Denham answered him with the brevity which is the result of having
another sentence in the mind to be addressed to another person. He
wished to say to Katharine: "Did you remember to get that picture
glazed before your aunt came to dinner?" but, besides having to answer
Rodney, he was not sure that the remark, with its assertion of
intimacy, would not strike Katharine as impertinent. She was listening
to what some one in another group was saying. Rodney, meanwhile, was
talking about the Elizabethan dramatists.

He was a curious-looking man since, upon first sight, especially if he
chanced to be talking with animation, he appeared, in some way,
ridiculous; but, next moment, in repose, his face, with its large
nose, thin cheeks and lips expressing the utmost sensibility, somehow
recalled a Roman head bound with laurel, cut upon a circle of semi-
transparent reddish stone. It had dignity and character. By profession
a clerk in a Government office, he was one of those martyred spirits
to whom literature is at once a source of divine joy and of almost
intolerable irritation. Not content to rest in their love of it, they
must attempt to practise it themselves, and they are generally endowed
with very little facility in composition. They condemn whatever they
produce. Moreover, the violence of their feelings is such that they
seldom meet with adequate sympathy, and being rendered very sensitive
by their cultivated perceptions, suffer constant slights both to their
own persons and to the thing they worship. But Rodney could never
resist making trial of the sympathies of any one who seemed favorably
disposed, and Denham's praise had stimulated his very susceptible
vanity.

"You remember the passage just before the death of the Duchess?" he
continued, edging still closer to Denham, and adjusting his elbow and