Pangbutt nodded:
“I have read it,” he said—but his attitude was enigma.
Anthony was relieved to find there was to be no oratorial protest in honour of Style. He went on as though repeating a distasteful task he had set himself:
“It has been attacked from all sides. It is as dead—as—a railway sandwich.”
“That is rather a misfortune,” said Pangbutt.
Anthony laughed. He felt strangely ashamed—of himself—of his friend. And it flashed through his thinking parts, with lightning stroke, that this was the man whom Caroline had nursed through the typhoid.
He was roused from his reflections by Pangbutt’s sharp question:
“And you?”
He searched about in his mind for what he had last said:
“Eh? Me? Oh, ah, yes; I tried to grow a garden of literature in Fleet Street—to bring to blossom the tender buds of the new school of thought. But my star was not in journalism. My paper was burnt up in the fire of the young immortals who flocked to my office, whose masterpieces few would buy—or read.” He smiled a wan smile, and sighed: “The paper has gone into ash.... That’s why, when the wind blows keen, there is so much dust in Fleet Street.”