“I must keep it up—I must keep it up,” he murmured to himself as he left the room. “Winifred loves fancies—loves me for what she thinks mine.”
He went to his library, and sat down heavily, to devise fresh outrages on the ordinary.
His pranks became innumerable, and Society called him the most original figure of London. The papers quoted him—his doings, not his sayings. People pointed him out in the Park. His celebrity waxed. Even the Marble Arch seemed turning to gaze after him as he went by, showing the observation which the imaginative think into inanimate things.
At least, so a wag declared.
And Winifred bore it, but with an increasing impatience.
At this time, too, a strange need of protection crept over her, the yearning for man’s beautiful, dog-like sympathy that watches woman in her grand dark hour before she blooms into motherhood. When she knew the truth, she resolved to tell Eustace, and she came into his room softly, with shining eyes. He was sitting reading the Financial News in a nimbus of cigarette smoke, secretly glorying in his momentary immunity from the prison rules of the fantastic. Winifred’s entry was as that of a warder. He sprang up laughing.
“Winnie,” he said, “I think I am going to South Africa.”
“You!” she said in surprise.
“Yes; to give acrobatic performances in the street, and so pave the way to a position as a millionaire. Who ever heard of a man rising from a respectable competence to a fortune? According to the papers, you must start with nothing; that is the first rule of the game. We have ten thousand a year, so we can never hope to be rich. Fortune only favours the pauper. I am mad about money to-day. I can think of nothing else.”
And he began showing her conjuring tricks with sovereigns which he drew from his pockets.