“You were under the impression, somehow, that he suggested your climbing to the roof? That was a rummy notion, wasn’t it?”
“A bit too rummy for general use. Oh no: he only said—now, what the mischief did he say? Oh, no matter.”
“If he said ‘no matter’ when he saw that you were bent on gymnastics in the middle of a day with the temperature hovering about a hundred, he should be ashamed of himself.”
“He didn’t say ‘no matter.’ I’ve just said it. Let me say it again. You should be a cross-examiner at the Bailey and Middlesex Session, Letts. Now, mind, not a word to the missus. Don’t let her cross-examine you: evade her as I’m evading you. I’ll see you after dinner: maybe we’ll have a billiard together—I’m too tired now.”
He went off, leaving Letts trying to find out the place where he had left off in a novel of George Eliot’s. George Eliot is still read on the West Coast of Africa.
But when Minton had left the room Letts did not trouble himself further with the novel. He tossed it away and lay back in his Madeira chair with a frown, suggesting perplexity, on his face.
Some five minutes had passed, and yet the frown, so far from departing, had but increased in intensity.
“I should like very much to know what his game is,” he muttered. “It wouldn’t at all be a bad idea to induce sunstroke by over-exertion on a day like this. But why can’t he remember if the nigger tried on that game with him? P’chut! what’s the good of bothering about it when the game didn’t come off, whatever it was?”
But in spite of his attempted dismissal of the whole matter from his mind, he utterly failed to give to the confession of the youth in ‘Middlemarch’ (it was to the effect that his father had been a pawnbroker, and it was very properly made to the young woman to the accompaniment of the peals of a terrific thunderstorm) the attention which so striking an incident demanded.