"What I _shall_ have to say to him before long, is--'I have tricked you this quarter out of L500--and I mean to do it again next quarter--if I can!' He won't want to kiss my hand again!" Chapter X Two men sat smoking and talking with Paul Lathrop in the hook-littered sitting-room of his cottage. One was a young journalist, Roger Blaydes, whose thin, close-shaven face wore the knowing fool's look of one to whom the world's his oyster, and all the bricks for opening it familiar. The other was a god-like creature, a poet by profession, with long lantern-jaws, grey eyes deeply set, and a mass of curly black hair, from which the face with its pallor and its distinction, shone dimly out like the portrait of a Cinquecento. Lathrop, in a kind of dressing-gown, as clumsily cut as the form it wrapped, his reddish hair and large head catching the firelight, had the look of one lazily at bay, as wrapped in a cloud of smoke, he twined from one speaker to the other. "So you were at another of these meetings last night?" said Blaydes, with a mouth half smiling, half contemptuous. "Yes. A disgusting failure! They didn't even take the trouble to pelt us." The poet--Merian by name--moved angrily on his chair. Blaydes threw a sly look at him, as he knocked the ash from his cigarette. "And what the deuce do you expect to get by it all?" Paul Lathrop paused a moment--and at last said with a lift of the eyebrows:-- "Well!--I have no illusions!" Merian broke out indignantly-- "I say, Lathrop--why should you try and play up to that cynic there? As if he ever had an illusion about anything!" "Well, but one may have faith without illusions," protested Blaydes, with hard good temper. "I doubt whether Lathrop has an ounce of either!" Lathrop reached out for a match. "What's the good of 'faith'--and what does anyone mean by it? Sympathies--and animosities: they're enough for me." "And you really are in sympathy with these women?" said the other. The tone was incredulous. Merian brought his hand violently down on the table. "Don't you talk about them, Blaydes! I tell you, they're out of your ken." "I daresay," said Blaydes, composedly. "I was only trying to get at what Lathrop means by going into the business." Paul Lathrop sat up. "I'm in sympathy with anything that harasses, and bothers and stings the governing classes of this country!" he said, with an oratorical wave of his cigarette. "What fools they are! In this particular business the Government is an ass, the public is an ass, the women, if you like, are asses. So long as they don't destroy works of art that appeal to me, I prefer to bray with them than with their enemies." Merian rose impatiently--a slim, dark-browed St. George towering over the other two. "After that, I'd rather hear them attacked by Blaydes, than defended by you, Lathrop!" he said with energy, as he buttoned up his coat. Lathrop threw him a cool glance. "So for you, they're all heroines--and saints?"