Page:The Outcry (London, Methuen & Co., 1911).djvu/184

170 morning, will have blown on his flame of bravado."

Inevitably a student of character, Mr. Bender rose to the occasion. "Yes, I guess he's pretty mad."

"They've imputed to him"—Hugh but wanted to abound in that sense—"an intention of which after all he isn't guilty."

"So that"—his listener glowed with interested optimism—"if they don't look out, if they impute it to him again, I guess he'll just go and be guilty!"

Hugh might at this moment have shown to an initiated eye as fairly elated by the sense of producing something of the effect he had hoped. "You entertain the fond vision of lashing them up to that mistake, oh fisher in troubled waters?" And then with a finer art, as his companion, expansively bright but crudely acute, eyed him in turn as if to sound him: "The strongest thing in such a type—one does make out—is his resentment of a liberty taken; and the most natural furthermore is quite that he should feel almost anything you do take uninvited from the groaning board of his banquet of life to be such a liberty."