Page:Terminations (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1895).djvu/96

We clung to the idea of the brilliant course, delivered without an accident, that, as a lecturer, would still make the paying public aware of our great mind; but the fact remained that in the case of an inspiration so unequal there was treachery; there was fallacy, at least, in the very conception of a series. In our scrutiny of ways and means we were inevitably subject to the old convention of the synopsis, the syllabus—partly of course not to lose the advantage of his grand free hand in drawing up such things; but, for myself, I laughed at our playbills, even while I stickled for them. It was indeed amusing work to be scrupulous for Frank Saltram, who also at moments laughed about it, so far as the comfort of a sigh so unstudied as to be cheerful might pass for such a sound. He admitted with a candor all his own that he was in truth only to be depended on in the Mulvilles' drawing-room. "Yes," he suggestively conceded, "it's there, I think, that I am at my best; quite late, when it gets toward eleven—and if I've not been too much worried." We all knew what too much worry meant; it meant too enslaved for the hour to the superstition of sobriety. On the Saturdays I used to bring my portmanteau, so as not to have to think of eleven o'clock trains. I had a bold theory that as regards this temple of talk and its altars of cushioned chintz, its pictures and its flowers, its large fireside and clear lamplight, we might really arrive at something if the Mulvilles would only charge for