“Sheridan! and Drury Lane! That is the kind of company you prefer to keep! A doddering old man who falls asleep over his negus in White’s bow-window, coming and going here at all hours, and littering the library with his palsied snuff-taking.”
A doddering old man! It was true. The soul of White’s and Brookes’, the first table wit and vivant of the kingdom, the companion of a royal prince—he, “Sherry,” who all his life had never known ache or pain, not even the gout, who had out-dandied and out-bumpered the youngest of them—had lived beyond his time. The welcome of the gay world had dwindled to a grudging patronage. Gordon had more than once of late come between him and a low sponging-house or the debtors’ prison. Yet at his wife’s tone, a gleam of anger shot into his eyes—anger that made them steely-blue as sword blades.
“Sheridan was my friend,” he said. “My friend from the first, when others snarled. He is old now—old and failing—but he is still my friend. Is a man to pay no regard to loyalty or friendship?”
“He should have regard first to his own reputation. Do you? Even Brummell and Petersham and your choice fops of the Cocoa-Tree tavern and the Drury Lane committee have some thought for the world’s opinion. But you have none. You care nothing for what it thinks of you or of your morality.”
“Morality!” he repeated slowly. “I never heard the word before from anybody who was not a rascal that used it for a purpose!”
“Why will you sit silent,” she continued, “and hear yourself defamed everywhere without a word? Why will you not defend yourself?”
He shrugged his shoulders, the flash of indignation past She had touched the point of least response. The shrug angered her even more than his satiric reply:
“What man can bear refutation?”
“You seem to think it beneath your dignity to deny slander,” she went on. “You always did. I thought it would be different after we were married. But it has grown worse. The papers print more and more horrible things of you, and you do not care—either for yourself or for me!”
He gazed at her with a curious intentness.