“You seem to be extraordinarily interested in young girls for a man of your age,” sneered Lamont. “Your attitude in this trifling matter, barring its insolence, is amusing.”
“Trifling matter!” retorted Enoch, half springing out of his chair. “Yes, you’re right—it is a trifling matter. You are trifling, sir, with the affections of a child. Your attentions to this child are damnable, sir! You seem to be determined to continue them; very well, let me tell you once for all, that it will be my business to put a stop to them, and I intend to do it.”
“A child,” chuckled Lamont. “At about what age may I ask do you consider childhood ceases? I’m not interested in children, though I know a good many old gentlemen who are, who become doddering idiots over a girl of sixteen, until they find she is twenty. I know that fatherly sentimentality of yours. Paris is full of it.”
“Stop, sir!” cried Enoch.
“The Bois de Boulogne is full of them any afternoon,” continued Lamont. “Old beaux who go tottering up and down the Avenue des Acacias—tous ces vieux gagas—ces vieux marcheurs,” he laughed, lapsing again into French. “There’s the Compte de Valmontier—he’s one of them; he’s eighty if he’s a day. You can see him any afternoon with his valet back of him to keep him from falling, and his victoria and pair followed him in waiting.” Lamont turned slowly, and for the space of a few seconds gazed at Enoch, with his black eyes half closed and his mouth half open.
There are some expressions far more insolent than words.
“But the Compte de Valmontier is a gentleman,” he added coldly. “He does not choose his club to denounce a fellow member in, over an affair which does not concern him—among a circle of friends where he is not welcome.”
“S-sir!” stammered Enoch, white and quivering, as the group about him rose to a man.
They had had enough of “that choleric old fool,” they agreed among themselves. In fact, before Enoch could utter another word, they had risen and left him alone, bearing away with them their boon companion, Lamont, to the more exclusive locality of the bar, where, between two more rounds, they damned Enoch soundly for his impudence—his “unbelievable impertinence.”
“If that old fossil thrusts himself upon us again,” said Teddy Dryer, “I’ll have him put out of the club. ’Pon my word, I will——”