“And this, sir, is the last time I sacrifice any of my good hours to you.  Not because you are old, and therefore think you are wise, when you are not; not because you are blind and besotted and damned—­a trunk of a tree filled with dry rot that presently a clean wind will blow away; not because your opinions, and the opinions of all like you, have long ago been proven the lies and idiocies that they are; not even because you haven’t one single real right left to live—­I haven’t come to tell you these things, although they are true; for you are past hope and there is no use wasting words upon you; I have come to tell you that you bore me inexpressibly. (That would be the most dreadful revenge of all.  He could see his uncle’s face!) That you have a genius for taking the wrong side of every question, and I can no longer endure it.  I dissipate my time.  Good-night!”

He wouldn’t have said it in quite so stately a way, possibly, the sentences would not have been quite so rounded, but the context would have been the same.

Glorious; but it wasn’t said.  Instead, once a month, he got into his dinner-jacket, brushed his hair very sleekly, walked six blocks, said good-evening to his uncle’s butler, and went on back to the library, where, in a room rich with costly bindings, and smelling pleasantly of leather, and warmly yellow with the light of two shaded lamps, he would find his uncle reading before a crackling wood fire.  What followed was almost a formula, an exquisite presentation of stately manners, an exquisite avoidance of any topic which might cause a real discussion.  The dinner was invariably gentle, persuasive, a thoughtful gastronomic achievement.  Heaven might become confused about its weather, and about wars, and things like that, but Mr. McCain never became confused about his menus.  He had a habit of commending wine.  “Try this claret, my dear fellow, I want your opinion....  A drop of this Napoleonic brandy won’t hurt you a bit.”  He even sniffed the bouquet before each sip; passed, that is, the glass under his nose and then drank.  But Adrian, with a preconceived image of the personality back of this, and the memory of too many offences busy in his mind, saw nothing quaint or amusing.  His gorge rose.  Damn his uncle’s wines, and his mushrooms, and his soft-footed servants, and his house of nuances and evasions, and his white grapes, large and outwardly perfect, and inwardly sentimental as the generation whose especial fruit they were.  As for himself, he had a recollection of ten years of poverty after leaving college; a recollection of sweat and indignities; he had also a recollection of some poor people whom he had known.