“Where is he, I say?” continued Paul Beck sourly.
“Here he is,” replied Blake, drawing toward our hero, who felt that he was placed in an awkward position.
“Why, he’s only a baby!” said Beck, surveying our hero contemptuously.
Philip’s cheek flushed, and he, too, began to feel angry.
“He isn’t as old as you are, Mr. Beck,” said Andrew Blake manfully, “but you’ll find he understands his business.”
“I certainly didn’t expect you to get a child in my place,” said Paul Beck scornfully.
“I suppose a musician may know how to play, if he isn’t sixty-five,” said Miss Maria Snod-grass, who had listened indignantly to Mr. Beck’s contemptuous remarks about our hero, whose cause she so enthusiastically championed.
Poor Mr. Beck! He was sensitive about his age, and nothing could have cut him more cruelly than this exaggeration of it. He was really fifty-five, and looked at least sixty, but he fondly flattered himself that he looked under fifty. “Sixty-five!” he repeated furiously. “Who says I am sixty-five?”
“Well, you look about that age,” said Maria, with malicious pleasure.
“I shall have to live a good many years before I am sixty,” said Paul Beck angrily. “But that’s either here nor there. You engaged me to play to-night, and I am ready to do it.”