“Say, now,” Hugh sat up, crimsoning.
“Keep still. Are you going on living in a cloud of cheap tobacco smoke, in a hall bedroom on a back street, with no ambition for anything better—”
“Look here—”
“No one stands still,” declared John Ogden curtly. “You’re going down if you’re not going up. You, with your splendid physique, allowing your backbone to slump like boiled macaroni. Aren’t you man enough to take a brace and go to Farrandale and shove that pussy-footing secretary of your aunt’s out of the place that should be yours?”
Hugh regarded the suddenly fiery speaker with open lips.
“He expects to be her heir; everybody knows he does. He has Miss Frink under his influence so that the whole household are afraid of him. There she lives in this great house, with her servants and this secretary—Grimshaw, his name is. He has wormed himself into her confidence until she scarcely makes a move without him, though she doesn’t realize it herself. Will you stay here and let him have it all his own way?”
The speaker scowled into the dark eyes with the deep, pensive corners that were giving him their full attention.
“As soon as you told me you were Miss Frink’s nephew, I saw what you could do; and for the very same reason that you felt you could succeed in the movies. Isn’t it Shakespeare who said: ‘She is a woman, and therefore to be won’? They’re not a bit different at seventy from what they are at seventeen when they get hold of a man like you.”
Hugh still gaped, and was silent.
“Of course, there must be something inside your head as well as out. You’ll have to make self-denials and sacrifices; but who doesn’t who gets anywhere?”