tend they shall be, and nothing
unforeseen happens, will bring in over four hundred thousand pounds, and
close the 'corner' in Rubber Consols for good. Then I need never see the
City again, thank God! And for that matter--why, what is six weeks?
It's like tomorrow. I'm going to act as if I were free already. The rain
fills me full of the country. Will you both come with me tomorrow
or next day, and see the Pellesley place in Hertfordshire? By the
photographs it's the best thing in the market. The newest parts of it
are Tudor--and that's what I've always wanted."

"How unexpected you are!" commented Miss Madden. "You are almost
the last person I should have looked to for a sentiment about Tudor
foundations."

Thorpe put out his lips a trifle. "Ah, you don't know me," he replied,
in a voice milder than his look had promised. "Because I'm rough and
practical, you mustn't think I don't know good things when I see them.
Why, all the world is going to have living proof very soon"--he paused,
and sent a smile surcharged with meaning toward the silent member of the
trio--"living proof that I'm the greatest judge of perfection in beauty
of my time."

He lifted his glass as he spoke, and the ladies accepted with an
inclination of the head, and a touch of the wine at their lips, his
tacit toast. "Oh, I think I do know you," said Celia Madden, calmly
discursive. "Up to a certain point, you are not so unlike other men. If
people appeal to your imagination, and do not contradict you, or bore
you, or get in your way, you are capable of being very nice indeed
to them. But that isn't a very uncommon quality. What is uncommon
in you--at least that is my reading--is something which according
to circumstances may be nice, or very much the other way about. It's
something which stands quite apart from standards of morals or ethics or
the ordinary emotions. But I don't know, whether it is desirable for me
to enter into this extremely personal analysis."

"Oh yes, go on," Thorpe urged her. He watched her face with an almost
excited interest.

"Well--I should say that you possessed a capacity for sudden and
capricious action in large matters, equally impatient of reasoning
and indifferent to consequences, which might be very awkward, and even
tragic, to people who happened to annoy you, or stand in your road. You
have the kind of organization in which, within a second, without any
warning or reason, a passing whim may have worked itself u