"And I don't doubt that even the position of doorkeeper is a responsible one, requiring the intelligence of an educated gentleman to fill it," retorted Miss Lisle. "It must certainly be an exacting one. You know better than I do how many great motor vans pass down that quiet little lane every hour. They bear the names of different companies, they are ingeniously different in appearance, and they pass through London by various roads and by-roads. But they have one unique resemblance: they are all driven by mechanics who are astonishingly disconcerted by the offer of stray sixpences and shillings! It is the same at the little private wharf on the canal a mile away. It was quite a relief to find that the bargemen were common human bargees!"
Salt still smiled kindly. The slow, silent habit gives the best mask after all. "And why have you come to me?" he asked.
"Because I know that you are going to do something, and I want to help. I loathe the way things are being done down there." The nod meant the stately Palace of Westminster, though it happened to be really in the direction of Charing Cross, but it was equally appropriate, for the monuments of the Government, like those of Wren, lay all around. "Who can go on playing tennis as usual when an ambassador who learned his diplomacy in a Slaughter-housemen's Union represents us by acting alternately as a fool and a cad before an astounded Paris? Or have an interest in bridge when the Sultan of Turkey is contemptuously ordering us to keep our fleet out of sight of Mitylene and we apologise and obey? I will be content to address envelopes all day long if it will be of any use. Surely there are other secret processes down other little lanes? I will even be the doorkeeper at another artificial manure works if there is nothing else!"
Salt sat thinking, but from the first he knew that for good or ill some degree of their confidence must be extended to a woman. It is the common experience of every movement when it swells beyond two members: or conspiracies would be much more dangerous to their foes.
"It may be monotonous, perhaps even purposeless as far as you can see," he warned. "I do not know yet, and it will not be for you to say."
Miss Lisle flushed with the pleasurable thrill of blind sacrifice. "I will not question," she replied. "Only if there should be any need you might find that an ordinary uninteresting middle-class girl with a slangy style and a muddy complexion could be as devoted as a Flora Macdonald or a Charlotte Corday."
Salt made a quiet deprecating gesture. "A girl with a fearless truthful face can be capable of any heroism," he remarked as he began to write. "Especially when she combines exceptional intelligence with exceptional discretion. Only," he added as an afterthought, "it may be uncalled-for, and might be inconvenient in a law-abiding constitutional age."
"I quite understand that now; the conscientious addressing of circulars shall bound my horizon. Only, please let me be somewhere in it, when it does come."
"I say, Salt," drawled an immaculately garbed young man, lounging into the room, "do you happen——"
Miss Lisle, who had been cut off from the door by a screen, rose to leave.