'Not at all.'
Lee said to himself, 'This is a millionaire; and I am an adventurer—Fortune is a mistress of irony.'
A smile peculiar to him, and childish in its unconcealed expression of pleasure, passed over his face. Then he said brusquely, but with perfect good humour, 'Do you think much, Mr. Dempster?'
'Think!' exclaimed Mr. Dempster, throwing his head back in a convolution which a burlesque actor would have paid highly to learn the trick of.
'Yes, think,' repeated Lee, with his happy, innocent smile.
'I—I can't say I do,' said Dempster, perspiring profusely.
'I—I,' he continued making a wholly ineffectual effort to
laugh—'I—eh—ah—haven't given the subject much attention.
But——'
'Exactly, Mr. Dempster, I understand. I have often thought by the way, that you unlucky fellows who inherit your money, can't enjoy it so well as we who have wrought for it.'
Now, if there was one thing Dempster objected to more than another, it was to be hurried about from subject to subject. He had just got his mind focussed to the consideration of Lee's first question, when a new distance intervened, and—he saw men as trees walking. But he must make some reply.
'No—no,' he said. 'We can't. I—I think we can't. Eh—ah——'
'Eh—ah,' the favourite expletive of the orator, was frequently employed by Dempster with a solemn pathos inexpressibly touching. Lee almost relented at the overpowering sadness of its utterance on this occasion: but the baiting of a millionaire was as novel as any of his present manifold pleasures, and he continued it.