“Eh? ha! very good! devilish smart of your sick friend. Pray present me to him,” said Scaresby, rising.
“No, no, never mind him,” whispered Harcourt, pressing him down into his seat. “At some other time, perhaps. He is nervous and irritable. Conversation fatigues him, too.”
“Egad! that was neatly said, though; I hope I shall not forget it. One envies these sick fellows, sometimes, the venom they get from bad health. But I am forgetting myself in the pleasure of your society,” added he, rising from the table, as he finished off the last glass in the decanter. “I shall call at Downing Street to-morrow for that letter of Upton's, and, with your permission, will deposit it in your hands afterwards.”
Harcourt accompanied him to the door with thanks. Profuse, indeed, was he in his recognitions, desiring to get him clear off the ground before any further allusions on his part, or rejoinders from Glencore, might involve them all in new complications.
“I know that fellow well,” cried Glencore, almost ere the door closed on him. “He is just what I remember him some twenty years ago. Dressed up in the cast-off vices of his betters, he has passed for a man of fashion amongst his own set, while he is regarded as a wit by those who mistake malevolence for humor. I ask no other test of a society than that such a man is endured in it.”
“I sometimes suspect,” said Harcourt, “that the world never believes these fellows to be as ill-natured as then-tongues bespeak them.”
“You are wrong, George; the world knows them well. The estimation they are held in is, for the reflective flattery by which each listener to their sarcasms soothes his own conscience as he says, 'I could be just as bitter, if I consented to be as bad.'”
“I cannot at all account for Upton's endurance of such a man,” said Harcourt.
“As there are men who fancy that they strengthen their animal system by braving every extreme of climate, so Upton imagines that he invigorates his morale by associating with all kinds and descriptions of people; and there is no doubt that in doing so he extends the sphere of his knowledge of mankind. After all,” muttered he, with a sigh, “it 's only learning the geography of a land too unhealthy to live in.”
Glencore arose as he said this, and, with a nod of leave-taking, retired to his room.