"What sort of a fool circus are you children trying to make of yourselves," asked Hudson, as he came up.
"A grand one, old man, and you have been the elephant, the shining star of the whole show," replied Burleigh. "You will find beer in the ambulance."
"You have won the money handsomely, Steve," acknowledged Stoughton, "and we all accept with pleasure your kind invitation to dinner."
A RAMBLING DISCUSSION AND AN ADVENTURE, PERHAPS UNCONNECTED.
Dick Stoughton came to lunch that day in a decidedly bad humor, cause unknown. He was late, and all the other members of the club table were there, including the two dogs. A "Gray baiting" was going on. This sport consisted in working up the poetic feelings of Ernest Gray, and then ruthlessly harrowing the same. Gray was a fiery, imaginative little man, whose soul compassed far more than his body. His impulsive nature drove him constantly into the net spread by his friends, but he had become used to the process, and perhaps it did him good. Whether or not he had in him the stuff for a true poet, he was at least in no danger among those men of becoming a false one. He was just then stirred to a fine condition on the subject of Philistinism, was violently supporting the famous professor of the Humanities, and had almost got to the point of quoting poetry.
"It makes me laugh a low, sad laugh," remarked Stoughton, gloomily buttering a muffin, "when I think what Gray will be doing thirty years from now."
"We have arranged all that," said Burleigh. "Ernest is going to marry a strong-minded woman four times as big as himself, who will take him out shopping and make him carry the bundles and the twins."
"No, it will be a greater change than that," continued Dick. "At fifty he will probably be a keen, representative business man. He will be celebrated for being better able than any one in Wall Street to cheat his neighbor, and he will be absorbed in the occupation. He will be a man of strength and stamen, a man of industry, a plain, hard-working man. He will publish Letters of a Parent, in bad English, about the degeneracy of education at Harvard, and will refuse to send his sons here for fear of their becoming dudes and loafers. He won't spoil good paper then with odes and fantasies; he will devote it, instead, to watering stock and foreclosing mortgages. Just see if he doesn't."
"Are you narrow enough to think," asked Gray, defiantly, "that a man cannot work in this world, and work hard, without shutting his mind to everything outside of his tool shop?"