Inevitably a student of character, Mr. Bender rose to the occasion. “Yes, I guess he’s pretty mad.”
“They’ve imputed to him”—Hugh but wanted to abound in that sense—“an intention of which after all he isn’t guilty.”
“So that”—his listener glowed with interested optimism—“if they don’t look out, if they impute it to him again, I guess he’ll just go and be guilty!”
Hugh might at this moment have shown to an initiated eye as fairly elated by the sense of producing something of the effect he had hoped. “You entertain the fond vision of lashing them up to that mistake, oh fisher in troubled waters?” And then with a finer art, as his companion, expansively bright but crudely acute, eyed him in turn as if to sound him: “The strongest thing in such a type—one does make out—is his resentment of a liberty taken; and the most natural furthermore is quite that he should feel almost anything you do take uninvited from the groaning board of his banquet of life to be such a liberty.”
Mr. Bender participated thus at his perceptive ease in the exposed aristocratic illusion. “Yes, I guess he has always lived as he likes, the way those of you who have got things fixed for them do, over here; and to have to quit it on account of unpleasant remark—”
But he gave up thoughtfully trying to express what this must be; reduced to the mere synthetic interjection “My!”
“That’s it, Mr. Bender,” Hugh said for the consecration of such a moral; “he won’t quit it without a hard struggle.”
Mr. Bender hereupon at last gave himself quite gaily away as to his high calculation of impunity. “Well, I guess he won’t struggle too hard for me to hold on to him if I want to!”
“In the thick of the conflict then, however that may be,” Hugh returned, “don’t forget what I’ve urged on you—the claim of our desolate country.”
But his friend had an answer to this. “My natural interest, Mr. Crimble—considering what I do for it—is in the claim of ours. But I wish you were on my side!”