“You may not know it,” he said, “but you are practically expounding the views of that extraordinary writer of whom we were speaking—Paul Fiske.”
“I have been told,” the Bishop remarked, cracking a walnut, “that Paul Fiske is the pseudonym of a Cabinet Minister.”
“And I,” Hannaway Wells retorted, “have been informed most credibly that he is a Church of England clergyman.”
“The last rumour I heard,” Lord Shervinton put in, “was that he is a grocer in a small way of business at Wigan.”
“Dear me!” Doctor Lennard remarked. “The gossips have covered enough ground! A man at a Bohemian club of which I am a member—the Savage Club, in fact—assured me that he was an opium drugged journalist, kept alive by the charity of a few friends; a human wreck, who was once the editor of an important London paper.”
“You have some slight connection with journalism, have you not, Julian?” the Earl asked his son condescendingly. “Have you heard no reports?”
“Many,” Julian replied, “but none which I have been disposed to credit. I should imagine, myself, that Paul Fiske is a man who believes, having created a public, that his written words find an added value from the fact that he obviously desires neither reward nor recognition; just in the same way as the really earnest democrats of twenty years ago scoffed at the idea of a seat in Parliament, or of breaking bread in any way with the enemy.”
“It was a fine spirit, that,” the Bishop declared. “I am not sure that we are not all of us a little over-inclined towards compromises. The sapping away of conscience is so easy.”
The dining-room door was thrown open, and the butler announced a visitor.
“Colonel Henderson, your lordship.”