“Mr. Davidson, with a polished sarcasm that amounted to genius, advised me in his picturesque vernacular ‘t’ set thet jaw of mine goin’, and then go away an’ leave it!’”

Pause.

“I beg you, Mr. Slayton, do not think of such a thing.  I would not have him repressed for anything in the world.  As you value our future acquaintanceship, do not end our interview.  Thank you!  I appreciate your compliment, and in return will repeat that, though in a pretty sharp game, you are a true sport.  Our friend Arthur is strangely silent.  I have never met Mr. Arthur.  I have heard that either his face or his hat looks like a fried egg, but I forget for the moment which was so characterized.”

Pause.

“Fie, fie!  Mr. Arthur.  Addison, in his most intoxicated moments, would never have used such language.”

And then the man in the cabin, lying on the bed, began to laugh in a low tone.  His laugh was not pleasant to hear.  He was realizing how funny things were to other people—­things that had not been funny to him at all.  For the first time he caught a focus on his father, with his pompous pride and his stilted diction; on his mother’s social creed.  He cared as much for them as ever and his respect was as great, but now he realized that outsiders could never understand them as he did, and that always to others they must appear ridiculous.  So he laughed.  And, too, he perceived that the world would see something grimly humorous in his insistence on the girl’s parentage, when all the time, in the home to which he was to bring her, dwelt these unlovable, snobbish old parents of his own.  So he laughed.  And he thought of how he had been fooled, and played with, and duped, and cheated, and all but disgraced by the very people on whom he had looked down from a fancied superiority.  And so he laughed.  And as he laughed his hands swelled up to the size of pillows, and he thought that he was dressed in a loose garment spotted all over with great spots, and that he was standing on a stage before these grave, silent hillmen.  The light came in through a golden-yellow square just behind them.  In the front row sat Mary, looking at him with wide-open, trusting eyes.  And he was revolving these hands like pillows around each other, trying to make the sombre men and the wistful girl laugh with him, while over and over certain words slipped in between his cachinnations, like stray bird-notes through a rattle of drums.

“I have no fresh motley for my lady’s amusement,” he was saying to her, “no new philosophies to spread out for my lady’s inspection, no bright pictures to display for my lady’s pleasure, and so I, like a poor poverty-stricken minstrel whose harp has been broken, yet dare beg at the castle gate for a crumb of my lady’s bounty.”  At which he would have wept, but could only laugh louder and louder.

Then dimly he knew again he was in his own room, and he felt that several people were moving back and forth quickly.  He tried to rise, but could not, and he knew that he was slipping back to the hall and the solemn crowd of men.  He did not want to go.  He grasped convulsively at the blanket with his sound hand, and shrieked aloud.