“Just for relaxation of the mind, my young friend, what do you think of me?”
“Straight?”
“Straight.”
“I think you’re a slippery old legal crook,” returned Jeremy without hesitation.
“And I think you’re a flitter-witted young fool—ninety-nine times out of a hundred!”
“And the hundredth?”
“That’s what I’m looking at now. By God, you’re an American, anyway! Here, Jem,” he leaned across the table, extending a bony and argumentative forefinger; “if you and I were in the trenches, fighting shoulder to shoulder, it would n’t make a pickle’s worth of difference whether you were a sapheaded loon or not, or whether I was a crook or a thief or a murderer, or not. All we’d have to ask of each other would be that we were fighting in the same cause, and with the last drop of our blood, and to the finish! Am I right?”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Well, then! What’s this we’re up against right here in Fenchester? Are we fighting? Or playing tiddledy-winks?”
“There’s very little tiddledywinks in it, so far as The Guardian is concerned,” confessed Jeremy with a wry face.