“Yes; and your arteries—look here, suppose you were dead. The bar would get along without you, wouldn’t it?”
“But I’m not dead,” the other truthfully opposed to this fallacious supposition, and turned again to his papers.
The doctor shut his medicine case with a spiteful snap. “Don’t fool yourself that it’s devotion to the common weal that drives you ahead! Don’t make a pretty picture of yourself as working to the last in heroic service of your fellow-man! You know, as I know, that if you dropped out this minute, American jurisprudence would continue on its triumphant, misguided way quite as energetically as now.”
Mr. Emery looked up, dropping for once the mask of humorous tolerance with which he was accustomed to hide any real preoccupation of his own. “Look here, Melton, I’m too nervous to stand much fooling these days. If you want to know the reason why I’m going on, I’ll tell you. I’ve got to. I need the money.”
“Gracious powers! Did you get caught in that B. and R. slump?”
The Judge smiled a little bitterly. “No; I haven’t lost any money—for a very good reason. I never was ahead enough to have any to lose. Haven’t you any idea of what the cost of living the way we do—”
Dr. Melton interrupted him, wild-eyed: “Why, Nat Emery! You have yourself and your wife to feed and clothe and shelter—and you tell me that costs so much that you can’t stop working when there’s—”
“Oh, go away, Melton; you make me tired!” The Judge made a weary gesture of dismissal. “You’re always talking like a child, or a preacher, about how things might be! You know what an establishment like ours costs to keep up, as well as I do. I’m in it—we’ve sort of gradually got in deeper and deeper, the way folks do—and it would take a thousand times more out of me to break loose than to go on. You’re an old fuss, anyhow. I’m all right. Only for the Lord’s sake leave me quiet now.”
The doctor shivered and put his hand over his eyes as he remembered how, to his physician’s eye, the increasing ill health of his old friend gleamed lividly from his white face.
Mrs. Sandworth brought him back to the present with an astonished “Good gracious! how anybody can even pretend to shiver on a day like this!” She added: “Look here, Marius, are you going to sit there and moon all the afternoon? Here’s Lydia going already.”