t under her as she sat down. Then, with a feeling of jubilant elation, he sat down beside her and drew his chair up. He wanted to talk, to prove himself a brilliant conversationalist, to surprise the whole gathering with his wit, his penetration, his distinguished ease. Above all, he wanted to eat and eat and eat! His head felt light and drunk and giddy, but gloriously so—he had never been so superbly confident in his life. And in this mood, he unfolded his napkin, and smiling brightly, turned to dazzle his neighbour on his right with the brilliant effervescence of wit that already seemed to sparkle on his lips. One look, and the bright smile faded, wit and confidence fell dead together, his heart shrank instantly and seemed to drop out of his very body like a rotten apple. Miss Potter had not failed. Her unerring genius for calamity had held out to the finish. He found himself staring into the poisonous face of the one person in Cambridge that he hated most—the repulsive visage of the old composer, Cram.
An old long face, yellowed with malevolence, a sudden fox-glint of small eyes steeped in a vitriol of ageless hate, a beak of cruel nose, and thin lips stained and hardened in a rust of venom, the whole craftily, slantingly astare between a dirty frame of sparse lank locks. Cackling with malignant glee, and cramming crusty bread into his mouth, the old composer turned and spoke:
“Heh! Heh! Heh!”—Crunch, crunch—“It’s Mister Ten Eyck, isn’t it? The man who wrote that play Professor Hatcher put on at his last performance—that mystical fantasy kind of thing. That was your play, wasn’t it?”
The old yellow face came closer, and he snarled in a kind of gloating and vindictive whisper: “Most of the audience hated it! They thought it very bad, sir—very bad!” Crunch, crunch. “I am only telling you because I think you ought to know—that you may profit by the criticism.”
And Ten Eyck, hunger gone now, shrank back as if a thin poisoned blade had been driven in his heart and twisted there. “I—I—I thought some of them rather liked it. Of course I don’t know—I can’t say—” he faltered hesitantly, “but I—I really thought some of the audience—liked it.”
“Well, they didn’t,” the composer snarled, still crunching on his crust of bread. “Everyone that I saw thought that it was terrible. Heh! Heh! Heh! Heh! Except my wife and I—” Crunch, crunch. “We were the only ones who thought that it was any good at all, the only ones who thought there would ever be any hope for you. And we found parts of it—
