"They say, at the club," he answered, "that this place is a sham and a humbug."
"Will you bring your friends here to show them that it is not?"
"Harry stood up for you the other night. He's plucky, and they like him for all he looks a swell."
"Sometimes--not to say speak. He gets up after the speech, and says so and so is wrong. Yet they like him--because he isn't afraid to say what he thinks. They call him Gentleman Jack."
"I thought he was a brave man," said Angela, looking at Harry, who was rehearsing some story to the delight of Nelly and the girls.
"Yes--the other night they were talking about you, and one said one thing and one said another, and a chap said he thought he'd seen you in a West End music-hall, and he didn't believe you were any better than you should be."
"Oh!" She shrank as if she had been struck some blow.
"He didn't say it twice. After he'd knocked him down, Harry invited that chap to stand up and have it out. But he wouldn't."
It was a great misfortune for Harry that he lost the soft and glowing look of gratitude and admiration which was quite wasted upon him. For he was at the very point, the critical point, of the story.
Angela had made another convert. When Dick Coppin went home that night, he was humbled but pensive. Here was a thing of which he had never thought; and here was a woman the like of whom he had never imagined. The House of Lords, the Church, the Land Laws, presented no attraction that night for his thoughts. For the first time in his life he felt the influence of a woman.
Engaged in these pursuits, neither Angela nor Harry paid much heed to the circle at the boarding-house, where they were still nominally boarders. For Angela was all day long at her association, and her general assistant, or prime-minister, after a hasty breakfast, hastened to his daily labor. He found that he was left entirely to his own devices: work came in which he did or left undone, Miss Messenger's instructions were faithfully carried out, and his independence was respected. During work-time he planned amusements and surprises for Miss Kennedy and her girls, or he meditated upon the Monotony of Man, a subject which I may possibly explain later on; or when he knocked off, he would go and see the drayman roll about the heavy casks as if they were footballs; or he would watch the machinery and look at the great brown mass of boiling hops, or he would drop suddenly upon his cousin Josephus, and observe him faithfully entering names, ticking off and comparing, just as he had done for forty years, still a junior clerk. But he gave no thought to the boarders.