Sir Wilfrid silently shook his head.  Meredith threw back his blanched mane of hair, his deep eyes kindling under the implied contradiction.

“I am an old comrade of Lady Henry’s,” he said, quickly.  “My record, you’ll find, comes next to yours, Bury.  But if Lady Henry is determined to make a quarrel of this, she must make it.  I regret nothing.”

“What madness has seized upon all these people?” thought Bury, as he withdrew from the discussion.  The fire, the unwonted fire, in Meredith’s speech and aspect, amazed him.  From the corner to which he had retreated he studied the face of the journalist.  It was a face subtly and strongly lined by much living—­of the intellectual, however, rather than the physical sort; breathing now a studious dignity, the effect of the broad sweep of brow under the high-peaked lines of grizzled hair, and now broken, tempestuous, scornful, changing with the pliancy of an actor.  The head was sunk a little in the shoulders, as though dragged back by its own weight.  The form which it commanded had the movements of a man no less accustomed to rule in his own sphere than Montresor himself.

To Sir Wilfrid the famous editor was still personally mysterious, after many years of intermittent acquaintance.  He was apparently unmarried; or was there perhaps a wife, picked up in a previous state of existence, and hidden away with her offspring at Clapham or Hornsey or Peckham?  Bury could remember, years before, a dowdy old sister, to whom Lady Henry had been on occasion formally polite.  Otherwise, nothing.  What were the great man’s origins and antecedents—­his family, school, university?  Sir Wilfrid did not know; he did not believe that any one knew.  An amazing mastery of the German, and, it was said, the Russian tongues, suggested a foreign education; but neither on this ground nor any other connected with his personal history did Meredith encourage the inquirer.  It was often reported that he was of Jewish descent, and there were certain traits, both of feature and character, that lent support to the notion.  If so, the strain was that of Heine or Disraeli, not the strain of Commerce.

At any rate, he was one of the most powerful men of his day—­the owner, through The New Rambler, of an influence which now for some fifteen years had ranked among the forces to be reckoned with.  A man in whom politics assumed a tinge of sombre poetry; a man of hatreds, ideals, indignations, yet of habitually sober speech.  As to passions, Sir Wilfrid could have sworn that, wife or no wife, the man who could show that significance of mouth and eye had not gone through life without knowing the stress and shock of them.