"Really, the bosh he talks——"
"The Minority Report——"
"Corin!——"
"Plato——"
"Prang——"
Then, before anybody had had time to notice the entry of Amory and Edgar Strong, an extraordinary, not to say a regrettable thing occurred.
Mr. Eli Crabtree had spent the last twenty minutes in going deliberately from one person to another, often thrusting himself unceremoniously between two people already engaged in conversation, and in subjecting them to questionings that had become less and less reticent the further he had passed round the room. And it appeared that this collier who had forgotten his Davy had yet another lamp with him—the lamp of his own narrow intelligence and inalienable, if worthless, experience. By the help of that darkness within him that he mistook for light, he had added inference to inference and conclusion to conclusion. Cosimo—Wilkinson—Walter Wyron—Brimby—the Balliol men—the young students of the McGrath—he had missed not one of them; but none knew the portent of his tour of the studio until he had reached the hearth again. Then he was seen to be standing with his hands behind him, as if calmly summing them up.
"By—Gow!" he said half to himself, his football-cropped head moving this way and that and his eyes blinking rapidly as he sought somebody to address.
Then, all in a moment, he ceased his attempt to single out one more than another, and was addressing them in the lump, for all the world as if he had been allowed the entrée of the house, not as a high and memorable privilege and in order that he might learn something he had never suspected before, but as if, finding himself there, he might as well tell them a thing or two while he was about it. And though his astonishment at what he had seen might well have rendered him dumb, his good temper did not for an instant forsake him.
"By—Gow!" he said again. "But this is a menagerie, an' reight!"