at youth himself speculated as to whether
his affable host would let him, when he came back on his next vacation,
"learn to run the thing himself"; and Mr. Addison Granger, the elderly
bachelor brother of the volatile Lucy and Agnes, mentally formulated
the precise phrase in which, in his next letter to his cousin Professor
Spildyke of the University of East Latmos, he should allude to "our last
delightful trip in my old friend Cobham Stilling's ten-thousand-dollar
motor-launch"--for East Latmos was still in that primitive stage of
culture on which five figures impinge.

Isabel Stilling, sitting beside Mrs. Swordsley, her bead slightly
bent above the needlework with which on these occasions it was her
old-fashioned habit to employ herself--Isabel also had doubtless her
reflections to make. As Wrayford leaned back in his corner and looked
at her across the wide flower-filled drawing-room he noted, first of
all--for the how many hundredth time?--the play of her hands above the
embroidery-frame, the shadow of the thick dark hair on her forehead,
the lids over her somewhat full grey eyes. He noted all this with a
conscious deliberateness of enjoyment, taking in unconsciously, at the
same time, the particular quality in her attitude, in the fall of her
dress and the turn of her head, which had set her for him, from the
first day, in a separate world; then he said to himself: "She is
certainly thinking: 'Where on earth will Cobham get the money to pay for
it?'"

Stilling, cigar in mouth and thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, was
impressively perorating from his usual dominant position on the
hearth-rug.

"I said: 'If I have the thing at all, I want the best that can be
got.' That's my way, you know, Swordsley; I suppose I'm what you'd call
fastidious. Always was, about everything, from cigars to wom--" his
eye met the apprehensive glance of Mrs. Swordsley, who looked like her
husband with his clerical coat cut slightly lower--"so I said: 'If
I have the thing at all, I want the best that can be got.' Nothing
makeshift for me, no second-best. I never cared for the cheap and showy.
I always say frankly to a man: 'If you can't give me a first-rate cigar,
for the Lord's sake let me smoke my own.'" He paused to do so. "Well, if
you have my standards, you can't buy a thing in a minute. You must look
round, compare, select. I found there were lots of motor-boats on the
market, just as there's lots of stuff called champagne. But I s