"Simple as swearin' off taxes," says I. "Send him the sketch."
Mr. Steele gasps. "Wha-a-at!" says he. "Why, I've been offered ten times what I paid for it, and refused; although there have been times when—well, you understand. My dear McCabe, that little pencil drawing is much more to me than a fragment of genius. It stands for satisfaction. It's something that I own and he wants."
"And there you are," says I. "Been rackin' your nut to dig up something kind and generous to do for him, ain't you! Well?"
Say, you should have seen the look J. Bayard gives me at that! It's a mixture of seven diff'rent kinds of surprise, reproach, and indignation. And the line of argument he puts up too! How he does wiggle and squirm over the very thought of givin' that picture to Twombley-Crane, after he'd done the gloat act so long!
But I had the net over Mr. Steele good and fast, and while I was about it I dragged him over a few bumps; just for the good of his soul, as Father Reardon would say.
"Oh, come!" says I. "You're makin' the bluff that you want to scatter deeds of kindness; but when I point one out, right under your nose, you beef about it like you was bein' frisked for your watch. A hot idea of bein' an angel of mercy you've got, ain't you? Honest now, in your whole career, was you ever guilty of wastin' a kind word, or puttin' out the helpin' hand, if you couldn't see where it might turn a trick for J. Bayard Steele?"
Makes him wince a little, that jab does, and he flushes up under the eyes.
"I don't know that I have ever posed either as a philanthropist or a saint," says he. "If I seem to have assumed a rôle of that sort now, it is because it has been thrust upon me, because I have been caught in a web of circumstances, a tangle of things, without purpose, without meaning. That's what life has always been to me, always will be, I suppose,—a blind, ruthless maze, where I've snatched what I could for myself, and given up what I couldn't hold. Your friend Gordon did his share in making it so for me; this man Twombley-Crane as well. Do you expect me to be inspired with goodness and kindliness by them?"
"Oh, Pyramid had his good points," says I. "You'd find Twombley-Crane has his, if you knew him well enough."
"And who knows," adds Steele, defiant and bitter, "but that I may have mine?"