Chapter 5 - Page 2

the
gods only coincided more exactly with those of the party. There
was a distinct moment when, without saying anything more definite
to me, Gravener entertained the idea of annexing Mr. Saltram. Such
a project was delusive, for the discovery of analogies between his
body of doctrine and that pressed from headquarters upon
Clockborough--the bottling, in a word, of the air of those lungs
for convenient public uncorking in corn-exchanges--was an
experiment for which no one had the leisure. The only thing would
have been to carry him massively about, paid, caged, clipped; to
turn him on for a particular occasion in a particular channel.
Frank Saltram's channel, however, was essentially not calculable,
and there was no knowing what disastrous floods might have ensued.
For what there would have been to do THE EMPIRE, the great
newspaper, was there to look to; but it was no new misfortune that
there were delicate situations in which THE EMPIRE broke down. In
fine there was an instinctive apprehension that a clever young
journalist commissioned to report on Mr. Saltram might never come
back from the errand. No one knew better than George Gravener that
that was a time when prompt returns counted double. If he
therefore found our friend an exasperating waste of orthodoxy it
was because of his being, as he said, poor Gravener, up in the
clouds, not because he was down in the dust. The man would have
been, just as he was, a real enough gentleman if he could have
helped to put in a real gentleman. Gravener's great objection to
the actual member was that he was not one.

Lady Coxon had a fine old house, a house with "grounds," at
Clockborough, which she had let; but after she returned from abroad
I learned from Mrs. Saltram that the lease had fallen in and that
she had gone down to resume possession. I could see the faded red
livery, the big square shoulders, the high-walled garden of this
decent abode. As the rumble of dissolution grew louder the suitor
would have pressed his suit, and I found myself hoping the politics
of the late Mayor's widow wouldn't be such as to admonish her to
ask him to dinner; perhaps indeed I went so far as to pray, they
would naturally form a bar to any contact. I tried to focus the
many-buttoned page, in the daily airing, as he perhaps even pushed
the Bath-chair over somebody's toes. I was destined to hear, none
the less, through Mrs. Saltram--who, I afterwards learned, was in
correspondence with Lady Coxon's housekeeper--that Gravener was
known to have spoken of the habitation I had in my eye as the
pleasantest thing at Clockborough. On his part, I was sure, this
was the voice not of envy but of experience. The vivid scene was
now peopled, and I could see him in the