Some one dressed like a woman was standing by the stove whistling softly to himself while paring his nails with a pearl-handled knife.
“My brother Bill, sir,” said Hughes gruffly, and I thought rather nervously, indicating me with the peaked cloth cap which he carried, rolled scrollwise, in his hand.
I followed suit with a bow, or rather a duck, and a polite “Good-evening, sir,” but Mullen continued his nail-pairing and whistling without deigning to look up.
For about a quarter of a minute I stood there feeling, and perhaps looking, rather foolish. Then Hughes said again, and this time rather louder, “My brother, sir.”
“There, there, my good fellow, that will do! I haven’t become deaf! I hear you,” Mullen answered, without raising his head.
He spoke very much in the manner affected by some curates. Each syllable was carefully pronounced and fell as cleanly cut as if it had been new pennies which his lips were coining. The aspirates, the “hear” and “there’s,” he discharged at us as if his mouth had been a tiny popgun, and he roared at us gently as any sucking dove with the cooing sound in such words as “do.”
But for all his nicety of speech he had too much of what is commonly called “side” in his manner to delude any one into the idea that he was a gentleman.
There is in the bearing of your true aristocrat towards strangers a certain suave and urbane hauteur—as of one who expects and, if need be, will exact the courtesy he is accustomed to accord—which the man of no breeding thinks can be imitated by the assumption of “side.”
Without his “side” he might conceivably have passed for a gentleman. As it is, he as surely betrays himself for what he is, as the man who, by manifesting that over-anxiety to please—which he mistakes for the easy courtesy of well-bred intercourse—betrays his under-breeding.
Neither Hughes nor I made any reply to what Mullen had said—nor did the latter seem to expect us to do so, for he looked critically at his little finger, felt the nail with the tip of his thumb, put the finger to his teeth, nibbled at it for an instant, and then began scraping the nail edge very gingerly.