“You forget,” said Anthony, as he calmly helped himself to more bread and butter, “that it is some three years since Master Harry Wharton joined the Venturists and began to be heard of at all.  I watched his beginnings, and if I didn’t know him well, my friends and Louis’s did.  And most of them—­as he knows!—­have pretty strong opinions by now about the man.”

“Come, come, Anthony!” said Louis, “nobody expects a man of that type to be the pure-eyed patriot.  But neither you nor I can deny that he has done some good service.  Am I asked to take him to my bosom?  Not at all!  He proposes a job to me, and offers to pay me.  I like the job, and mean to use him and his paper, both to earn some money that I want, and do a bit of decent work.”

“You—­use Harry Wharton!” said the cripple, with a sarcasm that brought the colour to Louis’s thin cheek and made Marcella angrier than before.  She saw nothing in his attack on Wharton, except personal prejudice and ill-will.  It was natural enough, that a man of Anthony Craven’s type—­poor, unsuccessful, and embittered—­should dislike a popular victorious personality.

“Suppose we leave Mr. Wharton alone?” she said with emphasis, and Anthony, making her a little proud gesture of submission, threw himself back in his chair, and was silent.

It had soon become evident to Marcella, upon the renewal of her friendship with the Cravens, that Anthony’s temper towards all men, especially towards social reformers and politicians, had developed into a mere impotent bitterness.  While Louis had renounced his art, and devoted himself to journalism, unpaid public work and starvation, that he might so throw himself the more directly into the Socialist battle, Anthony had remained an artist, mainly employed as before in decorative design.  Yet he was probably the more fierce Venturist and anticapitalist of the two.  Only what with Louis was an intoxication of hope, was on the whole with Anthony a counsel of despair.  He loathed wealth more passionately than ever; but he believed less in the working man, less in his kind.  Rich men must cease to exist; but the world on any terms would probably remain a sorry spot.

In the few talks that he had had with Marcella since she left the hospital, she had allowed him to gather more or less clearly—­though with hardly a mention of Aldous Raeburn’s name—­what had happened to her at Mellor.  Anthony Craven thought out the story for himself, finding it a fit food for a caustic temper.  Poor devil—­the lover!  To fall a victim to enthusiasms so raw, so unprofitable from any point of view, was hard.  And as to this move to London, he thought he foresaw the certain end of it.  At any rate he believed in her no more than before.  But her beauty was more marked than ever, and would, of course, be the dominant factor in her fate.  He was thankful, at any rate, that Louis in this two years’ interval had finally transferred his heart elsewhere.