"You're right," he said. "Very right. All the same, there ought to have been more there besides Myself." There was a perfectly horrible silence, and then Antigone's voice came through it, pure and fine and rather slow. "There couldn't be. There couldn't really be anybody--there--_at all_. He stood alone." And with her wonderful voice there went a look, a look of intelligence, as wonderful, as fine and pure. It went straight to Burton. It was humble, and yet there was a sort of splendid pride about it. And there was no revolt, mind you, no disloyalty in it; the beauty of the thing was that it didn't set her father down; it left him where he was, as high as you please, as high as his vogue could lift him. Ford Lankester was beyond him only because he was beyond them all. And yet we wondered how he'd take it. He took it as if Antigone had been guilty of a social blunder; as if her behavior had been in some way painful and improper. That's to say he took no notice of it at all beyond shifting his seat a little so as to screen her. And then he spoke--exclusively to us. "I came," he said, "partly because I felt that, for all Lankester's greatness, _this_--" (his gesture indicated us all sitting there in our mourning)--"_this_ was the last of him. It's a question whether he'll ever mean much to the next generation. There's no doubt that he limited his public--wilfully. He alienated the many. And, say what you like, the judgment of posterity is not the judgment of the few." There was a faint murmur of dissent (from Furnival), but Wrackham's voice, which had gathered volume, rolled over it. "Not for the novelist. Not for the painter of contemporary life." He would have kept it up interminably on those lines and on that scale, but that Antigone created a diversion (I think she did it on purpose to screen him) by getting up and going out softly into the porch of the inn. Burton followed her there. You forgive many things to Burton. I have had to forgive his cutting me out with Antigone. He _says_ that they talked about nothing but Ford Lankester out there, and certainly as I joined them I heard Antigone saying again, "I oughtn't to have come. I only came because I adored him." I heard Burton say, "And you never knew him?" and Antigone, "No, how _could_ I?" And then I saw him give it back to her with his young radiance. "It's a pity. He would have adored _you_." He always says it was Ford Lankester that did it. The next thing Furnival's article came out. Charles Wrackham's name was in it all right, and poor Antigone's. I'm sure it made her sick to see it there. Furny had been very solemn and decorous in his article; but in private his profanity was awful. He said it only remained now for Charles Wrackham to die. II