“He’s the terror. If you can stand him, you have either the spirit of a perfect Christian or else you have no spirit at all. A more perfect bounder never bounded.”
“But why does McCarthy stand it?”
My friend looked at me significantly through his cigarette smoke, and shrugged his shoulders.
“You will form your own conclusions about that. Mine were formed very soon, and I never found occasion to alter them.”
“It would help me very much if you would tell me them.”
“When you see a man in his own house allowing his business to be ruined, his comfort destroyed, and his authority defied by another man in a subordinate position, and calmly submitting to it without so much as a word of protest, what conclusion do you come to?”
“That the one has a hold over the other.”
Percival Manners nodded his head.
“There you are! You’ve hit it first barrel. It seems to me that there’s no other explanation which will cover the facts. At some period in his life the little Doctor has gone astray. Humanum est errare. I have even done it myself. But this was something serious, and the other man got a hold of it and has never let go. That’s the truth. Blackmail is at the bottom of it. But he had no hold over me, and there was no reason why I should stand his insolence, so I came away—and I very much expect to see you do the same.”
For some time he talked over the matter, but he always came to the same conclusion—that I should not retain my new situation very long.