The words came out jerkily.
“Wish I could answer ‘Pretty well, thanks. How are you?’” said Wyvern with a rueful laugh. “I’m not getting on at all.”
“No. And I don’t suppose you ever will.”
Wyvern stiffened. The other had never used that tone towards him before.
“That sounds nice, and friendly, and cheering,” he answered coldly. “May I ask why you happen to hold that opinion?”
“Because you haven’t got it in you,” rapped out Le Sage. He was nettled at a certain spice of hauteur that the other had infused into his tone and manner. Moreover, he was nervous, and a commingling of nervousness and irritation is a very bad equipment indeed for the starting upon a difficult and delicate discussion. Wyvern, for his part, was the more sensitive to the bluntness of the statement, in that at the back of his mind lurked a misgiving that the speaker might be stating no more than the truth. Nothing he had ever touched had succeeded. He was no fool in the matter of intellect, but—somehow—he had never quite managed to “get there,” and the consciousness of this was the secret canker of his life. He was disappointed, but not yet soured. In time he might come to be that.
“Are you quite sure of your ground in making that flattering statement?” he said, mustering great self-control—for this sort of talk was not at all what he was used to. Decidedly Le Sage was straining his privileges as father-in-law elect to a dangerous point.
“Well, I don’t know. Only that events seem to bear it out most remarkably. Got rid of that mortgage on your place yet?”
“You know I haven’t.”
“Well, they were going to foreclose, weren’t they? And if they do, it’s tantamount to selling you up. Oh, I know. Of course, it would be no damn business of mine under ordinary circumstances. Under existing ones it is. I’m thinking of Lalanté.”