"Am I to count you among my friends?" says he.
"Any friend of Mary's is a friend of mine," I answered. He took. "Then that is assured," he says, with his smoothest smile.
We all waited.
"Ah, Youth!" says Mr. Belknap, with a look at Mary, and an explaining, indulgent smile at me. "How heartening it is to see its readiness, its resource in the untried years! Rejoice in your youth and strength, my young friend!—as for me—" he stopped and looked so grave he near fooled me again. "I am worn down so I barely believe in hope. My poor, commonplace ambitions, my dull idea of duty puts me out of the pale of friendship entirely—I have nothing pleasant to offer my friend."
"Oh, no! Mr. Belknap!" says Mary. "How can you speak like that? With your great work—how can you call it dull? I'm sure it is a high privilege to be listed with your friends!"
I felt a chill go over me—the whole business was tricky, stagy; of a piece with the highfalutin talk. Belknap was no old man, not a day over forty, and powerful as a bull, by the look of him, yet the tone of his voice, the air he threw around it, made him the sole and lonely survivor of a great misfortune, without a helping hand at time of need.
I felt mad and disgusted with Mary for being taken in. I had yet to learn that even the best of women are easy worked through the medium of making 'em feel they are the support of a big man. They'll take his word for his size, and swallow almost anything for the fun of supporting him. Saxton made the great mistake of admitting his foolishnesses to be foolish, and swearing at 'em; he should have sadly regretted them as accidents. A woman has to learn a heap before she can appreciate a thoroughly honest man. There is a poetry in being honest, but like some kinds of music, it takes a highly educated person to enjoy it. Sing to the girls in a sweet and melancholy voice about a flower from your angel mother's grave, and most of 'em will forget you never contributed a cent to the angel mother's support—and it ain't that they like honesty the less, but romance the more, as the feller said about Julius Cæsar. But when a woman like Mary does get her bearings she has 'em for keeps.
Now Sax was a durned sight more romantic really than this black-coated play-actor, but he would insist on stripping things to the bones, and the sight of the skeleton—good, honest, flyaway man frame that it was—scart Mary.
It came across me bitter that she looked at Brother Belknap the way she did. I got up.
"I must go," I says.