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something in the nature of things.
She took the line of huffy dutifulness. She disapproved highly, it was
evident, but she did not prohibit. The flight of Bensington, as she must
have considered it, may have shaken her, and her worst was to treat him
with bitter persistence for a cold he had not caught and fatigue he had
long since forgotten, and to buy him a new sort of hygienic all-wool
combination underwear that was apt to get involved and turned partially
inside out and partially not, and as difficult to get into for an
absent-minded man, as--Society. And so for a space, and as far as this
convenience left him leisure, he still continued to participate in the
development of this new element in human history, the Food of the Gods.
The public mind, following its own mysterious laws of selection, had
chosen him as the one and only responsible Inventor and Promoter of this
new wonder; it would hear nothing of Redwood, and without a protest it
allowed Cossar to follow his natural impulse into a terribly prolific
obscurity. Before he was aware of the drift of these things, Mr.
Bensington was, so to speak, stark and dissected upon the hoardings. His
baldness, his curious general pinkness, and his golden spectacles had
become a national possession. Resolute young men with large
expensive-looking cameras and a general air of complete authorisation
took possession of the flat for brief but fruitful periods, let off
flash lights in it that filled it for days with dense, intolerable
vapour, and retired to fill the pages of the syndicated magazines with
their admirable photographs of Mr. Bensington complete and at home in
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