He was a beau ideal commissioner. The native newspaper said so
when he first came, having painfully selected the phrase from a "Dictionary
Of Polite English for Public Purposes" edited by a College graduate
at present in the Andamans. True, later it had called him an "overbearing
and insane procrastinator"--"an apostle of absolutism"--and, plum of
all literary gleanings, since it left so much to the imagination of the native
reader,--"laudator temporis acti." But that the was because he had
withdrawn his private subscription prior to suspending the paper sine die
under paragraph so-and-so of the Act for Dealing with Sedition; it could
not be held to cancel the correct first judgment, any more than the
unmeasured early praise had offset later indiscretion. Beau ideal must stand.

It was not his first call at the Blaines' house, although somehow or other
he never contrived to find Dick Blaine at home. As a bachelor he had
no domestic difficulties to pin him down when office work was over
for the morning, and, being a man of hardly more than forty, of fine
physique, with an astonishing capacity for swift work, he could usual
finish in an hour before breakfast what would have kept the routine rank
and file of orthodox officials perspiring through the day. That was one
reason why he had been sent to Sialpore--men in the higher ranks,
with a pension due them after certain years of service, dislike being hurried.

He was a handsome man--too handsome, some said--with a profile l
ike a medallion of Mark Antony that lost a little of its strength and poise
when he looked straight at you. A commissionership was an apparent
rise in the world; but Sialpore has the name of being a departmental
cul-de-sac, and they had laughed in the clubs about "Irish promotion"
without exactly naming judge O'Mally. (Mrs. O'Mally came from a cathedral
city, where distaste for the conventions is forced at high pressure from