“What does count for everything?” I asked, in some curiosity.
“That he’s a man at all.”
“That’s it exactly,” I agreed, heartily. “I hadn’t put it to myself in that way; but I see that it’s what I’ve been conscious of.”
“As an instance of that you can take the friendship between Straight and Christian. From the point of view of the outside world they’re of types so diverse that you’d say that the difference precluded friendship of any kind. You know what Christian is; but the colonel is hardly what you’d call a man of education. Without being illiterate, he makes elementary grammatical mistakes, and unusual ideas floor him. But to say that he and Christian are like brothers hardly expresses it.”
I pondered on this as the meeting, with Christian in the chair, came to order and the routine of business began.
When it grew uninteresting to people with no share in the management of the club I got an opportunity to whisper, “You settled in New York?”
“I’m with Sterling Barry; the junior of the four partners.”
The reply seemed to strip from me the few rags of respectability with which I had been trying to cover myself up. Had he gone on to say, “And I saw you break into his house and steal his daughter’s trinkets,” I should scarcely have felt myself more pitilessly exposed.
It was perhaps a proof of what the club had done for me that I no longer regarded this crime with the same sang-froid as when I entered. Even on the morning of my first talk with Andrew Christian I could have confessed it more or less as I should have owned to a solecism in etiquette. During the intervening ten days, however, I had so far reverted to my former better self that the knowledge that I was the man who had crept into a house and begun to rob it filled me with dismay.