“My head is going round,” she murmured. “What an upheaval! Fancy Mephistopheles on a steamer!”
“He was, at any rate, the most interesting of that little trio,” Wingrave remarked, “but even he was a trifle heavy.”
“Do you go about the world preaching your new doctrines?” she asked.
“Not I!” he answered. “Nothing would every make a missionary of me, for good or for evil, for the simple reason that no one else’s welfare except my own has the slightest concern for me.”
“What hideous selfishness!” she said softly. “But I don’t think—you quite mean it?”
“I can assure you I do,” he answered drily. “My world consists of myself for the central figure, and the half a dozen or so of people who are useful or amusing to me! Except that the rest are needed to keep moving the machinery of the world, they might all perish, so far as I was concerned.”
“I don’t think,” Mrs. Travers said softly, “that I should like to be in your world.”
“I can very easily believe you,” he answered.
“Unless,” she remarked tentatively, “I came to convert!”
He nodded.