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Clem Sypher's letter and Septimus's ticket lay side by side on her dressing-table, and they appealed to her sense of humor. They represented the net result of her misanthropic travels. What would her mother say? What would Emmy say? What would be the superior remark of the Literary Man from London?
"I don't think I quite like you er to look on Mrs. Middlemist as an advertisement," said Septimus. To speak so directly cost him considerable effort. "Don't you? Then I won't. I love a man to speak straight to me. I respect him. Here's my hand." He wrung Septimus's hand warmly. "I feel that we are going to be friends. I'm never wrong. I hope Mrs. Middlemist will allow me to be a friend.
It stops your heart beating and makes you cold and unsympathetic and prevents women from loving you. You mustn't invent things. That's why I am going to make you a Member of Parliament a Conservative member." William Octavius, who had been listening attentively, suddenly chuckled, as if he had seen a joke. Septimus's gaze conveyed sedate reproof.
When she drew Septimus's attention to this phenomenon he accounted for it by saying that it was because he had such a very big name, which was an excellent thing in that it would enable him to occupy a great deal of room in the universe when he grew up. She busied herself all the morning about the flat, happier than she had been for a whole year. Her days of Hagardom were over.
In her heart she did not believe in it. She had tried it a few weeks before on the sore head of a village baby, with disastrous results; then the mother had called in the doctor, who wrote out a simple prescription which healed the child immediately. The only real evidence of its powers she had seen was on Septimus's brown boots.
Its power of massacre was unparalleled in the history of wholesale slaughter. A child might work it. Septimus's explanation was too lucid for a man of Sypher's intelligence not to grasp the essentials of his invention. To all his questions Septimus returned satisfactory answers. He could find no flaw in the gun.
Yet she sang Septimus's praises to Emmy and Emmy's praises to Septimus in so natural a manner that neither of the two was puzzled. "It is the natural instinct that makes every woman a matchmaker. She works blindly towards the baby. If she cannot have one directly, she will have it vicariously. The sourest of old maids is thus doomed to have a hand in the perpetuation of the race."
She dawned on Septimus's horizon like a mischievous and impertinent planet, so different from Zora, the great fixed star of his heaven, yet so pretty, so twinkling, so artlessly and so obviously revolving round some twopenny-halfpenny sun of her own, that he took her, with Wiggleswick, the ducks and the donkey, into his close comradeship. It was she who had ordained the carrots.
He had also dined in a Christian fashion, for the old villain could cook a plain dinner creditably when he chose. Septimus proclaimed the regeneration of his body servant as one of the innumerable debts he owed to Zora. "Why do you repay them to me?" asked Sypher. Then he rose, laughed into the distressed face, and put both his hands on Septimus's shoulders. "No, don't try to answer.
Perhaps so much the better. I shall remain sane and heart-whole all the longer." After dinner Sypher went round to "The Nook," and executed his difficult mission as best he could. To carry out Septimus's wishes, which involved the vilification of the innocent and the beatification of the guilty, went against his conscience.
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