Critchett opens the door at that moment, and breaks in on his reflections.
“Mr. Fanshawe, sir.”
A gentleman of no definite age, with a shrewd countenance and a significant smile, crosses the room with outstretched hand.
“My dear Wilfrid, they tell me you are in a wax about the exceptions I took to your article. I am extremely sorry to touch any single line of yours, but B.P. must be considered, you know. You are miles too advanced for this inviolate isle; she is still shuddering at the fright which Guy Fawkes gave her.”
Bertram replies stiffly: “I have certainly no affinity to Guy Fawkes, who was a religious person and a strict monarchist. As for the essay, pray do not trouble yourself; I shall publish it in the Age to Come.”
“Oh, that’s a pity; that will be practically putting it into the waste-paper basket; excuse me saying so, but you know the circulation of the Age to Come is at present—is—well—limited.”
“We certainly do not chronicle scandals of the hunting-field, and devote columns to prophesying the shape of next year’s bonnets, as the Torch does!”
“That shows you don’t understand your public, or don’t want to secure one. Extreme opinions, my dear boy, can only be got down the throats of the world in a weekly journal by being adroitly sandwiched between the caviare of calumny and the butter of fashion. People hate to be made to think, my dear boy. The Age to Come gives ’em nothing but thinking; and damned tough thinking too. You write with uncommon power, but you are too wholesale, too subversive; you scare people so awfully that they stop their ears to your truths. That is not the way to secure a hearing.”
“I am consistent.”
“Oh, Lord! Never be consistent. There’s nothing so unpopular in life.”