nd
in especial of so much right attention. "Do you _mind_ my asking
you? Because if you do I won't press; but as a man whose own
responsibilities, some of 'em at least, don't differ much, I gather,
from some of his, one would like to know how he was ever allowed to get
to the point--! But I _do_ plough you up?"

Mark sat back in his chair, moved but holding himself, his elbows
squared on each arm, his hands a bit convulsively interlocked across
him--very much in fact as he had appeared an hour ago in the old
tapestry _bergere_; but as his rigour was all then that of the grinding
effort to profess and to give, so it was considerably now for the fear
of too hysterically gushing. Somehow too--since his wound was to that
extent open--he winced at hearing the author of it branded. He hadn't so
much minded the epithets Mrs. Folliott had applied, for they were to
the appropriator of _her_ securities. As the appropriator of his own he
didn't so much want to brand him as--just more "amusingly" even, if one
would.--to make out, perhaps, with intelligent help, how such a man, in
such a relation, _could_ come to tread such a path: which was exactly
the interesting light that Winch's curiosity and sympathy were there
to assist him to. He pleaded at any rate immediately his advertising
no grievance. "I feel sore, I admit, and it's a horrid sort of thing
to have had happen; but when you call him a brute and a hog I rather
squirm, for brutes and hogs never live, I guess, in the sort of hell in
which he now must be."

Newton Winch, before the fireplace, his hands deep in his pockets, where
his guest could see his long fingers beat a tattoo on his thighs, Newton
Winch dangled and swung himself, and threw back his head and laughed.
"Well, I must say you take it amazingly!--all the more that to see you
again this way is to feel that if, all along, there was a man whose
delicacy and confidence and general attitude might have marked him for
a particular consideration, you'd have been the man." And they were
more directly face to face again; with Newton smiling and smiling _so_
appreciatively; making our friend in fact almost ask himself when before
a man had ever grinned from ear to ear to the effect of its so becoming
him. What he replied, however, was that Newton described in those
flattering terms a client temptingly fatuous; after which, and the
exchange of another protest or two in the interest of justice and
decency, and another plea