He made more rings of smoke and blew them away.
"As for Tredennis," he said, with a deliberateness he felt necessary to his outward composure, "his advantage is that he does not exactly belong to the nineteenth century. He has no place in parlors; when he enters one, without the least pretension or consciousness of himself, he towers over the rest of us with a gigantic modesty it is useless to endeavor to bear up against. He ought to wear a red cross, and carry a battle-axe, and go on a crusade, or right the wrongs of the weak by unhorsing the oppressor in single combat. He might found a Round Table. His crush hat should be a helmet, and he should appear in armor."
The professor smiled.
"That is a very nice figure," he said, "though you don't treat it respectfully. It pleases my fancy."
Arbuthnot laughed again, not the gayest laugh possible.
"It is he who is a nice figure," he returned. "And, though he little suspects it, he is the one most admired of women. He could win anything he wanted and would deserve all he won. Oh, I'm respectful enough. I'm obliged to be. There's the rub!"
"Is it a rub?" asked the professor, a little disturbed by an illogical fancy which at the moment presented itself without a shadow of warning.
"You don't want the kind of thing he might care for."
This time Laurence's laugh had recovered its usual delightful tone. He got up and went to the mantel for a match to light a new cigar.
"I!" he said. "I want nothing but the assurance that I shall be permitted to retain my position in the Treasury until I don't need it. It is a modest ambition, isn't it? And yet I am afraid it will be thwarted. And then—in the next administration, perhaps—I shall be seedy and out at elbows, and Mrs. Amory won't like to invite me to her Thursday evenings, because she will know it will make me uncomfortable, and then—then I shall disappear."