“What d’you mean—about us?” Mr. Basnett asked, with a little smile.
“That depends upon many things,” said Mary. The conspirators looked pleased, as if Katharine’s question, with the belief in their existence which it implied, had a warming effect upon them.
“In starting a society such as we wish to start (we can’t say any more at present),” Mr. Basnett began, with a little jerk of his head, “there are two things to remember—the Press and the public. Other societies, which shall be nameless, have gone under because they’ve appealed only to cranks. If you don’t want a mutual admiration society, which dies as soon as you’ve all discovered each other’s faults, you must nobble the Press. You must appeal to the public.”
“That’s the difficulty,” said Mary thoughtfully.
“That’s where she comes in,” said Mr. Basnett, jerking his head in Mary’s direction. “She’s the only one of us who’s a capitalist. She can make a whole-time job of it. I’m tied to an office; I can only give my spare time. Are you, by any chance, on the look-out for a job?” he asked Katharine, with a queer mixture of distrust and deference.
“Marriage is her job at present,” Mary replied for her.
“Oh, I see,” said Mr. Basnett. He made allowances for that; he and his friends had faced the question of sex, along with all others, and assigned it an honorable place in their scheme of life. Katharine felt this beneath the roughness of his manner; and a world entrusted to the guardianship of Mary Datchet and Mr. Basnett seemed to her a good world, although not a romantic or beautiful place or, to put it figuratively, a place where any line of blue mist softly linked tree to tree upon the horizon. For a moment she thought she saw in his face, bent now over the fire, the features of that original man whom we still recall every now and then, although we know only the clerk, barrister, Governmental official, or workingman variety of him. Not that Mr. Basnett, giving his days to commerce and his spare time to social reform, would long carry about him any trace of his possibilities of completeness; but, for the moment, in his youth and ardor, still speculative, still uncramped, one might imagine him the citizen of a nobler state than ours. Katharine turned over her small stock of information, and wondered what their society might be going to attempt. Then she remembered that she was hindering their business, and rose, still thinking of this society, and thus thinking, she said to Mr. Basnett:
“Well, you’ll ask me to join when the time comes, I hope.”
He nodded, and took his pipe from his mouth, but, being unable to think of anything to say, he put it back again, although he would have been glad if she had stayed.
Against her wish, Mary insisted upon taking her downstairs, and then, as there was no cab to be seen, they stood in the street together, looking about them.