“It is only terror that is evil enough—or mad enough—to point death at a brother human.”
He put his hand over the pistol, looked into her face, smiling whimsically, then coolly took the pistol from her and tossed it on the table.
“You—you are the strangest tramp I ever saw,” she gasped.
“Tramp? Oh! Am I? Then look well at me—that noble and pathetic figure, the tramp! Madam, the rich world you live in occasionally produces a man like me, but it soon casts him out!” He sighed heavily.
Like most persons who have been lifted above their original station in life, Mrs. Mearely thought others should keep to theirs. So she said, with a degree of pride:
“What do you know of the world I live in?”
“Lady,” he whined, “I’ll tell you my secret. Once I, too, was respectable; but I have lived it down.” He sat down on the arm of an old mahogany chair, as casually as if it were a stump by the woodside, and picked burrs from his stockings. Evidently they had pricked him as his ankles swung together.
“Why did you leave my world—if, indeed, you were ever in it?”
“My biography, revised edition. I left your world because I had no affinity with it. I was born to be a poet. I found, however, that society felt no need of me and my verses. Society does not need poets. Society’s great need is chauffeurs! And I could never stomach the smell of gasolene.”
“But, even so, need you have become a tramp—an outcast? A—a vagabond who enters houses at night for food? Frightening people!” Her indignation rose. “Why don’t you work?”