all, though, it’s a bit unfair on Cranston.  Hang it, I’ve been a married man myself,’ and he chuckled in unregenerate enjoyment.  ’However, the seat’s got to be won.  Let’s think of an epigram,’ and he scratched his head and slapped his thigh.  It was the Captain’s way of thinking.  The satisfactory epigram would not emerge.  He could fashion nothing better as a description of Cranston than, ’A refreshment-room sandwich; two great chunks of sin and a little slice of repentance between.’  Mr. Burl condemned it as crude, and for the moment the epigram was dropped.

The Mallinsons arrived a week after the contest had begun.  Captain Le Mesurier welcomed Clarice with boisterous effusion, and her husband with quarter-deck dignity.  ‘You look ill,’ he said to Clarice.  ’It’s your husband worrying you.  Ah, I know, I know!  Those writing chaps!’

To Mallinson, however, he suddenly showed excessive friendliness, and took the opportunity of saying to him loudly in a full room, ’There’s something I must tell you.  I know it’ll make you laugh.  It does me whenever I think of it.  You know Drake?  Well, we travelled up from Plymouth together when he came back from Africa.  He bought your book at the bookstall, and sat opposite me reading it.  What was it called?  I know, A Man of Influence.  You should have seen Drake’s face.  Lord, he couldn’t make head or tail of it.  How should he?  I asked him what he thought of it, and imagine what he answered!  You can’t, though.  It’s the funniest thing I ever heard.  He said it was a very clever satire.  Satire!  Good Lord, I almost rolled off the seat.  It is funny, isn’t it?’

Mallinson, with a wry face, agreed that the story was funny.

‘I knew you would think so,’ pursued the Captain relentlessly.  ’Everybody does I have told it to, and that’s everybody I know.  Satire!  Lord help us!’ and he shook with laughter and clapped Mallinson in the small of the back.

Mallinson felt the fool that he was intended to look, with the result that his dormant resentment against Drake sprang again into activity.  That resentment became intensified, as the date of the election drew nearer, by an unconfessed jealousy.  They both made speeches, but Mallinson chiefly at the smaller meetings.  And when they stood upon the same platform he was continually forced to compare the difference in the acclamation with which their speeches were severally received.  As a matter of fact, Drake spoke from a fire of conviction, and the conviction not merely burnt through his words, but minted them for him, gave him spontaneously the short homely phrase which sank his meaning into the minds of his hearers.  Mallinson took refuge in a criticism of Drake’s speeches from the standpoint of literary polish.  He recast them in his thoughts, turning this sentence more deftly, whittling that repartee to a finer point.  The process consoled him for Drake’s misreckoning of his purpose in the matter of A Man of Influence, since it pointed to a certain lack of delicacy, say at once to crassness in the man’s intellect.