Her appraisement of Val I was not inclined to dispute; it coincided with certain suspicions which I myself had shamefacedly entertained, but had never found courage to express openly. But was she right about Kirby? Had we here the rare “great man”? Concede to her that we had, her case was still a hard one. Kirby had no start; he was in a rut, if I may say so with unfeigned respect to the distinguished service to which he belonged—an honourable useful rut, but, so far as personal glory or the prospects of it went, a rut, all the same. Unless some rare chance came—they do come now and then, but it was ill to gamble on one here—his main function would be to do the work, to supply the knowledge secretly, perhaps to shape a policy some day in the future; but tulit alter honores. Not to him would the public raise their cheers, and posterity a statue. Her worship of him must be, in all likelihood, solitary, despised, and without reward. Would it be appreciated as it ought to be by her hero himself? But here, perhaps, I could not get thoroughly into the skin of the devotee; the god is not expected to be overwhelmed by his altars and his sacrifices—his divinityship is merely satisfied.
“Mr Hare is behaving splendidly,” Jane reported to me. She had a constant—apparently a daily—report of him from Lady Lexington, his unremitting champion. Indeed the women were all on his side, and it was surprising how many of them seemed to know his position; I cannot help thinking that Val, in his turn, had succumbed to the temptations of sympathy. They spoke of him as of a man patient under wrong, amiable and forgiving through it all, puzzled, bewildered, inevitably hurt, yet with his love unimpaired and his forgiveness ready.
“Do you suppose,” I asked Jane, “that he’s got any theory why she hesitates?”
“Theory! Who wants a theory? We all know why.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” My “exclusive information” seemed a good deal cheapened. “Has she told you, may I ask?”
“Not she; but she goes every afternoon, just after lunch, to Mrs Something Simpson’s—that’s the man’s aunt. She lives in a flat in Westminster, and he goes from his office to lunch at his aunt’s every day, now.”
While I had been musing, Jane had been getting at the facts.
“Val knows that?”
“Of course Lady Lexington told him. Let’s have fair play, anyhow!” said Jane rather hotly.
“What does he say about it?”