The considered reply of Mr. Cuthbert Rampant was lost in the boom and the rattle of Mr. Marmaduke Buzzard's heavy artillery.
Henry Harper might have sailed six years upon the high seas, but a flood of deep and perplexing waters was all around him now. Stylists to right of him, stylists to left of him, all discoursing ex cathedra upon that supreme quality. Never, since the grim days of the Margaret Carey had he felt a sterner need to keep cool and hold his wits about him. But with the native shrewdness that always stood to him in a crisis, he had grasped already a very important fact. It must be the task just now of the new Stevenson to sit tight and say nothing.
To this resolve he kept honorably. And it was less difficult than it might have been had not Style alone been the theme of their discourse, had not this been an authentic body of its practitioners, and had not "The Adventures of Dick Smith" been acclaimed as the finest example of pure narrative seen for many a year. All through the period of tea and cake, which Mr. Henry Harper contrived to hand about with the best of them, being honestly determined not to mind his inferior clothes and absence of manner, because, after all, these things were less important than they seemed at the moment, he kept perfectly mute.
Nevertheless he had one brief lapse. It was after he had drunk a cup of tea and the undefeated Miss Carinthia Small had drunk several, and Mr. Marmaduke Buzzard had retired in gallant pursuit of some watercress sandwiches, that the dauntless lady felt it to be her duty to draw him out.
"Tell me, Mr. Harper," said she, "what really led you to Stevenson?"
So much was the novice troubled by the form of the question that she decided to restate it in a simpler one, although heaven knew it was simple enough already!
"What is your favorite Stevenson?" she asked, looking Mr. Cuthbert Rampant full in the eye with an air of the complete Amazon.
The author of "The Adventures of Dick Smith" was bound to speak then. Unfortunately he spoke to his own undoing.
"I've only read one book by Stevisson," he said, in a voice of curious penetration which nervousness had rendered loud and strident.
"Pray, which is that?" asked Miss Carinthia Small in icy tones.