He came up, taking his cigar from his mouth as he stopped, and flicking the ashes away, while he stood looking at me with an expression of sympathy which he struggled in vain, I saw, to dissemble. On his finely coloured, though rather impassive features, there was the same darkening of a carefully suppressed emotion—the same lines of anger drawn, not by temper, but by suffering—that I had seen first at the club when his favourite hunter had died, and next on the day when the General had spoken to him, in my presence, of my engagement to Sally. Under his short dark mustache, his thin, nervous lips were set closely together.
"I'm awfully cut up, Ben," he said, "I declare I don't know when I was ever so cut up about anything before."
"I'm cut up too, George, like the deuce, but it doesn't appear to help matters, somehow."
"That's the worst thing about being a man of affairs like you—or like Uncle George," he observed, making an amiable effort to assure me that even in the hour of adversity, I still held my coveted place in the General's class; "when the crash comes, you big ones have to pay the piper, while the rest of us small fry manage to go scot-free."
It was put laboriously, but beneath the words I felt the force of that painful sympathy, too strong for concealment, and yet not strong enough to break through the inherited habit of self-command. The General had broken through, I acknowledged, but then was not the very greatness of the great man the expression of an erratic departure from traditions rather than of the perfect adherence to the racial type?
"And the louder the music the bigger the cost of the piper," I observed, with a laugh.
"Oh, you'll come out all right," he rejoined cheerfully, "things are never so bad as they might be."
"Well, I don't know that there's much comfort in reflecting that a thunder-storm might have been accompanied by an earthquake."
For a moment he stood in silence watching the end of his cigar, which went out in his hand. Then without meeting my eyes he asked in a voice that had a curiously muffled sound:—
"It's rough on Sally, isn't it? How does she stand it?"