“Be careful, Beecroft,” put in Lawrie. “There have been about twenty men of genius—real genius—in forty, or is it sixty?—thousand years.”
“A genius,” reiterated Beecroft. “We’ll give a show. You can ram him down their throats week by week, Yeo.”
“It’s no good running a genius in this place,” growled Lawrie.—He was always discovering poets and seeing them go to ruin.—“They don’t want genius. They’re so used to imitations.”
“At any rate,” protested Beecroft, “they haven’t had anything like this for years, and I don’t think we ought to let ’em off.”
“My brother’s coming home now. I’ll tell him what you said. It’s rather funny. I haven’t seen him since we were boys, and then he was much older than I.”
“We’ll have a show,” repeated Beecroft. “He’s a local man?”
“We weren’t born here. But my father’s been rector of St. Paul’s, Bide Street, for some years now.”
“That’s good enough. The stinking rotters here like to think they’ve had a hand in anything produced in the place—if people talk about it enough. Have some more whiskey?”
Frederic was beyond saying “no.” The drink went to his head, inflated him, and he offered to sing. Strutt played his accompaniments, and they kept him at it for an hour until he was hoarse, and they shouted the choruses in cracked, beery voices.