I smiled in spite of myself.
“Your interest in—in plutocrats is charitable, then?”
“Why, yes,” he said, “my interest in all kinds of people is charitable. However improbable it may seem, I have no reason to dislike or envy people who have more than they know what to do with.” And the worst of it was he looked it. He managed somehow simply by sitting there with his strange eyes fixed upon me—in spite of his ridiculous philosophy—to belittle my ambitions, to make of small worth my achievements, to bring home to me the fact that in spite of these I was neither contented nor happy though he kept his humour and his poise, he implied an experience that was far deeper, more tragic and more significant than mine. I was goaded into making an injudicious remark.
“Well, your campaign against Ennerly and Jackson fell through, didn't it?” Ennerly and Jackson were the city officials who had been tried.
“It wasn't a campaign against them,” he answered. “And considering the subordinate part I took in it, it could scarcely be called mine.”
“Greenhalge turned to you to get the evidence.”
“Well, I got it,” he said.
“What became of it?”
“You ought to know.”
“What do you mean?”