temperament of a saint," declared the great lady in a firm tone.
"And they kept him shut up for twenty years. One shudders at the
stupidity of it. And now they have let him out everybody belonging to
him is gone away somewhere or dead. His parents are dead; the girl he
was to marry has died while he was in prison; he has lost the skill
necessary for his manual occupation. He told me all this himself with
the sweetest patience; but then, he said, he had had plenty of time to
think out things for himself. A pretty compensation! If that's the
stuff revolutionists are made of some of us may well go on their knees to
them," she continued in a slightly bantering voice, while the banal
society smiles hardened on the worldly faces turned towards her with
conventional deference. "The poor creature is obviously no longer in a
position to take care of himself. Somebody will have to look after him a
little."

"He should be recommended to follow a treatment of some sort," the
soldierly voice of the active-looking man was heard advising earnestly
from a distance. He was in the pink of condition for his age, and even
the texture of his long frock coat had a character of elastic soundness,
as if it were a living tissue. "The man is virtually a cripple," he
added with unmistakable feeling.

Other voices, as if glad of the opening, murmured hasty compassion.
"Quite startling," "Monstrous," "Most painful to see." The lank man,
with the eyeglass on a broad ribbon, pronounced mincingly the word
"Grotesque," whose justness was appreciated by those standing near him.
They smiled at each other.

The Assistant Commissioner had expressed no opinion either then or later,
his position making it impossible for him to ventilate any independent
view of a ticket-of-leave convict. But, in truth, he shared the view of
his wife's friend and patron that Michaelis was a humanitarian
sentimentalist, a little mad, but upon the whole incapable of hurting a
fly intentionally. So when that name cropped up suddenly in this vexing
bomb affair he realised all the danger of it for the ticket-of-leave
apostle, and his mind reverted at once to the old lady's well-established
infatuation. Her arbitrary kindness would not brook patiently any
interference with Michaelis' freedom. It was a deep, calm, convinced
infatuation. She had not only felt him to be inoffensive, but she had
said so, which last by a confusion of her absolutist mind became a sort