"I'm awfully sorry about the house, General. Isn't there some way of curbing him?"
"I never saw the bit yet that could curb an old fool," replied the great man, indignantly; "the next thing his roof will be sold over his head, and they'll go to the poorhouse, that's what I told Mrs. Clay. Poor lady, she was really in a terrible state of mind."
"Surely you won't let it come to that. Wait till these dreamed-of coal fields materialise and I'll take over that mortgage."
The General's lower lip shot out with a sulky and forbidding expression.
"The best thing that could happen to the old fool would be to have his house sold above him, and by Jove, if he doesn't cease his extravagance, I'll stand off and let them do it as sure as my name is George Bolingbroke. What Theophilus needs," he concluded angrily, "is discipline."
"It's too late to begin to discipline a man of over eighty."
"No, it ain't," retorted the General; "it's never too late. If it doesn't do him any good in this world, it will be sure to benefit him in the next. He's entirely too opinionated, that's the trouble with him. Do you remember the way he sat up over there on Church Hill, and tried to beat me down that Robert Carrington lived in Bushrod's house, and that he'd attended him there in his last illness? As if I didn't know Bushrod Carrington as well as my own brother. Got all his clothes in Paris. Can see him now as he used to come to church in one of his waistcoats of peaehblow brocade. Yet you heard Theophilus stick out against me. Wouldn't give in even when I offered to take him straight to Bushrod's grave in Saint John's Churchyard, where I had helped to lay him. That's at the back of the whole thing, I tell you. If Theophilus had had a little discipline, this would never have happened."
"All the same I hope you won't let it come to a sale," I responded, as a bunch of telegrams was brought to him, and we settled down to our morning's work.
In the afternoon when I went back to the doctor's, I found Sally in the low canvas chair between the giant-of-battle rose-bush and the bleeding hearts, with George Bolingbroke on the ground at her feet, reading to her, I noticed at a glance, out of a book of poems. George hated poetry—I had never forgotten his contemptuous boyish attitude toward Latin—and the sight of him stretched there, his handsome figure at full length, his impassive face flushed with a fine colour, produced in me a curious irritation, which sounded in my voice when I spoke.
"I thought you scorned literature, George. Are you acting the part of a gay deceiver?"