“I say, why the h——” Mr. Dinks began again, and had advanced so far when he suddenly saw his cousin.
“Hallo! what are you doing here?” he said to her abruptly, and in the half-sycophantic, half-bullying tone that indicates the feeling of such a man toward a person to whom he is under immense obligation. Alfred Dinks’s real feeling was that Hope Wayne ought to give him a much larger allowance.
Hope was inexpressibly disgusted; but she found an excitement in encountering this boorishness, which served to stimulate her in the struggle going on in her own soul. And she very soon understood how the sharp, sparkling, audacious Fanny Newt had become the inert, indifferent woman before her. A clever villain might have developed her, through admiration and sympathy, into villainy; but a dull, heavy brute merely crushed her. There is a spur in the prick of a rapier; only stupidity follows the blow of a club.
After sitting silently for some minutes, during which Alfred Dinks sprawled in a chair, and yawned, and whistled insolently to himself, while Fanny sat without looking at him, as if she were deaf and dumb, Hope Wayne said to the husband and wife:
“Abel Newt is ruining himself, and he may harm other people. If there is any thing that can be done to save him we ought to do it. Fanny, he is your own flesh and blood.”
She spoke with a kind of despairing earnestness, for Hope herself felt how useless every thing would probably be. But when she had ended Alfred broke out into uproarious laughter,
“Ho! ho! ho! Ho! ho! ho!”
He made such a noise that even his wife looked at him with almost a glance of contempt.
“Save Abel Newt!” cried he. “Convert the Devil! Yes, yes; let’s send him some tracts! Ho! ho! ho!”
And he roared again until the water oozed from his eyes.