money was
all right! What a cur you are!"
"That's right;--abuse me."
"Well, it was horrid. Didn't I tell you that it must necessarily
injure me with the house? How are two fellows to get on together
unless they can put some trust in each other? Even if I did run you
into a difficulty, do you really think I'm ruffian enough to tell you
that the money was there if it were untrue?"
Sexty looked like a cur and felt like a cur, as he was being thus
abused. He was not angry with his friend for calling him bad names,
but only anxious to excuse himself. "I was out of sorts," he said,
"and so d----d hippish I didn't know what I was about."
"Brandy-and-soda!" suggested Lopez.
"Perhaps a little of that;--though, by Jove, it isn't often I do that
kind of thing. I don't know a fellow who works harder for his wife
and children than I do. But when one sees such things all round
one,--a fellow utterly smashed here who had a string of hunters
yesterday, and another fellow buying a house in Piccadilly and
pulling it down because it isn't big enough, who was contented with a
little box at Hornsey last summer, one doesn't quite know how to keep
one's legs."
"If you want to learn a lesson look at the two men, and see where the
difference lies. The one has had some heart about him, and the other
has been a coward."
Parker scratched his head, balanced himself on the hind legs of
his stool, and tacitly acknowledged the truth of all that his
enterprising friend said to him. "Has old Wharton come down well?" at
last he asked.
"I have never said a word to old Wharton about money," Lopez
replied,--"except as to the cost of this election I was telling you
of."
"And he wouldn't do anything in that?"
"He doesn't approve of the thing itself. I don't doubt but that the
old gentleman and I shall understand each other before long."
"You've got the length of his foot."
"But I don't mean to drive him. I can get along without that. He's an
old man, and he can't take his money along with him when he goes the
great journey."
"There's a brother, Lopez,--isn't there?"
"Yes,--there's a brother; but Wharton has enough for two; and if he
were to put either out of his will it wouldn't be my wife. Old men
don't like parting with their money, and he's like other old men.
If it were not so I shouldn't bother myself coming into the city at
all."
"Has he enough for that, Lopez?"
"I suppose he's worth a quarter of a million."
"B
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