pictures too fine for private ownership. Just then he was being
particularly fine in an exciting way. He sat up very straight, flung out
his great arm with a gesture of abandonment, and said that he would have
no more to do with this house. So might a conqueror speak of a city he
was weary of looting. He wanted to sell it outright, and desired Mr.
Philip to undertake the whole business of concluding the sale with the
Rio agents. "It's all here," he said, and took from his pocket-book a
packet of letters. "They hold the title-deeds and you'll see how things
are getting on with the deal. But I suppose the language will be a
difficulty. I can read you these, of course, but how will you carry on
the correspondence?"

"Och, we can send out to a translator--"

A tingling ran through Ellen's veins. The men's words, uttered on one
side in irritated languor and on the other with empty spruceness, had
suddenly lifted her to the threshold of life. She had previsioned many
moments in which she should disclose her unique value to a dazzled
world, but most of them had seemed, even to herself, extremely unlikely
to arrive. It was improbable that Mr. Asquith should fall into a river
just as she was passing, and that he should be so helpless and the
countryside so depopulated that she would be able to exact votes for
women as the price of his rescue; besides, she could not swim. It was
improbable, too, that she should be in a South American republic just
when a revolution was proclaimed, and that, the Latin attitude to women
being what it is, she should be given a high military command. But there
had been one triumph which she knew to be not impossible even in her
obscurity. It might conceivably happen that by some exhibition of the
prodigious bloom of her efficiency she would repay her debt to the firm
and make the first steps towards becoming the pioneer business queen.