rily upon a fierceness behind the
moustache. The general impression upon the public was that Butteridge,
was a small man. No one big, it was felt, could have so virulently
aggressive an expression, though, as a matter of fact, Butteridge had a
height of six feet two inches, and a weight altogether proportionate to
that. Moreover, he had a love affair of large and unusual dimensions and
irregular circumstances and the still largely decorous British public
learnt with reluctance and alarm that a sympathetic treatment of this
affair was inseparable from the exclusive acquisition of the priceless
secret of aerial stability by the British Empire. The exact particulars
of the similarity never came to light, but apparently the lady had, in
a fit of high-minded inadvertence, had gone through the ceremony
of marriage with, one quotes the unpublished discourse of Mr.
Butteridge--"a white-livered skunk," and this zoological aberration did
in some legal and vexatious manner mar her social happiness. He wanted
to talk about the business, to show the splendour of her nature in the
light of its complications. It was really most embarrassing to a press
that has always possessed a considerable turn for reticence, that wanted
things personal indeed in the modern fashion. Yet not too personal.
It was embarrassing, I say, to be inexorably confronted with
Mr. Butteridge's great heart, to see it laid open in relentlesss
self-vivisection, and its pulsating dissepiments adorned with emphatic
flag labels.

Confronted they were, and there was no getting away from it. He
would make this appalling viscus beat and throb before the shrinking
journalists--no uncle with a big watch and a little baby ever harped
upon it so relentlessly; whatever evasion they attempted he set aside.
He "gloried in his love," he said, and compelled them to write it down.

"That's of course a private affair, Mr. Butteridge," they would object.

"The injustice, sorr, is public. I do not care either I am up against
institutions or individuals. I do not care if I am up against the
universal All. I am pleading the cause of a woman, a woman I lurve,
sorr--a noble woman--misunderstood. I intend to vindicate her, sorr, to
the four winds of heaven!"

"I lurve England," he used to say--"lurve England, but Puritanism, sorr,
I abhor. It fills me with loathing. It raises my gorge. Take my own
case."

He insisted relentlessly upon his heart, and upon seeing proofs of the
intervi