“Jove! If it isn’t Sammy Branstone! Are you a member of these fossils?”
“Dubby Stewart!” said Sam, as recognition dawned on him.
“Reed’s here as well, somewhere,” said Stewart. “It’s a gathering of the clan.”
Reed and Stewart, it seemed, were both members, which is to say that they had come once or twice some time ago and continued to keep up the small subscription from force of habit or through sheer weakness to stop paying it. Few societies indeed could exist were it not for the enthusiasm of the attending nucleus and the subscriptions of the nonattending mass.
“We came to hear Gerald Adams make an ass of himself,” Stewart explained. “What a subject!”
Sam had even forgotten what the subject was. “Rich for Ada, rich for Ada,” was still ringing in his ears.
The subject was “Social Purity.”
“Which accounts,” said Stewart, “for the size of the audience. They’ve all come hoping for the worst. I know I have.”
The worst did not happen, or, rather, if it did, it was so skilfully disguised that nobody recognized it as the worst. It was easy to mistake it for the best.
Adams was one part in earnest and two parts impish in the manner of the superior person who is out for an intellectual lark. He had a constant preoccupation with that which is known above all other questions as the social question. It was not a nice preoccupation for a young man: it was, for instance, remote from the healthy exuberance of Sam’s Rabelaisianism. And, of course, Adams was wily: he wasn’t the stuff of martyrdom. He enjoyed, as an intellectual gymnastic, the treatment of his subject so that it should at once shock his audience and win him their approval as an honest man doing an unpleasant job from conviction.