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 He looked so sad and reproachful that it seemed only common humanity to say that he wasn't.

"Oh, it isn't as bad as that," I remarked, with all the gumption I could put into such an awful fib.

"I don't know why I should particularly care," he went on, "but it has kind of got on my nerves, you know. I feel myself boiling in a caldron of resentment, while your friends are cheerfully skimming the grease off the top. It—it's humiliating! I wish I could do what a friend of mine did in London when a Lord Somebody cut him on the street. Followed him, you know, calling out and raising such a hullabaloo, that finally the lord, in self-defense, was compelled to turn round and ask him angrily what was the matter. 'I just wanted to tell you,' said my friend, 'that if you don't want to know me, you needn't!' If it wouldn't be asking too much of you, I wish you'd give the same message from me to Studdingham."