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"You might respect the mantelpiece," said Mr. Enwright bitterly, and went into the principals' room, where John Orgreave could be heard dictating letters. George straightened his clothes and picked up his money, and the two men of the world giggled nervously at each other. Mr. Haim next disturbed them. The shabby, respectable old man smiled vaguely, with averted glance.
A fine, stalwart, cordial fellow the captain who has been very kind to me since I presented my letter of introduction from his cousin, Archibald Enwright. Poor Archie! A meek, correct little soul, who would be horrified beyond expression if he knew that of him I had made a spy and a frequenter of Limehouse!
"I suppose you know Sir Hugh Corver, Bart., is to be the assessor," said Mr. Enwright in a devastating tone. Sir Hugh Corver, formerly a mere knight, had received a baronetcy, to Mr. Enwright's deep disgust. Mr.
Proud of having spoken through a French telephone, he began to conceive romantically the interior of a Paris home he had seen naught but a studio or so with Mr. Enwright and to thrill at the prospect of Sunday races. Not merely had he never seen a horse-race on a Sunday he had never seen a horse-race at all.
He had been down to Staffordshire for a rest, and had returned unrested. And then Mr. Enwright had suggested that it would do him good to go to Paris, even to go alone. He went, with no plan, but having made careful arrangements for the telegraphing to him of the result of the competition, which was daily expected.
He had heard compositions by Richard Strauss, but he could make nothing of them, and his timid, untravelled taste feared to like them. Mr. Enwright himself was mainly inimical to Strauss, as to most of modern Germany, perhaps because of the new architecture in Berlin.
The official relations between the two had been rigorously polite and formal. No reference had ever been made by either to the quarrel in the basement or to the cause of it. And for the world in general George's engagement had remained as secret as before. Marguerite had not seen her father in the long interval, and George had seen only the factotum of Lucas & Enwright.
George had stood on his hands on a box and lodged his toes on the mantelpiece, and then raised his hands and Lucas had softly pushed the box away. George's watch was dangling against his flushed cheek. "Put that box back, you cuckoo!" George exploded chokingly. Then the door opened and Mr. Enwright appeared. Simultaneously some shillings slipped out of George's pocket and rolled about the floor.
The brown gentleman modestly enjoyed his triumph. With only three people had he failed Mr. Enwright, George, and the youngish woman next to George. "And how's Paris, Miss Ingram?" he pointedly asked the last. George was surprised. He had certainly taken her for a married woman, and one of his generalizations about life was that he did not like young married women; hence he had not liked her.
Enwright commonly entered the office full of an intense and aggrieved consciousness of his own existence of his insomnia, of the reaction upon himself of some client's stupidity, of the necessity of going out again in order to have his chin lacerated by his favourite and hated Albanian barber. But now he had actually forgotten himself. "What is this?" he demanded.
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