“What did he say?”
“Oh, he flared up, and said it was his own affair.”
“Well, I always thought Milburn a pretty square kind of a fellow,” said a quiet man who stood leaning against a gilded column. “In that deal with ‘—— Syndicate’—you recollect it, Frost—he could have beaten the life out of you, but he stood to you when I know he was offered double commission to come off.”
“Ah! nobody is saying anything against his honesty,” returned Willard, sharply, “he’s square enough, but it is his infernal recklessness. Now, yesterday, I sauntered into his office to remonstrate. I said, ‘Robert, old boy, you are getting yourself out of everybody’s good books; why don’t you brace up? The first thing you know, you will be dropped like a hot nail.’ I asked him why he couldn’t be a little more modest about it, for instance, I suggested, ‘when the spirit moves you to take Morris out for an airing, why won’t a moonlight night and a by-road answer the purpose as well as Fifty-eighth Street and the middle of the afternoon.’”
“And what did he say to that?”
“He held out his cigar case to me saying, ‘You are wasting your time, I don’t care to be respectably wicked, and I choose to go to the devil in my own way.’”
“Look here!” interrupted the quiet man, “I fancy I know Milburn better than most people, and he has a clean life behind him; moreover, he thinks you are the only man on earth. I can’t understand how he can deliberately throw himself away, as you say he is doing. There is a very strong motive of some kind. He is not a man to take to dissipation for its own sake.”
Frost’s eye twinkled as he turned abruptly and fronted the speaker.