“He utterly failed to see the point of view,” Murphree reported in some astonishment to Dickinson.
“What else did he say?” Mr. Dickinson asked.
Murphree hesitated.
“Well—what?” the banker insisted.
“He wasn't quite himself,” said Murphree, who was a comparative newcomer in the city and had a respect for the Blackwood name. “He said that that was the custom of thieves: when they were discovered, they offered to divide. He swore that he would get justice in the courts.”
Mr. Dickinson smiled....
Thus Perry, through his obstinacy and inability to adapt himself to new conditions, had gradually lost both caste and money. He resigned from the Boyne Club. I was rather sorry for him. Tom naturally took the matter to heart, but he never spoke of it; I found that I was seeing less of him, though we continued to dine there at intervals, and he still came to my house to see the children. Maude continued to see Lucia. For me, the situation would have been more awkward had I been less occupied, had my relationship with Maude been a closer one. Neither did she mention Perry in those days. The income that remained to him being sufficient for him and his family to live on comfortably, he began to devote most of his time to various societies of a semipublic nature until—in the spring of which I write his activities suddenly became concentrated in the organization of a “Citizens Union,” whose avowed object was to make a campaign against “graft” and political corruption the following autumn. This announcement and the call for a mass-meeting in Kingdon Hall was received by the newspapers with a good-natured ridicule, and in influential quarters it was generally hinted that this was Mr. Blackwood's method of “getting square” for having been deprived of the Boyne Street line. It was quite characteristic of Ralph Hambleton that he should go, out of curiosity, to the gathering at Kingdon Hall, and drop into my office the next morning.
“Well, Hughie, they're after you,” he said with a grin.
“After me? Why not include yourself?”
He sat down and stretched his long legs and his long arms, and smiled as he gaped.