"Well—no doubt on the subject of business more than on any other."
Still the good eyes rested. "Tell me one thing, other than that, for which you haven't at least some intelligence."
"Oh sir, there are no end of things, and it's odd one should have to prove that—though it would take me long. But I allow there's nothing I understand so little and like so little as the mystery of the 'market' and the hustle of any sort."
"You utterly loathe and abhor the hustle! That's what I blissfully want of you," said Mr. Betterman.
"You ask of me the declaration——?" Gray considered. "But how can I know, don't you see?—when I am such a blank, when I've never had three cents' worth of business, as you say, to transact?"
"The people who don't loathe it are always finding it somehow to do, even if preposterously for the most part, and dishonestly. Your case," Mr. Betterman reasoned, "is that you haven't a grain of the imagination of any such interest. If you had had," he wound up, "it would have stirred in you that first time."
Gray followed, as his kinsman called it, enough to be able to turn his memory a moment on this. "Yes, I think my imagination, small scrap of a thing as it was, did work then somehow against you."
"Which was exactly against business"—the old man easily made the point. "I was business. I've been business and nothing else in the world. I'm business at this moment still—because I can't be anything else. I mean I've such a head for it. So don't think you can put it on me that I haven't thought out what I'm doing to good purpose. I do what I do but too abominably well." With which he weakened for the first time to a faint smile. "It's none of your affair."
"Isn't it a little my affair," Gray as genially objected, "to be more touched than I can express by your attention to me—as well (if you'll let me say so) as rather astonished at it?" And then while his host took this without response, only engaged as to more entire repletion in the steady measure of him, he added further, even though aware in sounding it of the complacency or fatuity, of the particular absurdity, his question might have seemed to embody: "What in the world can I want but to meet you in every way?" His perception at last was full, the great strange sense of everything smote his eyes; so that without the force of his effort at the most general amenity possible his lids and his young lips might have convulsively closed. Even for his own ear "What indeed?" was thus the ironic implication—which he felt himself quite grimace to show he should have understood somebody else's temptation to make. Here, however, where his uncle's smile might pertinently have broadened, the graver blandness settled again, leaving him in face of it but the more awkwardly assured. He felt as if he couldn't say enough to abate the ugliness of that—and perhaps it even did come out to the fact of beauty that no profession of the decent could appear not to coincide with the very candour of the greedy. "I'm prepared for anything, yes—in the way of a huge inheritance": he didn't care if it might sound like that when he next went on, since what could he do but just melt to the whole benignity? "If I only understood what it is I can best do for you."
"Do? The question isn't of your doing, but simply of your being."