“Talk to him some time, and find out what he means by it,” Wingrave said. “I don’t want to find my biography in the American newspapers. It might interfere with my operations there. Here’s this woman coming to worry us! You take her off, Aynesworth! I shall go into the smoking room.” But Mrs. Travers was not so easily to be disposed of. For some reason or other, she had shown a disposition to attach herself to Wingrave. “Please put me in my chair,” she said to him, holding out her rug and cushion. “No! Not you, Mr. Aynesworth. Mr. Wingrave understands so much better how to wrap me up. Thanks! Won’t you sit down yourself? It’s much better for you out here than in the smoking room--and we might go on with our argument.” “I thought,” Wingrave remarked, accepting her invitation after a moment’s hesitation, “that we were to abandon it.” “That was before dinner,” she answered, glancing sideways at him. “I feel braver now.” “You are prepared,” he remarked, “for unconditional surrender?” She looked at him again. She had rather nice eyes, quite dark and very soft, and she was a great believer in their efficacy. “Of my argument?” He did not answer her for a moment. He had turned his head slightly towards her, and though his face was, as usual, expressionless, and his eyes cold and hard, she found nevertheless something of meaning in his steady regard. There was a flush in her cheek when she looked away. “I am afraid,” she remarked, “that you are rather a terrible person.” “You flatter me,” he murmured. “I am really quite harmless!” “Not from conviction then, I am sure,” she remarked. “Perhaps not,” he admitted. “Let us call it from lack of enterprise! The virtues are all very admirable things, but it is the men and women with vices who have ruled the world. The good die young because there is no useful work for them to do. No really satisfactory person, from a moral point of view, ever achieved greatness!” She half closed her eyes. “My head is going round,” she murmured. “What an upheaval! Fancy Mephistopheles on a steamer!” “He was, at any rate, the most interesting of that little trio,” Wingrave remarked, “but even he was a trifle heavy.” “Do you go about the world preaching your new doctrines?” she asked. “Not I!” he answered. “Nothing would every make a missionary of me, for good or for evil, for the simple reason that no one else’s welfare except my own has the slightest concern for me.” “What hideous selfishness!” she said softly. “But I don’t think--you quite mean it?” “I can assure you I do,” he answered drily. “My world consists of myself for the central figure, and the half a dozen or so of people who are useful or amusing to me! Except that the rest are needed to keep moving the machinery of the world, they might all perish, so far as I was concerned.” “I don’t think,” Mrs. Travers said softly, “that I should like to be in your world.” “I can very easily believe you,” he answered.