'And edged tools may cut the user's fingers.'
YAH DON'T CATCH ME GOING SO FAH FROM NEWMARKET.
'Not mine,' he answered, taking out a cigarette. 'Oh deah no. He can't turn against me. He wouldn't dare to. Yah see, I have the fellah entirely in my powah. I know all his little games, and I can expose him any day. But it suits me to keep him. I don't mind telling yah, since I respect your intellect, that he and I are engaged in pulling off a big coup togethah. If it were not for that, I wouldn't be heah. Yah don't catch me going away so fah from Newmarket and the Empire for nothing.'
'I judged as much,' I answered. And then I was silent.
But I wondered to myself why the neutral-tinted young man should be so communicative to an obviously hostile stranger.
For the next few days it amused me to see how hard our lordling tried to suit his conversation to myself and Elsie. He was absurdly anxious to humour us. Just at first, it is true, he had discussed the subjects that lay nearest to his own heart. He was an ardent votary of the noble quadruped; and he loved the turf—whose sward, we judged, he trod mainly at Tattersall's. He spoke to us with erudition on 'two-year-old form,' and gave us several 'safe things' for the spring handicaps. The Oaks he considered 'a moral' for Clorinda. He also retailed certain choice anecdotes about ladies whose Christian names were chiefly Tottie and Flo, and whose honoured surnames have escaped my memory. Most of them flourished, I recollect, at the Frivolity Music Hall. But when he learned that our interest in the noble quadruped was scarcely more than tepid, and that we had never even visited 'the Friv.,' as he affectionately called it, he did his best in turn to acquire our subjects. He had heard us talk about Florence, for example, and he gathered from our talk that we loved its art treasures. So he set himself to work to be studiously artistic. It was a beautiful study in human ineptitude. 'Ah, yaas,' he, murmured, turning up the pale blue eyes ecstatically towards the mast-head. 'Chawming place, Florence! I dote on the pickchahs. I know them all by heart. I assuah yah, I've spent houahs and houahs feeding my soul in the galleries.'
'And what particular painter does your soul most feed upon?' I asked bluntly, with a smile.
The question staggered him. I could see him hunting through the vacant chambers of his brain for a Florentine painter. Then a faint light gleamed in the leaden eyes, and he fingered the straw-coloured moustache with that nervous hand till he almost put a visible point upon it. 'Ah, Raphael?' he said, tentatively, with an inquiring air, yet beaming at his success. 'Don't you think so? Splendid artist, Raphael!'