city editor, told me. He has, so it appears, invested enormous sums. Consols will go up in consequence. But even then I don't see how he can repay himself. They cannot rise much."
"I wonder if I was well advised to sell?" said Mrs. Armstrong, nervously. "They say Sir Michael never makes a mistake. He must have some private information."
"I don't think that is possible, Mrs. Armstrong," Ommaney said. "Of course Sir Michael may very likely know something about the situation which is not yet public. He may be reckoning on it. But things are in such hopeless confusion that no sane speculator would buy for a small rise which endured for half a day. He would not be able to unload quickly enough. It seems as if Sir Michael is buying for a permanent recovery. And I assure you that nothing can bring that about. Only one thing at least."
"What is that?" asked both Mrs. Armstrong and Schuabe together.
The editor paused, while a faint smile flickered over his face. "Ah," he said, "an impossibility, of course. If any one discovered that 'The Discovery' was a fraud — a great forgery, for instance — then we should see a universal relief."
"That, of course, is asking for an impossibility," said Mrs. Armstrong, rather shortly. She resented the somewhat flippant tone of the great man.
These things were all her life. To Ommaney they but represented a passing panorama in which he took absolutely no personal interest. The novelist disliked and feared this detachment. It warred with her strong sense of mental duty. The highly trained journalist, to whom all life was but news, news, news, was a strange modern product which warred with her sense of what was fitting.
