“Well, I didn’t know but what—”
“I don’t. I’m not so proud of havin’ you callin’ on me as all that. You used to come to see me years ago and, if I remember, it was I, and not you, who stopped it then. I can stop it again if it’s necessary. What do you mean by askin’ such a question?”
He laughed. “There, there!” he protested. “Don’t fly off the handle. All I meant was—”
“I know what you meant. You are ashamed of havin’ to ask a woman’s advice and you don’t want anybody to know that the great Foster Townsend does have to ask for anything. Of course I don’t tell. But if you think nobody knows you come to this house—yes, and doesn’t know it every time you come—it must be because you carry your head so high in the air you can’t see what is on either side of you. I have been asked a dozen times what you come here for. The last time you came—when Esther wasn’t with you, I mean—Abbie Makepeace was waitin’ to ask why you did it.”
“Humph! She was, eh? What did you tell her?”
“I told her my rent was two weeks behindhand and maybe you’d come to collect it.”
“Humph! That wasn’t so bad. What did she say to that?”
“Well, if you must know, she said she guessed it was somethin’ of the sort. She said she never knew you to go anywhere unless there was somethin’ to be got for yourself by doin’ it. You forgot to speak to her the last time you and she met, Foster. That was a mistake.”
His newly found good humor was not shaken by this plain speech. He was still chuckling.
“She was right, in one way, Reliance,” he admitted. “I generally do come to you when I want something in the way of horse sense. And I’m free to say I usually get it—with plenty of pepper. I might come to a worse place.... Well, whoever else you tell, don’t tell Millard.”