"Where from? Where we have always got it."
"Where you have always got it?" returned Uncle Ernst. He turned for the first time a stern, fixed look upon his son. "That is to say, out of the pockets of the public, whose credulity you have, in the most shameless manner, deceived and betrayed with false and lying prospectuses; whose anxious hopes you feed with sham dividends, which they must pay themselves; whose loud complaints you boldly stifle in your so-called general meetings, till at length it occurs to the legal authorities that might is not always right. I do not care to have anything to do with the legal authorities--and my carriage is at the door."
"So is mine," said Philip, turning on his heel and leaving the room.
Uncle Ernst went to a side-table and poured out a large glass of wine--the bottle knocked against the glass; he had some difficulty in pouring out the wine--and drank it down at one gulp.
He stood there with an angry cloud on his brow, one hand leaning on the table, in a kind of stupor.
"I did not wish it," he murmured; "I wished to keep calm. When he came in he reminded me of his mother--a vacant face too; she never understood me; but he is only a caricature of her--the vacancy supplemented by vice! And then his voice--her voice also--her thin voice when she inflicted upon me her commonplace wisdom--only it is enlivened by insolence--wretched, insolent boy!"
He drank down a second glass. The cloud on his brow had only grown darker.