Pike was a man of nearly sixty with furiously black and luxuriant hair. He had been every sort of journalist in America and in London, and some years previously had been brought into the editorship of the _County Times_. The Press, broad-based on the liberty of the English people and superbly impervious to whatever temptation to jump in the direction the cat jumps, is, on the other hand, singularly sensitive to apparently inconsequent trifles in the lives of its proprietary. Pike, with his reputation, was brought into the editorship of the _County Times_ solely because the proprietor late in life suddenly married. The wife of the proprietor desiring to share a knighthood with her husband, the proprietor, anxious to please but unwilling to pay, incontinently sacked the tame editor who was beguiling an amiable dotage with the _County Times_ and looked about for a wild editor, whom unquestionably he found in Mr. Pike. The breath of the _County Times_ became as the breath of life to the Tory tradition and burst from its columns as the breath of a fiery furnace upon all that was opposed to the Tory tradition. The proprietor felt that his knighthood was assured as soon as the tide of liberalism turned; and the _County Times_, which could not notice even a Baptist harvest festival without snorting fire and brimstone upon it, said that the tide of radicalism--it did not print the words Liberal or Liberalism--was turning every day. About once a week the _County Times_ said that the tide of radicalism "definitely turned last night." Pike was a man of extraordinarily violent language. Consequent, no doubt, on the restraint of having to write always in printable language, his vocal discussion of the subjects on which he wrote was mainly in unprintable. He spoke of trade-unionists always as "those swine and dogs" and of the members of the Government as "those dogs and swine",--swine and dogs being refined and temperate euphuisms for the epithets Mr. Pike actually employed. However he heard Sabre's stumbling periods tolerantly out and tolerantly dealt with him. "Excuse me, Sabre, but that sort of stuff's absolutely fatal--fatal. It's simply compromise. Compromise. The most fatal defect in the English character." Sabre happened to be stout enough on this particular point. "That's just what it isn't. Precisely what it isn't. I loathe compromise. More than anything. Compromise is accepting a little of what you know to be wrong in order to get a little of what you imagine to be right." Pike made a swift note in shorthand on his blotting pad. "Exactly. Well?" "Well, that's just the opposite to what I mean. I mean accepting, admitting, what you know to be _right_." Pike smote his hand upon the blotting pad. "But, damn it, those dogs and swine never _are_ right." "There you are!" said Sabre. And there they were, shouting, smashing; and Sabre could not do either and retired dismayed from the arenas of both. CHAPTER II I