“Hardly,” was the whispered reply; “those colored cravats are not in the best taste, at least not to mine; but my taste is no rule for all.”
“You mistake; I mean the other two, and I don’t refer to dress, but countenance. I confess I am not familiar with such gentry any further than reading about them in the papers—but those two are—are sharpers, aint they?”
“Far be from us the captious and fault-finding spirit, my dear sir.”
“Indeed, sir, I would not find fault; I am little given that way: but certainly, to say the least, these two youths can hardly be adepts, while the opposed couple may be even more.”
“You would not hint that the colored cravats would be so bungling as to lose, and the dark cravats so dextrous as to cheat?—Sour imaginations, my dear sir. Dismiss them. To little purpose have you read the Ode you have there. Years and experience, I trust, have not sophisticated you. A fresh and liberal construction would teach us to regard those four players—indeed, this whole cabin-full of players—as playing at games in which every player plays fair, and not a player but shall win.”
“Now, you hardly mean that; because games in which all may win, such games remain as yet in this world uninvented, I think.”
“Come, come,” luxuriously laying himself back, and casting a free glance upon the players, “fares all paid; digestion sound; care, toil, penury, grief, unknown; lounging on this sofa, with waistband relaxed, why not be cheerfully resigned to one’s fate, nor peevishly pick holes in the blessed fate of the world?”
Upon this, the good merchant, after staring long and hard, and then rubbing his forehead, fell into meditation, at first uneasy, but at last composed, and in the end, once more addressed his companion: “Well, I see it’s good to out with one’s private thoughts now and then. Somehow, I don’t know why, a certain misty suspiciousness seems inseparable from most of one’s private notions about some men and some things; but once out with these misty notions, and their mere contact with other men’s soon dissipates, or, at least, modifies them.”
“You think I have done you good, then? may be, I have. But don’t thank me, don’t thank me. If by words, casually delivered in the social hour, I do any good to right or left, it is but involuntary influence—locust-tree sweetening the herbage under it; no merit at all; mere wholesome accident, of a wholesome nature.—Don’t you see?”
Another stare from the good merchant, and both were silent again.