“One has noticed it oneself,” said Mr. Walter Pater Walkinshaw. “May one ask, Dodson, has your knowledge been gained empirically, or are you in the possession of data which have been privately communicated?”
“Well, sir,” said Mr. Dodson, “he has not said a word about his family; but if it is not a good deal above the common my name is not Matthew Arnold Dodson. I believe, sir, his mental training is entirely due to a maiden aunt who lives in the neighbourhood of Hither Green—I believe, sir, he was left an orphan at a tender age—but his manners and behaviour seem to have been handed down. Personally, I do not doubt, sir, for a single moment that Mr. Octavius was right when he allowed him to take his seat in our midst.”
“The judgment at which you have arrived does you infinite credit, Dodson,” said Mr. Walter Pater Walkinshaw. “It is also a tribute to a fun-da-men-tal goodness of heart. There can be no doubt whatever that Mr. Octavius was quite right.”
Mr. Dodson totally ignored a compliment that one of less calibre would have felt constrained to accept with embarrassment.
“I, for one, sir,” said Mr. Dodson confidentially, “place implicit faith in the judgment of Mr. Octavius. Personally, sir, I have never seen it betray a sign of being at fault.”
“You are right, Dodson, you are perfectly right,” said Mr. Walter Pater Walkinshaw with great cordiality. “I feel more indebted to your judgment than I am able to express.”
Mr. Dodson, girt by the knowledge that complete success had crowned his devices yet again, and fortified also with the feeling that once more he had laid an unerring finger on the pulse of that great establishment, sauntered back to his stool in the left-hand corner with that somewhat sinister nonchalance which must so often clothe natural eminence when it has been brought into contact with an eminence that is merely official. In his own phrase—out of office hours—“Pa had not half as much about him as the back of a coster’s dog.”
On the other hand, Mr. Walter Pater Walkinshaw, unlike so many whose intellectual attainments are merely of the second class, was uncommonly susceptible to the impact of those of the first.
“Luff,” said he, “do you know who I think will one day be the head of this world-famous house?”
“Who?” observed Mr. Aristophanes Luff.