“That’s all tommy nonsense,” said he. “If I ain’t strong enough to be his father, good God, what’s the use of giving me eighty pounds a week, eh?... What?... Born out o’ wedlock? Blame me, so was I.... Now, come—drop this nonsense; let me hug you well—though it is a blamed nervous job with me always—you’re as delicate as a confounded caramel—though I must say I like it when I get there—and——”
Now it so chanced that as the Honourable Rupert Greppel, strolling hidalgic beside his nervous little aristocratic friend, Lord Monty Askew, took a short cut down a dirty side-alley off Booksellers’ Row—Monty complaining the while that they should have allowed the smells of so unusual a proceeding to come between them and their nobility—Mr. Sim Crittenden came down the other end of the same high-smelling by-way, his pretty Polly at his side, with intent to get her some dinner at a restaurant he knew of, before the dusk grew to darkness and he had to answer his call “to play the giddy goat for a consideration” at one of those places called music-halls.
There were but few of its dirty inhabitants in the dirty street, when Rupert Greppel took the wall of the pretty lady and her escort on the narrow footway and put her out into the dirty gutter of the dirtier street; but when Sim Crittenden, having dropped behind the girl, following her to let the others pass the more easily, put himself before the great man, and Rupert Greppel cried “Out of the way, fellow!” and Sim Crittenden mocked him, the street began to fill.
It was a deadlock.
Mr. Sim Crittenden took off his hat:
“Sir,” said he—“I am in the illegitimate drama, wherein to bray like an ass is the soul of comedy. I am a student of bad manners. Would you mind doing it again?”
Rupert Greppel struck him with his cane.
Sim Crittenden hit him violently in the mouth, so that Rupert fell; and as Rupert gathered himself and his dazed wits together, Sim Crittenden took off his straw hat and his coat and handed them sadly to Polly, and, expressing his muttered regret that he was making a beastly scene and was to baptize his betrothal in claret, he squared his huge shoulders for the fray.
Rupert Greppel arose and made an ugly rush at him, and after some fencing, to allow of the crowd’s whimsical twitting of the big man, Sim Crittenden gripped his lips tight and struck out, hitting the hidalgic Rupert heavily on the jaw. Rupert answered the helm and sat down—violently.
Sim Crittenden stooped over him: