"For the better. This afternoon for the first time in our acquaintance I beheld you in a lady's drawing-room. You are growing tolerant of your kind."
"I am no longer a misanthrope, but I am rapidly becoming a misogynist. Yes, I am altered, old friend, greatly altered. At the bottom of my former misanthropy was a diseased conviction born of vanity that I was the only person in the world really worth thinking badly about. But marriage has compelled me to think more badly still of somebody else. The less selfish outlook thus induced has broadened my mind. I begin to look forward to a time when my perversion will be complete and I shall be able without blushing to look any woman in the face and acknowledge her superiority in innate viciousness."
"I begin to pity your wife, Dixon."
"A waste of sentiment. She has married five and twenty thousand pounds per annum, and she would be the last to tell you that the institution is a failure. Few women contrive to dispose as advantageously of the sort of goods they have to sell. Lady Helen would have made a fortune as a bagman. But there, I do not want to prejudice you against her. She likes you, I believe. Perhaps—who knows—but there—good-night."
I was glad to get away.
Chapter XIV The Pushful Man
A day or two afterwards, while spending an hour in the rooms of the Egyptology Society I was introduced to a new Fellow, who had been appointed during my absence from England. His name was Louis Coen. He was in private life a broker, but his heart and soul were wrapped in the Cause. He evidently spelt it with a capital, in sympathy, perhaps, with the vast sums in cash he had already put at the disposal of the Society for exploration work. He was intensely entertaining. He took me aside and confided that it was his ambition to transform the Society into a sort of club. We needed a liquor license and more commodious premises, it seemed. Then we would boom. He offered to provide all the money requisite and he begged me to use my influence with other members to get his views adopted. He was one of those men whose mission in life is to "run" every concern into which they can manage to insinuate themselves. I was afraid I disappointed him, although I did my best to be polite. But he was nothing daunted. He declared he would galvanise the "old fogies" into fresh activity and make us see things from his point of view or die in the attempt. We might be as serious as we pleased, but he would force us to be sociable. He had a nose like a parrot, and was already on the committee of management. He even proposed to change our name. The Royal Egyptian Club seemed to him a "real smart monniker." He saved me from an impending mental and physical collapse by mentioning the name of Sir Robert Ottley. Ottley, it appeared, was his latest convert. Ottley agreed with him that we wanted new blood, that our methods were too conservative. Ottley thought it was ridiculous that everything a member did or discovered should have to be reported to, and judged about, by a lot of old fossils. What right had those old "stick-at-homes" to appropriate the credit of the exertions of the energetic? "Would you believe it," cried Mr. Coen, "they have had the impudence to demand from him an account of his recent find—the tomb of an old johnny named Ptahmes—which he unearthed at his own expense entirely! They have had the 'hide' to insist that he shall immediately hand over the mummy to the British Museum and place the papyri before them—them—them—for the purpose of translation, et-cetera! I never heard a more cheeky proposition in my life. My friend Ottley would act rightly if he told them to go to the deuce!"
"What has he told them?" I inquired.