To relieve him of the burthen of such
social attentions she even made a fag or so. The making of fags out
of manifestly stricken men, the keeping of tamed and hopeless
admirers, seemed to her to be the most natural and reasonable of
feminine privileges. They did their useful little services until it
pleased the Lord Cheetah to come to his own. That was how she put
it. . . .
But at last he was talking to her in tones that could no longer be
ignored. He was manifestly losing his temper with her. There was a
novel austerity in his voice and a peculiar whiteness about his face
on certain occasions that lingered in her memory.
He was indeed making elaborate explanations. He said that what he
wanted to do was to understand "the collective life of the world,"
and that this was not to be done in a West-End study. He had an
extraordinary contempt, it seemed, for both sides in the drama of
British politics. He had extravagant ideas of beginning in some
much more fundamental way. He wanted to understand this "collective
life of the world," because ultimately he wanted to help control it.
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