“But do I know—?”
“How Apollo must look?” Mitchy considered. “Why the way it works is that it’s just from Van’s appearance they get the tip, and that then, don’t you see? they’ve their term of comparison. Isn’t it what you call a vicious circle? I borrow a little their vice.”
Mr. Longdon, who had once more been arrested, once more sidled away. Then he spoke from the other side of the expanse of a table covered with books for which the shelves had no space—covered with portfolios, with well-worn leather-cased boxes, with documents in neat piles. The place was a miscellany, yet not a litter, the picture of an admirable order. “If we’re a fond association of two, you and I, let me, accepting your idea, do what, this way, under a gentleman’s roof and while enjoying his hospitality, I should in ordinary circumstances think perhaps something of a breach.”
“Oh strike out!” Mitchy laughed. It possibly chilled his interlocutor, who again hung fire so long that he himself at last adopted his image. “Why doesn’t he marry, you mean?”
Mr. Longdon fairly flushed with recognition. “You’re very deep, but with what we perceive—why doesn’t he?”
Mitchy continued visibly to have his amusement, which might have been, this time and in spite of the amalgamation he had pictured, for what “they” perceived. But he threw off after an instant an answer clearly intended to meet the case. “He thinks he hasn’t the means. He has great ideas of what a fellow must offer a woman.”
Mr. Longdon’s eyes travelled a while over the amenities about him. “He hasn’t such a view of himself alone—?”
“As to make him think he’s enough as he stands? No,” said Mitchy, “I don’t fancy he has a very awful view of himself alone. And since we ARE burning this incense under his nose,” he added, “it’s also my impression that he has no private means. Women in London cost so much.”
Mr. Longdon had a pause. “They come very high, I dare say.”
“Oh tremendously. They want so much—they want everything. I mean the sort of women he lives with. A modest man—who’s also poor—isn’t in it. I give you that at any rate as his view. There are lots of them that would—-and only too glad—‘love him for himself’; but things are much mixed, and these not necessarily the right ones, and at all events he doesn’t see it. The result of which is that he’s waiting.”