“Now,” continued Buford, “kindly satisfy my curiosity on one point. Why, when you were told of the danger of the enterprise, did you start?”
“Perhaps I liked the danger, wanted it to tone me up. I’m a bank clerk, Mr. Buford, and my life’s monotonous. Danger’s a change.”
He raised his voice and spoke with sudden rude defiance. Buford looked quickly at him, while his eyebrows went up nearly to his hair.
“A bank clerk, oh!” he said with a falling inflection of disappointment, much chagrined to discover that the child of millions occupied such a humble niche. “I—I—was not aware of that.”
“An assistant cashier,” continued Dominick in the same key of exasperation, “and I managed to get a holiday at this season because my father was one of the founders of the bank and they allow me certain privileges. If you would like to know anything else ask me and I’ll answer as well as I know how.”
His manner and tone so plainly indicated his resentment of the other’s curiosity that the actor flushed and shrank. He was evidently well-meaning and sensitive, and the young man’s rudeness hurt rather than angered him. For a moment nothing was said, Buford making no response other than to clear his throat, while he stretched out one arm and pulled down his cuff with a jerking movement. There was constraint in the air, and Rose, feeling that he had been treated with unnecessary harshness, sought to palliate it by lifting the book on her lap and saying to him,
“This is the book we were talking about when you came in, Mr. Buford, Wife in Name Only. Have you read it?”
She handed him the ragged volume, and holding it off he eyed it with a scrutiny all the more marked by the way he drew his heavy brows down till they hung like bushy eaves over his eyes.
“No, my dear young lady. I have not. Nor do I feel disposed to do so. ‘Wife in Name Only!’ That tells a whole story without reading a word. Were you going to read it?”
“No; Mr. Ryan and I were just looking over them. We were thinking about reading one of them aloud. This one happened to be on the pile.”