Page:Leon Wilson - Ruggles of Red Gap.djvu/212

198 and shake it heartily, an action that I could explain no more than he, except that the violence of my self-communion was still upon me and required an outlet. He grinned amiably, then regarded me with a shrewd eye and demanded if I had been drinking.

"This," I said; "I am drunk with this," and held the card up to him. But when he took it interestedly he merely read the obverse side which I had not observed until now. "Go to Epstein's for Everything You Wear," it read in large type, and added, "The Square Deal Mammoth Store."

"They carry a nice stock," he said, still a bit puzzled by my tone, "though I generally trade at the Red Front." I turned the card over for him and he studied the list of humble-born notables, though from a point of view peculiarly his own. "I don't see," he began, "what right they got to rake up all that stuff about people that's dead and gone. Who cares what their folks was!" And he added, "'Horace was the son of a shopkeeper'—Horace who?" Plainly the matter did not excite him, and I saw it would be useless to try to convey to him what the items had meant to me.

"I mean to say, I'm glad to be here with you," I said.

"I knew you'd like it," he answered. "Everything is nice here."

"America is some country," I said.

"She is, she is," he answered. "And now you can bile up a pot of tea in your own way while I clean these here fish for supper."

I made the tea. I regret to say there was not a tea cozy in the place; indeed the linen, silver, and general table