THE BETTER SORT
we don't know. There's very little to know. He covered His tracks as no other human being has ever done."
She was still in her public costume and had not taken off the gloves that she made a point of wearing as a part of that uniform; she remembered how the rustling housekeeper in the Border castle, on whom she had begun by modelling herself, had worn them. She seemed official and slightly distant. "To cover His tracks. He must have had to exist. Have we got to give that up?"
"No, I don't ask you to give it up yet. But there's very little to go upon."
"And is that what I'm to tell Them in return for everything?"
Gedge waited—he walked about. The place was doubly still after the bustle of the day, and the summer evening rested on it as a blessing, making it, in its small state and ancientry, mellow and sweet. It was good to be there, and it would be good to stay. At the same time there was something incalculable in the effect on one's nerves of the great gregarious density. That was an attitude that had nothing to do with degrees and shades, the attitude of wanting all or nothing. And you couldn't talk things over with it. You could only do this with friends, and then but in cases where you were sure the friends wouldn't betray you. "Couldn't you adopt," he replied at last, "a slightly more discreet method? What we can say is that things have been said; that's all we have to do with. 'And is this really'—when they jam their umbrellas into the floor—'the very spot where He was born?' 'So it has, from a long time back, been described as being.' Couldn't one meet Them, to be decent a little, in some such way as that?"
She looked at him very hard. "Is that the way you meet them?"
"No; I've kept on lying—without scruple, without shame."
272
