Rickman did not offer to go as Mr. Pilkington advanced; for, Heaven knew how, in some obscure and subtle way she had managed to convey to him that his presence was a protection.

Mr. Pilkington entered the room with the air of a man completely assured as to his reception.  He bowed to Miss Harden; an extraordinary bow.  No words could have conveyed the exquisite intimations of Mr. Pilkington’s spine.  It was as if he had said to her, “Madam, you needn’t be afraid; in your presence I am all deference and chivalry and restraint.”  But no sooner had Dicky achieved this admirable effect of refinement than he spoilt it all by the glance he levelled at young Rickman. That expressed nothing but the crude emotion of the insolent male, baulked of his desire to find himself alone on the field.  It insulted her as brutally as any words by its unblushing assumption of the attitude of sex.

“I must introduce myself, Miss ’Arden,” he said, ignoring Rickman.  “I think I have not had the pleasure—­” His large mouth closed reluctantly on the unfinished phrase.

He seated himself with circumstance, parting the tails of his coat very carefully.  He had chosen a seat opposite the window.  As if conscious of the glory of his appearance, he offered himself liberally to the light.  He let it play over his figure, a figure that youth subdued to sleekness that would one day be corpulence; it drew out all the yellow in his moustache and hair; it blazed in his gold-rimmed eye-glass; thence it alighted, a pale watery splendour, on the bridge of his nose.  It was a bridge where two nationalities met and contended for mastery.  Mr. Pilkington’s nose had started with a distinctly Semitic intention, frustrated by the Anglo-Saxon in him, its downward course being docked to the proportion of a snub.  Nobody knew better than Mr. Pilkington that it was that snub that saved him.  He was proud of it as a proof of his descent from the dominant race.  Assisted by his reluctantly closing mouth and double eye-glass it inspired confidence, giving to Mr. Pilkington’s face an expression of extreme openness and candour.  He was proud of his eye-glass too.  He considered that it made him look like a man of science or of letters.  But it didn’t.  It did much better for him than that.  It took all the subtlety out of his face and endowed it with an earnest and enormous stare.  And as that large mouth couldn’t and wouldn’t close properly, his sentences had a way of dying off in a faint gasp, leaving a great deal to the imagination.  All these natural characteristics were invaluable for business purposes.

But if you had asked Mr. Pilkington for the secret of his success, he would have told you that he owed it to his possession of two qualities, “bounce” and “tact.”  To both, mind you; for tact without bounce will carry a man neither far nor high; while bounce without tact will elevate him occasionally to his own perdition.  Conversationally he was furnished with tentacles sensitive to the lightest touch of an idea; he had the very subtlest discernment of shades within shades.  He grasped with airy impact; he moved by a delicate contact and recoil, a process he was pleased to describe as “feelin’ his way.”