every awkwardness. Morewood was so savage that an abrupt
conclusion of the entertainment threatened to be necessary. May, who had
previously decided that Mr. Quisante would be much better in company,
was travelling to the conclusion that he was not nearly so trying when
alone; to be weaselly is not so bad as to be inconsiderate and
ostentatious.

Just then came the change which transformed the party. Somebody
mentioned Mahomet; Morewood, with his love of a paradox, launched on an
indiscriminate championship of the Prophet. Next to believing in nobody,
it was best, he said, to believe in Mahomet; there, he maintained, you
got most out of your religion and gave least to it; and he defended the
criterion with his usual uncompromising aggressiveness. Then Quisante
put his arms on the table, interrupted Morewood without apology, and
began to talk. May thought that she would not have known how good the
talk was--for it came so easily--had she not seen how soon Morewood
became a listener, or even a foil, ready and content to put his
questions not as puzzles but as provocatives. Yet Morewood was
proverbially conceited, and he was fully a dozen years Quisante's
senior. She stole a look round; the brothers were open-mouthed, Mrs.
Gellatly looked almost frightened. Next her eyes scanned Quisante's
face; he was not weaselly now, nor ostentatious. His subject filled him
and lit him up; she did not know that he looked as he had when he spoke
to old Maria of his Empress among women, but she knew that he looked as
if nothing mentally small, nothing morally mean, nothing that was not in
some way or other, for good or evil, big and spacious could ever come
near him from without or proceed out from him.

She was immensely startled when, in a pause, her host whispered in her
ear, "One of his moments!" The phrase was to become very familiar to her
on the lips of others, even more in her own thoughts. "His moments!" It
implied a sort of intermittent inspiration, as though he were some
ancient prophet or mediaeval fanatic through whose mouth Heaven spoke
sometimes, leaving him for the rest to his own low and carnal nature.
The phrase meant at once a plenitude of inspiration and a rarity of it.
Not days, nor hours, but moments were seemingly what his friends valued
him for, what his believers attached their faith to, what must (if
anything could) outweigh all that piled the scales so full against him.
An intense curiosity then and there assai