At this chance thrust young Barter turned curiously red and white, and had some ado to recover that open smile of his.
‘Hang it,’ he said, ‘you can’t suppose I meant it that way. But,’ with a half-hysteric courage, ‘suppose you had—suppose I had—suppose anybody had—what would he do? You, I, anybody?’
Mr. Steinberg sipped at his lemon squash—he drank that inspiring liquid all the year round, and nothing else until cards for the day were over—and puffed at his cigar, and looking young Barter full in the face, nodded and smiled with an odd mingling of meaning and humour.
‘Put him on to me,’ he said, with perfect affability. ‘I’ll put him up to it.’
‘Rather dangerous, wouldn’t it be?’ said Barter, showing his white teeth in a somewhat forced and ghastly manner.
‘Everything’s dangerous for an ass,’ said Steinberg.
‘I shouldn’t have thought,’ laughed Barter, ‘that that was your line.’
He spoke as jestingly as he could, but he knew that his laugh was forced, and that the voice in which he spoke was unlike his voice of every day, and he wished, with the whole of his quaking heart, that he had left the theme alone.
‘Well, no,’ said Steinberg, ‘I suppose you wouldn’t.’ He sipped his liquor through a straw, and blew half a dozen rings of smoke from his lips with practised dexterity, and kept a glittering German-Jewish eye on Barter. Perhaps he meant something by the glance, perhaps he meant nothing. He was a rather Machiavelian and sinister-looking personage, was Mr. Steinberg, and there was something even in the calm expression of those perfectly-formed rings of smoke and in the very way in which, he sipped his liquor, and most of all in the observant glitter of his eye, which spoke of a penetration and shrewdness very far out of the common. More and more young Barter wished that he had not broached this theme with Steinberg.
He could not help it for his soul. He could feel that his colour was coming and going with a dreadful fluttering alternation. He quailed before the Israelitish eye so shrewdly cocked at him, and when in a very spasm of despair he tried to meet it, he was so abjectly quelled by it that he felt his face a proclamation of his secret.