“Ha! ha!” laughed the bishop. “Did some one ask him what he thought of judges?”
But the judge did not laugh. His frown was awful.
“Or was it about the ‘recall’? Or the relation of judges and corporations?”
The judge looked stern as Jove. “Ass!” he muttered.
“Maybe he’s a progressive,” returned the bishop. “The world seems to be changing. Ought we to change with it, I wonder?”
“I don’t,” snapped the judge. “If the world to-day is producing such fatuous blockheads, give me the world as it was.”
“The trouble is,” said the bishop, again rubbing his nose, “can we get it back? Hasn’t it left us behind and are we ever going to catch up?”
“Fudge!” said the judge. He and the bishop were such old friends, he could take that liberty.
Another of the sterner sex—one of Mrs. Ralston’s guests—looked as if he, too, could have said: “Fudge!” His lips fairly curled when he regarded Bob. He specialized as a vivisectionist, and he was a great authority. Now Bob loved the “under-dog” and was naturally kind and sympathetic. He had been blessed—or cursed—with a very tender heart for such a compact, well-put-up, six foot or so compound of hard-headed masculinity. Miss Dolly—imp of mischief—again rather forced the talk. It must be wonderful to cut things up and juggle with hind legs and kidneys and brains and mix them all up with different animals, until a poor little cat didn’t know if it had a dog’s brain or its own? And was it true that sometimes the dogs me-owed, and when a cat started to purr did it wag its tail instead? This was all right from Miss Dolly, but when the conversation expanded and Bob was appealed to, it was different. “Wouldn’t you just love to mix up the different ‘parts’?” asked Miss Dolly, and put a rabbit’s leg on a pussy, just to watch its expression of surprise when it started to run and found itself only able to jump, or half-jump? That got honest Bob—who couldn’t have carved up a poor dumb beast, to save his life—fairly involved, and before he had staggered from that conversational morass, he had offended Authority about two dozen times. Indeed, Authority openly turned its back on him. Authority found Bob impossible.
These are fair samples of a few of his experiences. And all the while he had an uneasy presentiment that Mrs. Dan and Mrs. Clarence were waiting to get him and have their innings. Now, Mrs. Dan would bestow upon him a too sweet smile between games of tennis; then Mrs. Clarence would drift casually in his direction, but something would happen that would prevent a heart-to-heart duologue, and she would as casually drift away again. These hit-and-miss tactics, however, gradually got on Bob’s nerves, and in consequence, he who was usually a star and a cracker jack at the game, played abominable tennis that afternoon—thus enhancing his unpopularity with divers partners who simply couldn’t understand why he had fallen off so. Indeed, about every one he came in contact with was profoundly dissatisfied or disgusted with Bob. Miss Gerald, who usually played with him, now firmly but unostentatiously, avoided him, and though Bob couldn’t blame her, of course, still the fact did not tend to mitigate his melancholy.