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What he had learned the last few minutes had been a surprise, a pain, and a puzzle to him. The runaway marriage held more elements than he had imagined. He bent forward confidentially. "You would make a carpet of your body for Zora Middlemist?" "Why, of course," replied the other in perfect simplicity. "Then, my friend, you're desperately in love with her."
"These things have all come crowding up together. One can't realize everything at once. 'Clem Sypher, Friend of Humanity! How they must have jeered behind my back if they thought me sincere! How they must have despised me if they thought me nothing but an advertising quack! Zora Middlemist, for heaven's sake tell me what you have thought of me. What have you taken me for a madman or a charlatan?"
She, Zora, could wander unattended over Europe, mixing without spot or stain with whatever company she listed; that was because she was Zora Middlemist, a young woman of exceptional personality and experience of life. Ordinary young persons, for their own safe conduct, ought to obey the conventions which were made with that end in view; and Emmy was an ordinary young person.
'If your skin is all right, try it on your boots. By George! I'll use it. This is a man with ideas, Mrs. Middlemist. We must encourage him." "Mr. Dix is an inventor," said Zora. She liked Sypher for laughing. It made him human. It was therefore with a touch of kindly feeling that she thanked him for the roses. "I wanted to make them blush at the sight of your complexion after the cure," said he.
"Precisely so there can be no doubt about it. Look at Flumley, and Warrington, and Middlemist three of our own fellows, without going any further. What is there in them to command success, except not deserving it, and knowing that they don't? The modest merit and perseverance business is quite played out for any man of spirit.
Middlemist," said he solemnly, "I passed my vigil, like a knight of old, in my dispensary, with a pot of the cure in front of me, and I took a great oath to devote my life to spread it far and wide among the nations of the earth. It should bring comfort, I swore, to the king in his palace and the peasant in his hut. It should be a household word in the London slum and on the Tartar steppe.
"In asking Zora Middlemist to give up her trip to California, just for the sake of the Cure." "It's worth the sacrifice," Sypher maintained. "To you, yes; but it mayn't be so to her." "But she believes in the thing as I do myself!" cried Sypher. "Why should she, any more than I, or Hégisippe Cruchot? If she did, she would have stayed. It would have been her duty.
Middlemist, if I didn't believe that," said Sypher solemnly, "do you think I would have devoted my life to it?" "I thought people ran these things to make money," said Zora. It was then that Sypher entered on the exordium of the speech which convinced her of the diabolical noisomeness of the Jebusa Jones unguent. His peroration summed up the contest as that between Mithra and Ahriman.
Voices had come to him as they had come to the girl at Domrémy, and they had told him that through Zora Middlemist, and no other, was his life's mission to be accomplished. To her it was anticlimax. Reaction forced a laugh against her will. She leaned back among the sofa cushions. "Is that all?" she said, and Sypher did not catch the significance of the words.
He had seen beyond doubt or question the heart of Septimus Dix. He knew what he had done, why he had done it. Zora Middlemist had passed Septimus by with her magnificent head in the air. But he was not one of the little men. "By God, he is not!" he cried aloud, and the cry came from his depths. Zora Middlemist had passed him, Clem Sypher, by with her magnificent head in the air.
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