“Mitigating circ—”
“Good legal phrase, is n’t it? Oh, I understand your errand perfectly. Aunt Edie wrote me that there was a ‘condition’ to the legacy that I would n’t fulfill. If you’d come out here and found me all swathed up in black like a mummy, and with a funereal gulp in my voice when I spoke of my dear old Auntie, and the general manners of an undertaker right on the job, I expect it might have been worth twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars to me. Even a mourning band on my coat and a few appropriate sighs in the right place might have got me five or ten thousand. Maybe if I’d stopped to figure it out, I’d have dressed the part. A fellow will do a good deal for money. Then again, maybe I would n’t.” The memory of Marcia’s frank and lustrous eyes checked him. Could he have met their challenge, with the black badge of hypocrisy on him? “No! I’m damned if I would!” he declared with profound sincerity. “So there you have it. I know where I get off, and I don’t much care, to tell the truth. I lose.”
The overweighted legal victim of responsibilities almost too heavy to be borne, slowly and accurately gathered up his hat, his gloves, his cane, his portfolio, and his eye-glasses in the absorbed manner of one taking an inventory. He bowed a solemn and professional farewell to Mr. Robson. At the door he paused. A gleam as of some faint, inward flickering of the eternal human which must at times assert itself even through the cerements of legal procedure, appeared upon his pink and careworn features.
“No,” he pronounced profoundly. “You win.”
CHAPTER IX
WHAT ’s the matter with you, Robson?”
Young Jeremy Robson turned a lack-luster eye upon Wackley, his managing editor. “Nothing,” he said listlessly.
“You’re not looking well.”