"Then I suppose you'll give up literature?" Toftrees asked.
Dickson Ingworth was about to assent in the most positive fashion to this question, when he remembered in whose presence he was, and his native cunning—"diplomacy" is the better word for a man with a Caroline mansion and sixteen hundred a year—came to his aid.
"Oh, no," he said, "not entirely. I couldn't, you know. But I shall be in a position now only to do my best work!"
Toftrees assented with pleasure. The trait interested him.
"I'm glad of that," he said. "To the artist, life without expression is impossible." Toftrees spoke quite sincerely. Although his own production was not of a high order he was quite capable of genuine appreciation of greater and more serious writers. It does not follow—as shallow thinkers tell us—that because a man does not follow his ideal that he is without one at all.
They smoked cigars and talked. As a matter of form the host offered Ingworth a drink, which was refused; they were neither of them men who took alcohol between meals from choice.
They chatted upon general matters for a time.
"And what of our friend the Poet?" Toftrees asked at length, with a slight sneer in his voice.
Ingworth flushed up suddenly and a look of hate came into his curious eyes. The acute man of the world noticed it in a second. Before Ingworth had left for his mission in Italy, he had been obviously changing his views about Gilbert Lothian. He had talked him over with Toftrees in a depreciating way. Even while he had been staying at Mortland Royal he had made confidences about Lothian's habits and the life of his house in letters to the popular author—while he was eating the Poet's salt.
But Toftrees saw now that there was something deeper at work. Was it, he wondered, the old story of benefits forgot, the natural instinct of the baser type of humanity to bite the hand that feeds?