"Well, that's more of a thing than a minister; how did he come by it?"
"He was clever, and father was able to send him to Oxford. He was a good deal older than I was. I suppose he took to the Church because he thought it his duty."
"And now that he's out here he wants to sink the shop?"
"Oh, as to that"—coldly—"when he was quite young, in England, he got in with swells. He's tremendously clever. There were men in England that thought no end of him."
"Did he lie low about the shop there?"
"I don't know"—shortly—"I was at school then."
Bates, perceiving that his questions were considered vastly offensive, desisted, but not with that respectfulness of mind that he would have had had Alec's father been a clergyman as well as his brother. Bates's feeling in this matter was what it was by inheritance, exactly as was the shape of his nose or the length of his limbs; it required no exercise of thought on his part to relegate Alec Trenholme to a place of less consequence.
Trenholme assuaged his own ill-temper by going to take out his pink and grey grosbeaks and give them exercise. He was debating in his mind whether they were suffering from confinement or not—a question which the deportment of the birds never enabled him to solve completely—when Bates wandered round beside him again, and betrayed that his mind was still upon the subject of their conversation.
"Ye know," he began, with the deliberate interest of a Scotchman in an argument, "I've been thinking on it, and I'm thinking your brother's in the right of it."
"You do!" The words had thunderous suggestion of rising wrath.