“I quite forgot to mention that Mr. Courtland was lunching with us to-day, Phyllis,” said Ella, while shaking hands with her visitor. “Now you will have a chance of getting the slave-dealer’s account of the whole business. Are you a slave-dealer, Bertie? If so, why don’t you wear the usual broad-leaved hat of your order?”
“It is I who am the enslaved one,” said Mr. Courtland, laying his hand to the left of the buttons of his white waistcoat and bowing the bow of the early years of the century, with a glance at each lady.
“What a pretty reminiscence of the age of artificiality!” said Ella; “and what an apt commentary upon the subject we were talking about, Phyllis! We were discussing the merits of directness in speech and straightness in every way. We were ridiculing the timid maid—all sandals and simper—of forty years ago. Why should men and women have ever taken the trouble to be affected? Let us go in to lunch and eat with the appetites of men and women of the nineties, not with the nibblings of society of the fifties. Come along, Phyllis. Mr. Courtland will tell us all about his dreadful goings on, his slave-dealings, his dynamitings. Have you seen that article in the—what’s the name of the paper, Phyllis?”
“The Spiritual Aneroid,” said Phyllis.
“I haven’t been so fortunate,” said he.
“Then we shall take the paper into the dining room with us, and place it before you. If you were guilty of the doings that the article details, you would do well to—to—well, to adopt the picturesque costume incidental to ruffianism—the linen jacket of the slave-trader, the mangy fur collar of the dynamity man of war. Have you ever trafficked in human beings, Mr. Courtland?”
“Well, yes,” said he. “I have done a little in that way, I admit.”
“And dynamite—have you ever massacred people with dynamite?” Ella continued.
“Well, when my dynamite exploded, the people who were in the immediate neighborhood were never just the same afterward,” said he.
“Finally, did you allow yourself to be worshiped as God?” she asked.