"I got you your job—did I? Then you're the young chap that discovered that blend for smoking. I told Bob you ought to have a royalty on that. Did he give it to you?"
"I'm to have ten per cent of the sales, sir. They've just begun."
"Well, hold on to it—it's a good blend. I tried it. And when you get your ten per cent, put it into the Old South Chemical Company, if you want to grow rich. It isn't everybody I'd give that tip to, but I like the looks of you. How tall are you?"
"Six feet one in my stockings."
"Well, I wouldn't grow any more. You're all right, if you can only manage to keep your hands and feet down. You've got good eyes and a good jaw, and it's the jaw that tells the man. Now, that's the trouble with that Jack Starr they want to nominate for governor. He lacks jaw. 'You can't make a governor out of a fellow who hasn't jaw,' that's what I said. And besides, he deliberately trod on my toe the first time I ever met him. Didn't know it was gouty, eh? What right has he got, I asked, to suppose that any gentleman's toe isn't gouty?"
His lower lip protruded angrily, and he sat staring into his glass of water with an enquiring and sulky look. It is no small tribute to my capacity for hero-worship to say that it survived even this nearer approach to the gouty presence of my divinity. But the glamour of success—the only glamour that shines without borrowed light in the hard, dry atmosphere of the workaday world—still hung around him; and his very dissipations—yes, even his fleshly frailties—reflected, for the moment at least, a romantic interest. I began to wonder if certain moral weaknesses were, indeed, the inevitable attributes of the great man, and there shot into my mind, with a youthful folly of regret, the memory of a drink I had declined that morning, and of a pretty maiden at the Old Market whom I might have kissed and did not. Was the doctor's teaching wrong, after all, and had his virtues made him a failure in life, while the General's vices had but helped him to his success? I was very young, and I had not yet reached the age when I could perceive the expediency of the path of virtue unless in the end it bordered on pleasant places. "The General is a bigger man than the doctor," I thought, half angrily, "and yet the General will be a gay old bird as long as the gout permits him to hobble." And it seemed to me suddenly that the moral order, on which the doctor loved to dilate, had gone topsy-turvy while I stood on the General's porch. As if reading my thoughts the great man looked up at me, with his roguish twinkle.
"Now there's Theophilus!" he observed. "Whatever you are, sir, don't be a damned mollycoddle."
Young George, plucking persistently at my sleeve, drew me at last out of the presence and into the house, where I smelt the fragrance of strawberries, freshly gathered.
"Here're the books," said George, leading me to the door of a long room, filled with rosewood bookcases and family portraits of departed Bolingbrokes. Then as I was about to cross the threshold, the sound of a bright voice speaking to the General on the porch caused me to stop short, and stand holding my breath in the hall.
"Good afternoon, General! You look as if you needed exercise."