“Know what?”
“That—Hasn't Tom told you? He has withdrawn—and—you'll have to get another second—if you think—that is—unless you—I suppose you'd have told me, if you'd changed your mind?”
Since I had become so deeply interested in Anita, my ambition—ambition!—to join the Travelers had all but dropped out of my mind.
“I had forgotten about it,” said I. “But, now that you remind me, I want my name withdrawn. It was a passing fancy. It was part and parcel of a lot of damn foolishness I've been indulging in for the last few months. But I've come to my senses—and it's 'me to the wild,' where I belong, Sammy, from this time on.”
He looked tremendously relieved, and a little puzzled, too. I thought I was reading him like an illuminated sign. “He's eager to keep friends with me,” thought I, “until he's absolutely sure there's nothing more in it for him and his people.” And that guess was a pretty good one. It is not to the discredit of my shrewdness that I didn't see it was not hope, but fear, that made him try to placate me. I could not have possibly known then what the Langdons had done. But—Sammy was saying, in his friendliest tone:
“What's the matter, old man? You're sour to-night.”
“Never in a better humor,” I assured him, and as I spoke the words they came true. What I had been saying about the Travelers and all it represented—all the snobbery, and smirking, and rotten pretense—my final and absolute renunciation of it all—acted on me as I've seen religion act on the fellows that used to go up to the mourners' bench at the revivals. I felt as if I had suddenly emerged from the parlor of a dive and its stench of sickening perfumes, into the pure air of God's Heaven.
I signed the bill, and we went afoot up the avenue. Sam, as I saw with a good deal of amusement, was trying to devise some subtle, tactful way of attaching his poor, clumsy little suction-pump to the well of my secret thoughts.
“What is it, Sammy?” said I at last. “What do you want to know that you're afraid to ask me?”
“Nothing,” he said hastily. “I'm only a bit worried about—about you and Textile. Matt,”—this in the tone of deep emotion we reserve for the attempt to lure our friends into confiding that about themselves which will give us the opportunity to pity them, and, if necessary, to sheer off from them—“Matt, I do hope you haven't been hard hit?”