It was very odd that he should say this.
For at that very instant I had found myself wishing that I could have seen him mastering the vicious chestnut.
I should have loved to have watched that elemental struggle between man and brute with the setting of the prairie and the wide sky. However much of "a bad hat" and a "waster" he is, he has at least lived a man's life, doing the things a man should do before he drifted to that attic in Jermyn Street and those more expensive town haunts where anybody else pays. Impulsively I looked up at the big, expensively dressed young loiterer with the hands that bear those ineradicable marks of strenuous toil. And, impulsively, I said:
"Why didn't you stay where you were? Oh, what a pity you ever came back!"
There was a pause before he laughed. And then we had what was very like a squabble! He said, in a not-very-pleased voice: "You'd scorn to say flattering things, perhaps?"
"Well," I said, "I'm not a Celt——"
"You mean that," he said sharply, "to stand for everything that's rather contemptible. I know! You think I'm utterly mercenary——"
"Well! You practically told me that you were that!"
"And you believe some of the things I tell you, and not others. You pick out as gospel the ones that are least to my credit," the Honourable Jim accused me. "How like your sex!"
How is it that these four words never fail to annoy our sex?