"Duke," said I, standing my umbrella up in the corner to show my childlike confidence in him, "how's your conduct?"
In five minutes afterwards I would have given worlds if I could have recalled my rash words. I did not mean anything more than to utter a piece of pleasantry, for I am passionately fond of pleasantry even in society; but Marbro seemed to take it to heart and to feel distressed. He made a low, guttural sound, but his reply seemed to die away in the mansard roof of his mouth. He stammered out something which sounded like the wail of a damned soul. At least it struck me to be like that, although my lot has not been cast among that class of souls since I got out of politics, and I may have forgotten their style of wail.
To hide his embarrassment, Marbro "rosined" his eye and put a large glass paper weight in it. He then regarded me with some amazement through this piece of brick-a-brac, while I poured out a grown person's dose of Rectified Ruin which stood on the escritoire and drank it with a keen relish, which showed that I trusted him implicitly. Everything I did was done to make Marbro forget himself and feel at his ease.
I told him I had known the Marbros in Maine ever since I was a boy; that we didn't feel above them then, and it would be a poor time to begin now at my time of life to look down on people just because I now wrote pieces for the paper, many of which were afterwards printed. We always thought that the Marbros, or Marlboroughs, of Maine, got their name from burrowing in the marl along the Piscataquis, I said.
Thus I chatted on with him for an hour or two without seeming to chirk him up at all. "Duke," said I at last, "I know what the matter must be with you—you are socially ostracized. I knew it as soon as I came into the room. You cannot disguise it from me. You are suffering from social ostracism, and it is breaking you down. The social demands made by America upon an imported social wreck do not give said wreck time to eat his meals and obtain a necessary amount of rest. I suppose there is nowhere in the world a climate that is so trying on a person suffering from social ostracism as that of my native land. In other climes they give a social outcast rest, but here he gets absolutely no rest whatever."
I then drifted into society chat in a graceful and naïve way which, with others, has never failed to melt the stoniest heart. I told him that I had understood, since I came to Newport, that the demands of society here were so unrelenting that they had kept Mr. and Mrs. Mayonnaise dressing all the time.
A long pause ensued here, during which I could hear Marbro's reason tottering on its throne. After waiting three-quarters of an hour, by my watch, and failing to see that my remark had shed even a ray of sunshine, where erstwhile all was gloom and chaos, I gave him my address and told him that if, in the future, he ever derived any beneficial effects from the above joke, I would be glad to have him communicate with me. And even if I were to die before he could truly say that he had been benefited by this joke and grapple with its keen, incisive nub, my grandchildren would be tickled almost to death to know that he had taken it to pieces and put it together again and found out how it was built and laugh at its ingenious mechanism.