whole Metropolitan crowd is just crazy to down us, and we must put up
the biggest fight we can. Leave it all to Crayford. He knows more than
any living man about a boom. And he said just now Madame Sennier was a
deed fool to have given us such a lift with her libel. There'll be a
crowd of pressmen around at the theater about it to-night, you can bet.
Here she comes! Get on your coat, and let's be off, or Crayford'll be
raging."

Claude stood still for an instant, looking from Alston to Charmian, who
walked in briskly, wearing a sealskin coat that reached to her heels,
and buttoning long white gloves. Then he said, "I won't be a minute!"
and went out of the room.

As he disappeared Charmian and Alston looked after him. Then Alston came
nearer to her, and they began to talk in rather low voices.

"The fight is on!"

How Claude hated those words; how he hated the truth which they
expressed! To-night, in New York, as he went to fetch his overcoat from
the smart and brilliantly lit bedroom which was opposite to the
sitting-room across a lobby, he wondered why Fate had led him into this
situation, why he had been doomed to become a sort of miserable center
of intrigue, recrimination, discussion, praise, blame, dissension. No
man, surely, on the face of the earth had loved tranquillity more than
he had. Few men had more surely possessed it. He had known his soul and
he had been its faithful guardian once--but long ago, surely centuries
ago! That he should be the cause of battle, what an irony!

Thinking with great rapidity, during this brief interval of loneliness,
while he got ready to go out, a rapidity to which his fatigue seemed to
contribute, giving it wings, Claude reviewed his life since the first
evening at Elliot's house. Events and periods and details flashed by;
his close friendship with Mrs. Mansfield (who had refused to come to
America), his almost inimical acquaintance with Charmian, Mrs.
Shiffney's capricious endeavors to get hold of him, the firmness of his
refusals, the voyage to Algiers, his regret at missing the wonders of
Africa, Charmian's return full of a knowledge he lacked, the dinner
during which he had looked at her with new eyes.

(He took down from its hook his heavy fur coat bought for the bitter
winter of New York.)

Chateaubriand's description of Napoleon, the little island in Mrs.
Grahame's garden, the production of Jacques Sennier's opera--they were
all linked together closely at this