"Oh, I'll go now," said Caruthers, getting up.
"I wish you would. Up to a very short time ago I thought you one of the most whimsically entertaining men I ever met, but as I said just now, a spiritual disparagement has arisen between us, a thick fog, and I wish you would clear the atmosphere."
"Well," said Caruthers, "I am off. I don't know what to take with me," he added, looking about. "I suppose I owe you more or less, and I'll leave things just as they are until I am prepared to face a statement."
"All right. Good day."
"But you won't shake hands?"
"Yes, through the fog," said Lyman, holding out his hand. Caruthers grasped it, dropped it, as if he too felt that it came through a fog, and hastened out. Just outside he met Warren coming in. "What's he looking so serious about?" the editor asked.
"Sit down," said Lyman. "Don't take the chair he had—the other one, that's it. Well, we have split the law trust and he goes across the square to open a new office."
"Is that so? Well, I reckon there's a good deal of the wolf about him. Yes, sir, he has seen me bleeding under the heel of the Express Company, without so much as giving me the——"
"Moist eye of sympathy," Lyman suggested.
"That's all right, and it fits. Say, you are more of a writer than a lawyer. And that's exactly in line with what I came in to tell you. I got a half column ad. this morning from a patent medicine concern in the North, and they want an additional write-up. It all comes through your sketches."