"Well, you seem to care a good deal," Berrisford laughed.
"Oh, not personally," I assured him, "only in the interest of science."
We squabbled for an hour, and at the end of that time I had discovered that (1) Billy's family spell their name with an e—a most incriminating thing to do, apparently, and (2) their house is on the left-hand side of the street as you go up, which (3) makes it easier for a rich man to pass through the moat into Heaven than to draw a beam of recognition from the eye of his neighbor. It was all very confusing—especially as Berrisford insisted that no one had ever told him these things—he had known that they were so when he came into the world.
"Well, I don't see how you 've allowed yourself to be so friendly with me," I wondered sarcastically. "You 've been pretty reckless, it strikes me. How do you know what side of the street our house is on in Perugia, Wisconsin—or whether, indeed, we live in a house at all?"
"Oh, you 're different," Berri laughed.
"Different from what?"
"From everything; that's why I 'm willing to run the risk. You 're a strange, barbarous thing, and I like you immensely."
That was all the satisfaction I got. The reason I thought of this was because Duggie and I discussed it among other things that Sunday morning on the rocks.
It was perfectly evident that Duggie's family lived on the right side of the street, and didn't "spell their name with an e," although I should never have seen them in this light if Berrisford hadn't opened my eyes ("poisoned my mind," Duggie called it). Duggie's father resembles the Duke in Little Lord Fauntleroy, and his mother—well, his mother is like Duggie; one could n't say very much more than that. My impression of them is that they are between nineteen and twenty feet high, and when they and Duggie and his elder sister and two younger brothers were assembled, they looked the way family groups of crowned heads ought to look and don't.
The sister met us at the station with a cart and two ponies.