Hubbard laughed as one who hears an absurd joke. “Oh, Howells and I have an understanding. We are really great friends,” he said. “I sat to him for my portrait and I really think he flattered me. I managed to keep him from seeing some of my ugliest lines.”
“Now you are not quite sincere,” said Mrs. Philpot, glancing over him from head to foot. “You are not so bad as he made you out to be. It’s one of Mr. Howells’s hobbies to represent men as rather flabby nonentities and women as invalids or dolls.”
“He’s got the men down fine,” replied Hubbard, “but I guess he is rather light on women. You will admit, however, that he dissects feminine meanness and inconsequence with a deft turn.”
“He makes fun of women,” said Mrs. Philpot, a little testily, “he caricatures them, wreaks his humor on them; but you know very well that he misrepresents them even in his most serious and quasi truthful moods.”
Hubbard laughed, and there was something essentially vulgar in the notes of the laugh. Mrs. Philpot admitted this mentally, and she found herself shrinking from his steadfast but almost conscienceless eyes.
“I imagine I shouldn’t be as bad a husband as he did me into, but—”
Mrs. Philpot interrupted him with a start and a little cry.
“Dear me! and aren’t you married?” she asked in exclamatory deprecation of what his words had implied.
He laughed again very coarsely and looked at her with eyes that almost lured. “Married!” he exclaimed, “do I look like a marrying man? A newspaper man can’t afford to marry.”
“How strange,” reflected Mrs. Philpot, “how funny, and Mr. Howells calls himself a realist!”