‘With an admirable memory and great readiness for an apropos?’
‘Perhaps he has.’
‘As a retailer of an incident they tell me he has no rival.’
‘I cannot say.’
‘Of course not. I take it the fellow has tact enough not to tell stories here.’
‘What is all that you are saying there?’ cried his lordship, to whom these few sentences were an ‘aside.’
‘Cecil is praising Mr. Atlee, my lord,’ said Maude bluntly.
‘I did not know I had been, my lord,’ said he. ‘He belongs to that class of men who interest me very little.’
‘What class may that be?’
‘The adventurers, my lord. The fellows who make the campaign of life on the faith that they shall find their rations in some other man’s knapsack.’