‘Let’s change the subject,’ said Alec. ‘Here’s a letter I got this morning, and I don’t know how to answer it.’
‘What’s this?’ said the older man, taking the thick sheet of paper between the tips of his fingers. ‘“Mr. James Lindsay presents his compliments to Mr. Alexander Lindsay, and requests the pleasure of his company at dinner on Tuesday the 27th inst., at half-past six. Blythswood Square, December, 187-.” Is this old James Lindsay o’ Drumleck?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you a connection of his?’
‘Grand-nephew.’
‘And why can’t you answer the note?’
‘I don’t want to go. I haven’t been brought up to this sort of thing, and I don’t care to go out of my way to make myself ridiculous in a rich man’s house. Besides, I don’t want to go to the expense of a suit of dress clothes. And then, my uncle and I were not particularly smitten with each other when I saw him last.’
‘Don’t be a fool, Alec,’ said Cameron quietly. ‘You can’t afford to throw away the friendship of a man worth twenty thousand a year.’
‘That phrase always reminds me,’ remarked Alec, ‘of what one of the Erskines—I don’t remember which of them it was—once said, when some one said in his company that so-and-so had died worth three hundred thousand pounds—“Did he indeed, sir? And a very pretty sum, too, to begin the next world with.”’
Cameron smiled grimly.