"Don't shout across the room," said Amory languidly, and perhaps a little pettishly. She was wondering what was the matter with her hand that Mr. Strong had not kissed it when he had said good afternoon. He had kissed it on a former occasion.
"Head bad?" said Mr. Strong.
"No, my head's all right, but there's no reason we should edit the 'Novum' from the housetops."
"Was I raising my voice? Sorry."
Mr. Strong rose from his footstool and took up a station between the tea-table and the asbestos log.
Amory was getting rather tired of hearing about that thing of Prang's. She did not see why Mr. Strong should shuffle about it in the way he did. The article had been twice "modified," that was to say more or less altered, and Amory could hardly be expected to go on reading it in its various forms for ever. What did Mr. Strong want? If he whittled much more at Mr. Prang's clear statement of a point of view of which the single virtue was its admitted extremeness, he would be reducing the "Novum" to the level of mere Liberalism, and they had long ago decided that, of the Conservative who opposed and the Liberal who killed by insidious kindnesses, the former was to be preferred as a foe. Besides, there was an alluring glow about Mr. Prang's way of writing. No doubt that was part and parcel of the glamour of the East. The Eastern style, like the Eastern blood, had more sun in it. Keats had put that awfully well, in the passage about "parched Abyssinia" and "old Tartary the Fierce," and so had that modern man, who had spoken of Asia as lying stretched out "in indolent magnificence of bloom." Yes, there was a funny witchery about Asia. In all sorts of ways they "went it" in Asia. Bacchus had had a spree there, and it was there—or was that Egypt?—that Cleopatra or the Queen of Sheba or somebody had smuggled her satiny self into a roll of carpets and had had herself carried as a present to King Solomon or Mark Antony or whoever it was. It seemed to be in the Asian atmosphere, and Mr. Prang's prose style had a smack of it too. Mr. Strong—his literary style, of course, she meant—might have been all the better for a touch of that blood-warmth and thrill....
And there were ripping bits of reckless passion in Herodotus too.
But Mr. Strong continued to stand between the tea-table and the asbestos log, and to let fall irresolute sentences from time to time. Prang, he said, really was a bit stiff, and he, Mr. Strong, wasn't sure that he altogether liked certain responsibilities. Not that he had changed his mind in the least degree. He only doubted whether in the long run it would pay the "Novum" itself to acquire a reputation for exploiting what everybody else knew as well as they did, but left severely alone. In fact, he had assumed, when he had taken the job on, that the work for which he received only an ordinary working-salary would be conditioned by what other editors did and received for doing it.... At that Amory looked up.
"Oh? But I thought that the truth, regardless of consequences, was our motto?"
"Of course—without fear or favour in a sense—but where there are extra risks——"