d. He would
help her to the utmost of his power; for, all the rest of that day and
the next, her easy injunction, tossed off that way as she turned her
beautiful back, was like the crack of a great whip in the blue air, the
high element in which Mrs. Lowder hung. He wouldn't grovel perhaps--he
wasn't quite ready for that; but he would be patient, ridiculous,
reasonable, unreasonable, and above all deeply diplomatic. He would be
clever, with all his cleverness--which he now shook hard, as he
sometimes shook his poor, dear, shabby, old watch, to start it up
again. It wasn't, thank goodness, as if there weren't plenty of that,
and with what they could muster between them it would be little to the
credit of their star, however pale, that defeat and
surrender--surrender so early, so immediate--should have to ensue. It
was not indeed that he thought of that disaster as, at the worst, a
direct sacrifice of their possibilities: he imaged--it which was enough
as some proved vanity, some exposed fatuity, in the idea of bringing
Mrs. Lowder round. When, shortly afterwards, in this lady's vast
drawing-room--the apartments at Lancaster Gate had struck him from the
first as of prodigious extent--he awaited her, at her request, conveyed
in a "reply-paid" telegram, his theory was that of their still clinging
to their idea, though with a sense of the difficulty of it really
enlarged to the scale of the place.

He had the place for a long time--it seemed to him a quarter of an
hour--to himself; and while Aunt Maud kept him and kept him, while
observation and reflection crowded on him, he asked himself what was to
be expected of a person who could treat one like that. The visit, the
hour were of her own proposing, so that her delay, no doubt, was but
part of a general plan of putting him to inconvenience. As he walked to
and fro, however, taking in the message of her massive, florid
furniture, the immense expression of her signs and symbols, he had as
little doubt of the inconvenience he was prepared to suffer. He found
himself even facing the thought that he had nothing to fall back on,
and that that was as great a humiliation in a good cause as a proud man
could desire. It had not yet been so distinct to him that he made no
show--literally not the smallest; so complete a show seemed made there
all about him; so almost abnormally affirmative, so aggressively erect,
were the huge, heavy objects that syllabled his hostess story. "When
all