to them!"

The sound, which filled the room, with its hurry of short syllables, its
sudden pauses, and its sudden attacks, might be compared to some animal
hubbub, frantic and inarticulate.

"D'you think that's all about my paper?" Rodney inquired, after a
moment's attention, with a distinct brightening of expression.

"Of course it is," said Mary. "It was a very suggestive paper."

She turned to Denham for confirmation, and he corroborated her.

"It's the ten minutes after a paper is read that proves whether it's
been a success or not," he said. "If I were you, Rodney, I should be
very pleased with myself."

This commendation seemed to comfort Mr. Rodney completely, and he began
to bethink him of all the passages in his paper which deserved to be
called "suggestive."

"Did you agree at all, Denham, with what I said about Shakespeare's
later use of imagery? I'm afraid I didn't altogether make my meaning
plain."

Here he gathered himself together, and by means of a series of frog-like
jerks, succeeded in bringing himself close to Denham.

Denham answered him with the brevity which is the result of having
another sentence in the mind to be addressed to another person. He
wished to say to Katharine: "Did you remember to get that picture glazed
before your aunt came to dinner?" but, besides having to answer Rodney,
he was not sure that the remark, with its assertion of intimacy, would
not strike Katharine as impertinent. She was listening to what some one
in another group was saying. Rodney, meanwhile, was talking about the
Elizabethan dramatists.

He was a curious-looking man since, upon first sight, especially if
he chanced to be talking with animation, he appeared, in some way,
ridiculous; but, next moment, in repose, his face, with its large nose,
thin cheeks and lips expressing the utmost sensibility, somehow recalled
a Roman head bound with laurel, cut upon a circle of semi-transparent
reddish stone. It had dignity and character. By profession a clerk in
a Government office, he was one of those martyred spirits to whom
literature is at once a source of divine joy and of almost intolerable
irritation. Not content to rest in their love of it, they must attempt
to practise it themselves, and they are generally endowed with very
little facility in composition. They condemn whatever they produce.
Moreover, the violence of their feelings is such that they seldom meet
with adequate sympathy, and being rendered ve