went into the market and chose me my mutton, not for
its leanness, but its fatness. In other words, there seemed in you, the
schoolboy who always had silver in his pocket, a reasonable probability
that you would never stand in lean need of fat succor; and if my early
impression has not been verified by the event, it is only because of
the caprice of fortune producing a fallibility of human expectations,
however discreet.'"

"Oh, that I should listen to this cold-blooded disclosure!"

"A little cold blood in your ardent veins, my dear Frank, wouldn't do
you any harm, let me tell you. Cold-blooded? You say that, because my
disclosure seems to involve a vile prudence on my side. But not so. My
reason for choosing you in part for the points I have mentioned, was
solely with a view of preserving inviolate the delicacy of the
connection. For--do but think of it--what more distressing to delicate
friendship, formed early, than your friend's eventually, in manhood,
dropping in of a rainy night for his little loan of five dollars or so?
Can delicate friendship stand that? And, on the other side, would
delicate friendship, so long as it retained its delicacy, do that? Would
you not instinctively say of your dripping friend in the entry, 'I have
been deceived, fraudulently deceived, in this man; he is no true friend
that, in platonic love to demand love-rites?'"

"And rites, doubly rights, they are, cruel Charlie!"

"Take it how you will, heed well how, by too importunately claiming
those rights, as you call them, you shake those foundations I hinted of.
For though, as it turns out, I, in my early friendship, built me a fair
house on a poor site; yet such pains and cost have I lavished on that
house, that, after all, it is dear to me. No, I would not lose the sweet
boon of your friendship, Frank. But beware."

"And of what? Of being in need? Oh, Charlie! you talk not to a god, a
being who in himself holds his own estate, but to a man who, being a
man, is the sport of fate's wind and wave, and who mounts towards heaven
or sinks towards hell, as the billows roll him in trough or on crest."

"Tut! Frank. Man is no such poor devil as that comes to--no poor
drifting sea-weed of the universe. Man has a soul; which, if he will,
puts him beyond fortune's finger and the future's spite. Don't whine
like fortune's whipped dog, Frank, or by the heart of a true friend, I
will cut ye."

"Cut me you have already, cruel Charlie, and to the