Filboid Studge had become a household word, but Dullamy wisely realized
that it was not necessarily the last word in breakfast dietary; its
supremacy would be challenged as soon as some yet more unpalatable food
should be put on the market. There might even be a reaction in favour
of something tasty and appetizing, and the Puritan austerity of the
moment might be banished from domestic cookery. At an opportune
moment, therefore, he sold out his interests in the article which had
brought him in colossal wealth at a critical juncture, and placed his
financial reputation beyond the reach of cavil. As for Leonore, who
was now an heiress on a far greater scale than ever before, he
naturally found her something a vast deal higher in the husband market
than a two-hundred-a-year poster designer. Mark Spayley, the
brainmouse who had helped the financial lion with such untoward effect,
was left to curse the day he produced the wonder-working poster.
"After all," said Clovis, meeting him shortly afterwards at his club,
"you have this doubtful consolation, that 'tis not in mortals to
countermand success."
THE MUSIC ON THE HILL
Sylvia Seltoun ate her breakfast in the morning-room at Yessney with a
pleasant sense of ultimate victory, such as a fervent Ironside might
have permitted himself on the morrow of Worcester fight. She was
scarcely pugnacious by temperament, but belonged to that more
successful class of fighters who are pugnacious by circumstance. Fate
had willed that her life should be occupied with a series of small
struggles, usually with the odds slightly against her, and usually she
had just managed to come through winning. And now she felt that she
had brought her hardest and certainly her most important struggle to a
successful issue. To have married Mortimer Seltoun, "Dead Mortimer" as
his more intimate enemies called him, in the teeth of the cold
hostility of his family, and in spite of his unaffected indifference to
women, was indeed an achievement that had needed some determination and
adroitness to carry through; yesterday she had brought her victory to
its concluding stage by wrenching her husband away from Town and its
group of satellite watering-places and "settling him down," in the
vocabulary of her kind, in this remote wood-girt manor farm which was
his country house.
"You will never get Mortimer to go," his mother had said carpingly,
"but if he once goes he'll stay; Yessney throws almost as much a spell
over him as Town does. One can understand what holds him to Town, but
Yessney--" and the dowager had shrugged her shoulders.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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