Under the Waggon roof, at Amberley's house, where there were charming women, it was shocking; it was an outrage! And the frankness of this well-dressed and well-spoken youth was disgusting in its very simplicity and non-moral attitude. Toftrees had gathered something of the young man's past during dinner. Was this, then, what one learnt at Eton? The novelist was himself the son of a clergyman, a man of some family but bitter poor. He had been educated at a country grammar school. His wife was the youngest daughter of a Gloucestershire baronet, impoverished also.
Neither of them had enjoyed all that should have been theirs by virtue of their birth, and the fact had left a blank, a slight residuum of bitterness and envy which success and wealth could never quite smooth away.
"Well, it doesn't seem to trouble you much," he said.
Ingworth laughed. He was unconscious of his great indiscretion, frothy and young, entirely unaware that he was giving his friend and patron into possibly hostile hands and providing an opportunity for a dissection of which half London might hear.
"Gilbert's quite different from any one else," he said lightly. "He is a genius. Keats taking pepper before claret, don't you know! One must not measure him by ordinary standards."
"I suppose not," Toftrees answered drily, reflecting that among the disciples of a great man it was generally the Judas who wrote the biography—"Let's go to the drawing room."
As they went out, the mind of the novelist was working with excitement and heat. He himself was conscious of it and was surprised. His was an intellect rather like dry ice. Very little perturbed it as a rule, yet to-night he was stirred.
Wonder was predominant.
Physically, to begin with, it was extraordinary that more drink should sober a man who a moment before had been making exaggerated and half-maudlin confidences to a stranger—in common with most decent living people, Toftrees knew nothing of the pathology of poisoned men. And, then, that sobriety had been so profound! Clearly reasoned thought, an arresting but perfectly sane point of view, had been enunciated with lucidity and force of phrase.
Disgust, the keener since it was more than tinged by envy, mingled with the wonder.