British Museum,
coughing and drawing up his chair also.

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked for just the moments required for
Basil to clear his throat and collect his words, and then he said:

"My proposal is this. I do not know that in the strict use of words you
could altogether call it a compromise, still it has something of that
character. My proposal is that the Government (acting, as I presume,
through your Museum) should pay Professor Chadd L800 a year until he
stops dancing."

"Eight hundred a year!" said Mr Bingham, and for the first time lifted
his mild blue eyes to those of his interlocutor--and he raised them
with a mild blue stare. "I think I have not quite understood you. Did I
understand you to say that Professor Chadd ought to be employed, in his
present state, in the Asiatic manuscript department at eight hundred a
year?"

Grant shook his head resolutely.

"No," he said firmly. "No. Chadd is a friend of mine, and I would say
anything for him I could. But I do not say, I cannot say, that he ought
to take on the Asiatic manuscripts. I do not go so far as that. I merely
say that until he stops dancing you ought to pay him L800 Surely you
have some general fund for the endowment of research."

Mr Bingham looked bewildered.

"I really don't know," he said, blinking his eyes, "what you are talking
about. Do you ask us to give this obvious lunatic nearly a thousand a
year for life?"

"Not at all," cried Basil, keenly and triumphantly. "I never said for
life. Not at all."

"What for, then?" asked the meek Bingham, suppressing an instinct meekly
to tear his hair. "How long is this endowment to run? Not till his
death? Till the Judgement day?"

"No," said Basil, beaming, "but just what I said. Till he has stopped
dancing." And he lay back with satisfaction and his hands in his
pockets.

Bingham had by this time fastened his eyes keenly on Basil Grant and
kept them there.

"Come, Mr Grant," he said. "Do I seriously understand you to suggest
that the Government pay Professor Chadd an extraordinarily high salary
simply on the ground that he has (pardon the phrase) gone mad? That he
should be paid more than four good clerks solely on the ground that he
is flinging his boots about in the back yard?"

"Precisely," said Grant composedly.

"That this absurd payment is not only to run on with the absurd dancing,
but actually to stop with the absurd dancing?"

"One must stop somewhere," said Grant.