Farquaharson's face darkened and he reached for his discarded coat.
"Hold on; you have company," suggested Wayne placatingly. "Where do you think you're going in such hot haste?"
Stuart was standing with his feet well apart and his mouth set in a stern line.
"Wayne," he said with a crisp and ominous decisiveness, "I've never slandered any man intentionally—and I require the same decency of treatment from others."
"Go easy there. Ride wide! Ride wide!" cautioned the visitor. "That little slander is mild compared with many others in the same pages. Are the rest of them rushing to the office to cane the editors? They are not, my son. Believe me, they are not."
"They should be. Submission only encourages a scoundrel."
"In the first place they would find no one there but a rather fragile and extremely polite young lady. The editor himself doesn't sit around waiting to be horsewhipped. In the second, society tacitly sanctions and supports that sheet. Your fashionable friends would call you a barbarian and what is worse—a boob."
Farquaharson stood in a statuesque ire, and Wayne went philosophically on. "Take the advice of a singularly wise bystander. At least treat it with the contempt of silence until you've consulted the lady. Caning people in New York is attended with some degree of notoriety and she would have to share it. When you're in Rome, be as Romanesque as possible."
"For my part," declared Stuart, "I like another version better. When you're a Roman, be a Roman wherever you are."
Yet after some debate he took off his coat again and announced cryptically, "After all, the one unpardonable idiocy is sectionalism of code—damn it!"