“I tell you, Harrington,” replied Wentworth, “that fellow’s a perfect snake in the grass. The next thing was to pitch into my personal appearance.”
“Yours!” exclaimed Harrington, laughingly. “Why, Richard, you’re the pink of fashion. You’re D’Orsay and Raphael Sanzio, in one.”
Wentworth smiled faintly; too angry at Witherlee to be much amused.
“Nevertheless,” he continued, “Witherlee poked his gibes at me, too—something about the Anti-Slavery Bazaar. Do they sell clothes there?”
“Not exactly,” replied Harrington, laughing.
“Then, I’m hanged if I know what he meant by that,” said Wentworth.
“Well, probably he said you looked bizarre; and Johnny, not knowing the word, mistook it for its fellow in sound,” remarked Harrington.
“That’s it I’ll bet,” burst out Wentworth, reddening. “Bizarre! The cursed snob! He wants me to cut my hair off, I suppose, and wear a stove-pipe hat instead of my Rubens. I’ll see him hanged first.”
“Well, go on Richard,” said Harrington. “All this is unimportant.”
“Then,” continued the young artist, fidgeting in his seat like a man who had to deal with an awkward subject, and looking very fixedly at the opposite wall, with his face redder than before, “then he proceeded to give Bagasse a sketch of us two with Cupid’s arrows stuck in our bleeding hearts—a regular Saint Valentine picture. O bother, I won’t report the stuff! It makes me crawl.”