Adelaide's silence was fully explained laterpractically explained when in June, returning to London, I

was honoured by this admirable woman with an early visit. As soon as she arrived I guessed everything, and

as soon as she told me that darling Ruth had been in her house nearly a month I had my question ready.

"Because she loves me so!" cried Adelaide gaily. But she hadn't come to see me only to tell me Miss Anvoy

loved her: that was quite sufficiently established, and what was much more to the point was that Mr.

Gravener had now raised an objection to it. He had protested at least against her being at Wimbledon, where

in the innocence of his heart he had originally brought her himself; he called on her to put an end to their

"In the most splendid spiritas a duty about which there can be no two opinions." To which my friend

I gave a quick cry at this, which, in its violence, made my visitor turn pale. "How very awful!"

"He isn't good enough!" I went on; to which she opposed a sound almost as contentious as my own had been.

This made me, with genuine immediate horror, exclaim: "You haven't influenced her, I hope!" and my

emphasis brought back the blood with a rush to poor Adelaide's face. She declared while she blushedfor I

had frightened her againthat she had never influenced anybody and that the girl had only seen and heard

and judged for herself. HE had influenced her, if I would, as he did every one who had a soul: that word, as

we knew, even expressed feebly the power of the things he said to haunt the mind. How could she, Adelaide,

help it if Miss Anvoy's mind was haunted? I demanded with a groan what right a pretty girl engaged to a

rising M.P. had to HAVE a mind; but the only explanation my bewildered friend could give me was that she

was so clever. She regarded Mr. Saltram naturally as a tremendous force for good. She was intelligent enough

"She's many things enough, but is she, among them, rich enough?" I demanded. "Rich enough, I mean, to

"That's for herself to judge. Besides, it's not her own money; she doesn't in the least consider it so."

"The difficulty that brought her back, yes: she had absolutely to see her poor aunt's solicitor. It's clear that by

Lady Coxon's will she may have the money, but it's still clearer to her conscience that the original condition,

definite, intensely implied on her uncle's part, is attached to the use of it. She can only take one view of it. It's

"The Endowment," I permitted myself to observe, "is a conception superficially sublime, but fundamentally

"Possibly, though I've not seen him for months. It's simply the way it strikes me too. It's an old wife's tale.

Gravener made some reference to the legal aspect, but such an absurdly loose arrangement has NO legal

"Ruth doesn't insist on that," said Mrs. Mulville; "and it's, for her, exactly this technical weakness that

"Are you repeating her words?" I enquired. I forget what else Adelaide said, but she said she was

magnificent. I thought of George Gravener confronted with such magnificence as that, and I asked what

could have made two such persons ever suppose they understood each other. Mrs. Mulville assured me the

girl loved him as such a woman could love and that she suffered as such a woman could suffer. Nevertheless

she wanted to see ME. At this I sprang up with a groan. "Oh I'm so sorry!when?" Small though her sense

of humour, I think Adelaide laughed at my sequence. We discussed the day, the nearest it would be

convenient I should come out; but before she went I asked my visitor how long she had been acquainted with

"I couldn't very well tell you she was with me without telling you that no time had even yet been fixed for her

marriage. And I couldn't very well tell you as much as that without telling you what I knew of the reason of

it. It was not till a day or two ago," Mrs. Mulville went on, "that she asked me to ask you if you wouldn't

come and see her. Then at last she spoke of your knowing about the idea of the Endowment."

"As a subject for the prize?" This was hugely obvious, and I presently returned: "I think I'll sail tomorrow

But I frivolously, continued. "On Thursday at five, we said?" The appointment was made definite and I

"In perfection, really, by the happiest of chances: he has positively been a dear. And then, as to what we

revere him for, in the most wonderful form. His very highestpure celestial light. You won't do him an ill

"What danger can equal for him the danger to which he's exposed from himself?" I asked. "Look out sharp, if

he has lately been too prim. He'll presently take a day off, treat us to some exhibition that will make an

My visitor, for a moment, screwed her parasol into my carpet. "He grows bigger every day."

That girl at Wimbledon, on the Thursday afternoon, more than justified my apprehensions. I recognised fully

now the cause of the agitation she had produced in me from the firstthe faint foreknowledge that there was

something very stiff I should have to do for her. I felt more than ever committed to my fate as, standing

before her in the big drawingroom where they had tactfully left us to ourselves, I tried with a smile to string

together the pearls of lucidity which, from her chair, she successively tossed me. Pale and bright, in her

monotonous mourning, she was an image of intelligent purpose, of the passion of duty; but I asked myself

whether any girl had ever had so charming an instinct as that which permitted her to laugh out, as for the joy

of her difficulty, into the priggish old room. This remarkable young woman could be earnest without being

solemn, and at moments when I ought doubtless to have cursed her obstinacy I found myself watching the

unstudied play of her eyebrows or the recurrence of a singularly intense whiteness produced by the parting of

her lips. These aberrations, I hasten to add, didn't prevent my learning soon enough why she had wished to

see me. Her reason for this was as distinct as her beauty: it was to make me explain what I had meant, on the

occasion of our first meeting, by Mr. Saltram's want of dignity. It wasn't that she couldn't imagine, but she

desired it there from my lips. What she really desired of course was to know whether there was worse about

him than what she had found out for herself. She hadn't been a month so much in the house with him without

discovering that he wasn't a man of monumental bronze. He was like a jelly minus its mould, he had to be

embanked; and that was precisely the source of her interest in him and the ground of her project. She put her

project boldly before me: there it stood in its preposterous beauty. She was as willing to take the humorous

view of it as I could be: the only difference was that for her the humorous view of a thing wasn't necessarily

Moreover she professed that she couldn't discuss with me the primary questionthe moral obligation: that

was in her own breast. There were things she couldn't go intoinjunctions, impressions she had received.

They were a part of the closest intimacy of her intercourse with her aunt, they were absolutely clear to her;

and on questions of delicacy, the interpretation of a fidelity, of a promise, one had always in the last resort to

make up one's mind for one's self. It was the idea of the application to the particular case, such a splendid one

at last, that troubled her, and she admitted that it stirred very deep things. She didn't pretend that such a

responsibility was a simple matter; if it HAD been she wouldn't have attempted to saddle me with any portion

of it. The Mulvilles were sympathy itself, but were they absolutely candid? Could they indeed be, in their

positionwould it even have been to be desired? Yes, she had sent for me to ask no less than that of

mewhether there was anything dreadful kept back. She made no allusion whatever to George GravenerI

thought her silence the only good taste and her gaiety perhaps a part of the very anxiety of that discretion, the

effect of a determination that people shouldn't know from herself that her relations with the man she was to

marry were strained. All the weight, however, that she left me to throw was a sufficient implication of the

weight HE had thrown in vain. Oh she knew the question of character was immense, and that one couldn't

entertain any plan for making merit comfortable without running the gauntlet of that terrible procession of

interrogationpoints which, like a young ladies' school out for a walk, hooked their uniform noses at the tail

of governess Conduct. But were we absolutely to hold that there was never, never, never an exception, never,

never, never an occasion for liberal acceptance, for clever charity, for suspended pedantry for letting one

side, in short, outbalance another? When Miss Anvoy threw off this appeal I could have embraced her for so

delightfully emphasising her unlikeness to Mrs. Saltram. "Why not have the courage of one's forgiveness,"

"Seeing how wonderfully you've threshed the whole thing out," I evasively replied, "gives me an

She considered this remark an instant with her eyes on mine, and I divined that it struck her I might possibly

intend it as a reference to some personal subjection to our fat philosopher, to some aberration of sensibility,

some perversion of taste. At least I couldn't interpret otherwise the sudden flash that came into her face. Such

a manifestation, as the result of any word of mine, embarrassed me; but while I was thinking how to reassure

her the flush passed away in a smile of exquisite good nature. "Oh you see one forgets so wonderfully how

one dislikes him!" she said; and if her tone simply extinguished his strange figure with the brush of its

compassion, it also rings in my ear today as the purest of all our praises. But with what quick response of

fine pity such a relegation of the man himself made me privately sigh "Ah poor Saltram!" She instantly, with

this, took the measure of all I didn't believe, and it enabled her to go on: "What can one do when a person has

"Yes, what can one do?" If I struck her as a little vague it was because I was thinking of another person. I

indulged in another inarticulate murmur"Poor George Gravener!" What had become of the lift HE had

given that interest? Later on I made up my mind that she was sore and stricken at the appearance he presented

of wanting the miserable money. This was the hidden reason of her alienation. The probable sincerity, in spite

of the illiberality, of his scruples about the particular use of it under discussion didn't efface the ugliness of

his demand that they should buy a good house with it. Then, as for his alienation, he didn't, pardonably

enough, grasp the lift Frank Saltram had given her interest in life. If a mere spectator could ask that last

question, with what rage in his heart the man himself might! He wasn't, like her, I was to see, too proud to

I was unable this time to stay to dinner: such at any rate was the plea on which I took leave. I desired in truth

to get away from my young lady, for that obviously helped me not to pretend to satisfy her. How COULD I

satisfy her? I asked myselfhow could I tell her how much had been kept back? I didn't even know and I

certainly didn't desire to know. My own policy had ever been to learn the least about poor Saltram's

weaknessesnot to learn the most. A great deal that I had in fact learned had been forced upon me by his

wife. There was something even irritating in Miss Anvoy's crude conscientiousness, and I wondered why,

after all, she couldn't have let him alone and been content to entrust George Gravener with the purchase of the

good house. I was sure he would have driven a bargain, got something excellent and cheap. I laughed louder

even than she, I temporised, I failed her; I told her I must think over her case. I professed a horror of

responsibilities and twitted her with her own extravagant passion for them. It wasn't really that I was afraid of

the scandal, the moral discredit for the Fund; what troubled me most was a feeling of a different order. Of

course, as the beneficiary of the Fund was to enjoy a simple lifeinterest, as it was hoped that new

beneficiaries would arise and come up to new standards, it wouldn't be a trifle that the first of these worthies

shouldn't have been a striking example of the domestic virtues. The Fund would start badly, as it were, and

the laurel would, in some respects at least, scarcely be greener from the brows of the original wearer. That

idea, however, was at that hour, as I have hinted, not the source of solicitude it ought perhaps to have been,

for I felt less the irregularity of Saltram's getting the money than that of this exalted young woman's giving it

up. I wanted her to have it for herself, and I told her so before I went away. She looked graver at this than she

had looked at all, saying she hoped such a preference wouldn't make me dishonest.

It made me, to begin with, very restlessmade me, instead of going straight to the station, fidget a little

about that manycoloured Common which gives Wimbledon horizons. There was a worry for me to work

off, or rather keep at a distance, for I declined even to admit to myself that I had, in Miss Anvoy's phrase,

been saddled with it. What could have been clearer indeed than the attitude of recognising perfectly what a

world of trouble The Coxon Fund would in future save us, and of yet liking better to face a continuance of

that trouble than see, and in fact contribute to, a deviation from attainable bliss in the life of two other persons

in whom I was deeply interested? Suddenly, at the end of twenty minutes, there was projected across this

clearness the image of a massive middleaged man seated on a bench under a tree, with sad far wandering

eyes and plump white hands folded on the head of a stick a stick I recognised, a stout goldheaded staff

that I had given him in devoted days. I stopped short as he turned his face to me, and it happened that for

some reason or other I took in as I had perhaps never done before the beauty of his rich blank gaze. It was

charged with experience as the sky is charged with light, and I felt on the instant as if we had been

overspanned and conjoined by the great arch of a bridge or the great dome of a temple. Doubtless I was

rendered peculiarly sensitive to it by something in the way I had been giving him up and sinking him. While I

met it I stood there smitten, and I felt myself responding to it with a sort of guilty grimace. This brought back

his attention in a smile which expressed for me a cheerful weary patience, a bruised noble gentleness. I had

told Miss Anvoy that he had no dignity, but what did he seem to me, all unbuttoned and fatigued as he waited

for me to come up, if he didn't seem unconcerned with small things, didn't seem in short majestic? There was

majesty in his mere unconsciousness of our little conferences and puzzlements over his maintenance and his

After I had sat by him a few minutes I passed my arm over his big soft shoulderwherever you touched him

you found equally little firmnessand said in a tone of which the suppliance fell oddly on my own ear:

"Come back to town with me, old friendcome back and spend the evening." I wanted to hold him, I wanted

to keep him, and at Waterloo, an hour later, I telegraphed possessively to the Mulvilles. When he objected, as

regards staying all night, that he had no things, I asked him if he hadn't everything of mine. I had abstained

from ordering dinner, and it was too late for preliminaries at a club; so we were reduced to tea and fried fish

at my roomsreduced also to the transcendent. Something had come up which made me want him to feel at

peace with meand which, precisely, was all the dear man himself wanted on any occasion. I had too often

had to press upon him considerations irrelevant, but it gives me pleasure now to think that on that particular

evening I didn't even mention Mrs. Saltram and the children. Late into the night we smoked and talked; old

shames and old rigours fell away from us; I only let him see that I was conscious of what I owed him. He was

as mild as contrition and as copious as faith; he was never so fine as on a shy return, and even better at

forgiving than at being forgiven. I dare say it was a smaller matter than that famous night at Wimbledon, the

night of the problematical sobriety and of Miss Anvoy's initiation; but I was as much in it on this occasion as

He never, in whatever situation, rose till all other risings were over, and his breakfasts, at Wimbledon, had

always been the principal reason mentioned by departing cooks. The coast was therefore clear for me to

receive her when, early the next morning, to my surprise, it was announced to me his wife had called. I

hesitated, after she had come up, about telling her Saltram was in the house, but she herself settled the

question, kept me reticent by drawing forth a sealed letter which, looking at me very hard in the eyes, she

placed, with a pregnant absence of comment, in my hand. For a single moment there glimmered before me

the fond hope that Mrs. Saltram had tendered me, as it were, her resignation and desired to embody the act in

an unsparing form. To bring this about I would have feigned any humiliation; but after my eyes had caught

the superscription I heard myself say with a flatness that betrayed a sense of something very different from

relief: "Oh the Pudneys!" I knew their envelopes though they didn't know mine. They always used the kind

sold at postoffices with the stamp affixed, and as this letter hadn't been posted they had wasted a penny on

me. I had seen their horrid missives to the Mulvilles, but hadn't been in direct correspondence with them.

"They enclosed it to me, to be delivered. They doubtless explain to you that they hadn't your address."

I turned the thing over without opening it. "Why in the world should they write to me?"

It was another chapter, I felt, of the history of their lamentable quarrel with her husband, the episode in

which, vindictively, disingenuously as they themselves had behaved, one had to admit that he had put himself

more grossly in the wrong than at any moment of his life. He had begun by insulting the matchless Mulvilles

for these more specious protectors, and then, according to his wont at the end of a few months, had dug a still

deeper ditch for his aberration than the chasm left yawning behind. The chasm at Wimbledon was now

blessedly closed; but the Pudneys, across their persistent gulf, kept up the nastiest fire. I never doubted they

had a strong case, and I had been from the first for not defending himreasoning that if they weren't

contradicted they'd perhaps subside. This was above all what I wanted, and I so far prevailed that I did arrest

the correspondence in time to save our little circle an infliction heavier than it perhaps would have borne. I

knew, that is I divined, that their allegations had gone as yet only as far as their courage, conscious as they

were in their own virtue of an exposed place in which Saltram could have planted a blow. It was a question

with them whether a man who had himself so much to cover up would dare his blow; so that these vessels of

rancour were in a manner afraid of each other. I judged that on the day the Pudneys should cease for some

reason or other to be afraid they would treat us to some revelation more disconcerting than any of its

predecessors. As I held Mrs. Saltram's letter in my hand it was distinctly communicated to me that the day

had comethey had ceased to be afraid. "I don't want to know the worst," I presently declared.

I felt itit was fat and uncanny. "Wheels within wheels!" I exclaimed. "There's something for me too to

Again my visitor faltered, and I began to reflect on the grotesque, the unconscious perversity of her action. I

was the only person save George Gravener and the Mulvilles who was aware of Sir Gregory Coxon's and of

Miss Anvoy's strange bounty. Where could there have been a more signal illustration of the clumsiness of

human affairs than her having complacently selected this moment to fly in the face of it? "There's the chance

Still I didn't understand; then it flashed upon me. "You mean they might intercept it? How can you imply

"It's not Iit's Mr. Pudney!" cried Mrs. Saltram with a flush. "It's his own idea."

Mrs. Saltram's embarrassment increased; she gave me another hard look. "You must make that out for

I burst out laughing, and I fear my laugh may have had an effect of impertinence. "Especially to Miss Anvoy,

who's so easily shocked? Why do such things concern HER?" I asked, much at a loss.

"Because she's there, exposed to all his craft. Mr. and Mrs. Pudney have been watching this: they feel she

"Thank you for all the rest of us! What difference can it make when she has lost her power to contribute?"

Again Mrs. Saltram considered; then very nobly: "There are other things in the world than money." This

hadn't occurred to her so long as the young lady had any; but she now added, with a glance at my letter, that

Mr. and Mrs. Pudney doubtless explained their motives. "It's all in kindness," she continued as she got up.

"Kindness to Miss Anvoy? You took, on the whole, another view of kindness before her reverses."

My companion smiled with some acidity "Perhaps you're no safer than the Mulvilles!"

I didn't want her to think that, nor that she should report to the Pudneys that they had not been happy in their

agent; and I well remember that this was the moment at which I began, with considerable emotion, to promise

myself to enjoin upon Miss Anvoy never to open any letter that should come to her in one of those penny

envelopes. My emotion, and I fear I must add my confusion, quickly deepened; I presently should have been

as glad to frighten Mrs. Saltram as to think I might by some diplomacy restore the Pudneys to a quieter

"It's best you should take my view of my safety," I at any rate soon responded. When I saw she didn't know

what I meant by this I added: "You may turn out to have done, in bringing me this letter, a thing you'll

profoundly regret." My tone had a significance which, I could see, did make her uneasy, and there was a

moment, after I had made two or three more remarks of studiously bewildering effect, at which her eyes

followed so hungrily the little flourish of the letter with which I emphasised them that I instinctively slipped

Mr. Pudney's communication into my pocket. She looked, in her embarrassed annoyance, capable of grabbing

it to send it back to him. I felt, after she had gone, as if I had almost given her my word I wouldn't deliver the

enclosure. The passionate movement, at any rate, with which, in solitude, I transferred the whole thing,

unopened, from my pocket to a drawer which I doublelocked would have amounted, for an initiated

Mrs. Saltram left me drawing my breath more quickly and indeed almost in painas if I had just perilously

grazed the loss of something precious. I didn't quite know what it wasit had a shocking resemblance to my

honour. The emotion was the livelier surely in that my pulses even yet vibrated to the pleasure with which,

the night before, I had rallied to the rare analyst, the great intellectual adventurer and pathfinder. What had

dropped from me like a cumbersome garment as Saltram appeared before me in the afternoon on the heath

was the disposition to haggle over his value. Hang it, one had to choose, one had to put that value

somewhere; so I would put it really high and have done with it. Mrs. Mulville drove in for him at a discreet

hourthe earliest she could suppose him to have got up; and I learned that Miss Anvoy would also have

come had she not been expecting a visit from Mr. Gravener. I was perfectly mindful that I was under bonds to

see this young lady, and also that I had a letter to hand to her; but I took my time, I waited from day to day. I

left Mrs. Saltram to deal as her apprehensions should prompt with the Pudneys. I knew at last what I

meantI had ceased to wince at my responsibility. I gave this supreme impression of Saltram time to fade if

it would; but it didn't fade, and, individually, it hasn't faded even now. During the month that I thus invited

myself to stiffen again, Adelaide Mulville, perplexed by my absence, wrote to me to ask why I WAS so stiff.

At that season of the year I was usually oftener "with" them. She also wrote that she feared a real

estrangement had set in between Mr. Gravener and her sweet young frienda state of things but half

satisfactory to her so long as the advantage resulting to Mr. Saltram failed to disengage itself from the merely

nebulous state. She intimated that her sweet young friend was, if anything, a trifle too reserved; she also

intimated that there might now be an opening for another clever young man. There never was the slightest

opening, I may here parenthesise, and of course the question can't come up today. These are old frustrations

now. Ruth Anvoy hasn't married, I hear, and neither have I. During the month, toward the end, I wrote to

George Gravener to ask if, on a special errand, I might come to see him, and his answer was to knock the

very next day at my door. I saw he had immediately connected my enquiry with the talk we had had in the

railway carriage, and his promptitude showed that the ashes of his eagerness weren't yet cold. I told him

there was something I felt I ought in candour to let him knowI recognised the obligation his friendly

"It wasn't to tell you so that I wanted to see you," I replied; "for it seemed to me that such a communication

would rest wholly with herself. If however she did speak to you of our conversation she probably told you I

"To the case of Mr. Saltram? My dear fellow, I don't know what you call discouraging!" Gravener cried.

"I believe she did, but such a thing's measured by the effect. She's not 'discouraged,'" he said.

"That's her own affair. The reason I asked you to see me was that it appeared to me I ought to tell you frankly

thatdecidedly!I can't undertake to produce that effect. In fact I don't want to!"

"It's very good of you, damn you!" my visitor laughed, red and really grave. Then he said: "You'd like to see

that scoundrel publicly glorifiedperched on the pedestal of a great complimentary pension?"

I braced myself. "Taking one form of public recognition with another it seems to me on the whole I should be

able to bear it. When I see the compliments that are paid right and left I ask myself why this one shouldn't

take its course. This therefore is what you're entitled to have looked to me to mention to you. I've some

evidence that perhaps would be really dissuasive, but I propose to invite Mss Anvoy to remain in ignorance

"Oh you don't require ityou've evidence enough. I speak of a sealed letter that I've been requested to

Gravener's clear handsome eyes plunged into mine a minute, but evidently without fishing up a clue to this

"Rather than you?" I wondered how to put the thing. "The only explanation I can think of is that the person

sending it may have imagined your relations with Miss Anvoy to be at an endmay have been told this is

Again for an instant I thought. "The offer I propose to make you gives me the right to address you a question

"Such good friends that you'll again become prospective husband and wife if the obstacle in your path be

"I'll do so if you're ready to assure me that her sacrifice would now presumably bring about your marriage."

"Yes, but would she marry YOU? What I ask of you of course is nothing less than your word of honour as to

your conviction of this. If you give it me," I said, "I'll engage to hand her the letter before night."

Gravener took up his hat; turning it mechanically round he stood looking a moment hard at its unruffled

perfection. Then very angrily honestly and gallantly, "Hand it to the devil!" he broke out; with which he

"Will you read it or not?" I said to Ruth Anvoy, at Wimbledon, when I had told her the story of Mrs.

She debated for a time probably of the briefest, but long enough to make me nervous. "Have you brought it

I went back, but I didn't destroy it till after Saltram's death, when I burnt it unread. The Pudneys approached

her again pressingly, but, prompt as they were, The Coxon Fund had already become an operative benefit and

a general amaze: Mr. Saltram, while we gathered about, as it were, to watch the manna descend, had begun to

draw the magnificent income. He drew it as he had always drawn everything, with a grand abstracted gesture.

Its magnificence, alas, as all the world now knows, quite quenched him; it was the beginning of his decline. It

was also naturally a new grievance for his wife, who began to believe in him as soon as he was blighted, and

who at this hour accuses us of having bribed him, on the whim of a meddlesome American, to renounce his

glorious office, to become, as she says, like everybody else. The very day he found himself able to publish he

wholly ceased to produce. This deprived us, as may easily be imagined, of much of our occupation, and

especially deprived the Mulvilles, whose want of selfsupport I never measured till they lost their great

inmate. They've no one to live on now. Adelaide's most frequent reference to their destitution is embodied in

the remark that dear faraway Ruth's intentions were doubtless good. She and Kent are even yet looking for

another prop, but no one presents a true sphere of usefulness. They complain that people are selfsufficing.

With Saltram the fine type of the child of adoption was scattered, the grander, the elder style. They've got

their carriage back, but what's an empty carriage? In short I think we were all happier as well as poorer

before; even including George Gravener, who by the deaths of his brother and his nephew has lately become

Lord Maddock. His wife, whose fortune clears the property, is criminally dull; he hates being in the Upper

House, and hasn't yet had high office. But what are these accidents, which I should perhaps apologise for

mentioning, in the light of the great eventual boon promised the patient by the rate at which The Coxon Fund