them that you can build, plan, organize; that you were meant to be a
ruler. You can't succeed without them, as things are. You've got to win
them over. Prove to them that they can trust you."

He sat for a minute tattooing with his fingers on the table, before
speaking.

"It's the frills and flummery part of it that frightens me," he said.
"You wouldn't think that sensitiveness was my weak point. But it is.
I've stood up to a Birmingham mob that was waiting to lynch me and
enjoyed the experience; but I'd run ten miles rather than face a drawing-
room of well-dressed people with their masked faces and ironic
courtesies. It leaves me for days feeling like a lobster that has lost
its shell."

"I wouldn't say it, if I didn't mean it," answered Joan; "but you haven't
got to trouble yourself about that . . . You're quite passable." She
smiled. It seemed to her that most women would find him more than
passable.

He shook his head. "With you," he said. "There's something about you
that makes one ashamed of worrying about the little things. But the
others: the sneering women and the men who wink over their shoulder while
they talk to you, I shall never be able to get away from them, and, of
course, wherever I go--"

He stopped abruptly with a sudden tightening of the lips. Joan followed
his eyes. Mrs. Phillips had swallowed the smoke and was giggling and
spluttering by turns. The yellow ostrich feather had worked itself loose
and was rocking to and fro as if in a fit of laughter of its own.