Mr Wyllie uttered an exclamation, half rose, and sank down again with a flabby smile.
“I would merely suggest St. Niklaus in the Zermatt Valley as a suitable headquarters to such operations,” said Gilead. “Do you know the place at all?”
His companion shook his head.
“This humour, young gentleman,” he said, “is, I presume, of the new order. I confess it is beyond my perhaps old-fashioned understanding.”
His tone was extremely lofty and courteous, but he appeared, in spite of it, to wax suddenly very wroth.
“What did you mean, sir,” he cried, “by your allusion to unprotected females?”
“I refer you to your own conscience, sir,” answered Gilead, as loftily.
“My conscience, sir,” said the stranger, “acquits me of any but the most consistently chivalrous attitude, the most respectful, the most diffident even towards the sex.”
“Then to what,” said Gilead, aghast before this enormous dissembling, “do you attribute its burden, which corresponds, by your own confession, with that upon your bones?”
“Now is this depravity or innocence,” cried the stranger, apostrophising space, “that can discover no pretext for self-reproach in any courses but those of libertinism?” He faced about on his stool, puffing and gasping: “I owe it to myself; I owe it more to the spotless fame of another,” he said, “that this gross slander should not pass unrefuted. You appear to be a reader, sir. Tell me, have you ever read ‘Night-Lights’?”