“Somebody’s pushing on the reins upstairs again. If the strike don’t bust this week, I’m a goat! I caught Milliken hanging round yesterday and chased him out. Gave him the police talk.”
“Dana knew all about Milliken and the strike. Had it from Milliken himself.”
“Wheels and wheels and wheels!” commented Andy, making expansive and elegantly rounded gestures. “Wheels within wheels; wheels without wheels; wheels going in opposite directions and at different speeds. They make me dizzy!”
They made Jeremy dizzy, too. At least, something made him dizzy. He was dizzy a good deal of the time, and tired. Very tired. He thought that some vague and hopeful day he’d take a week off. When things quieted down. When Andy’s anathematized “Botches” let up on the paper. When advertisers ceased to trouble. When the whole show was over and the final issue of The Guardian had closed with its final challenge to the forces of Deutschtum. When his heart stopped crying out for Marcia.
Meantime he wearily wished he could get a night’s sleep.
CHAPTER XVIII
SUCH advantage as the bee may boast over the butterfly is proverbially supposed to inhere in its industrious habits. But Miss Marcia Ames, now adopting the schedule of the bee at its busiest, found her earlier butterfly proclivities of advantage in that they had put her in touch with certain flowers of Fenchester’s social world with which the harder-worked honey-collector might not have been so familiar. Visiting these upon her proselytizing errand, this enterprising flitter, still trailing clouds of glory from her butterflyhood, left behind her the fructifying pollen of the Great Idea. In one respect—to carry the entomological metaphor a step farther—she was like a moth rather than either the butterfly or the bee, since her good works, to be effective, must needs be carried on in the dusk of a semi-secrecy.
Behold our bee, now, hovering about the garden of that ancient but still lively wasp, Madam Dorothea Taylor, until bidden to alight and state her errand, whereof the venerable one, having already received some hint from her friend, Letitia Pritchard, is alertly suspicious. Accepting the invitation, the visiting bee leads up diplomatically to the first point of risk, the name of Jeremy Robson.