“Men ain’t that way.  Angus had took no care of his figure, which was now pouchy, his hair was gray, and he was either shedding or had been reached, and he had lines of care and food in his face, and took no pains whatever with his accent—­or with what he said, for that matter.  I never saw a man yet that could hide a disgraceful past like a woman can.  They don’t seem to have any pride.  Most of ’em act like they don’t care a hoot whether people find it out on ’em or not.

“Angus was always reckless that way, adding to his wife’s burden of anxiety.  She’d got her own vile past well buried, but she never knew when his was going to stick its ugly head up out of its grave.  He’d go along all right for a while like one of the best set had ought to—­then Zooey!  We was out to dinner at another millionaire’s one night—­in that town you’re either a millionaire or drawing wages from one—­and Angus talked along with his host for half an hour about the impossibility of getting a decent valet on this side of the water, Americans not knowing their place like the English do, till you’d have thought he was born to it, and then all at once he breaks out about the hardwood finish to the dining-room, and how the art of graining has perished and ought to be revived.  ‘And I wish I had a silver dollar,’ he says, ’for every door like that one there that I’ve grained to resemble the natural wood so cunningly you’d never guess it—­hardly.’

“At that his break didn’t faze any one but Ellabelle.  The host was an old train-robber who’d cut your throat for two bits—­I’ll bet he couldn’t play an honest game of solitaire—­and he let out himself right off that he had once worked in a livery stable and was proud of it; but poor Ellabelle, who’d been talking about the dear Countess of Comtessa or somebody, and the dukes and earls that was just one-two-three with her on the other side, she blushed up till it almost showed through the second coating.  Angus was certainly poison ivy to her on occasion, and he’d refuse to listen to reason when she called him down about it.  He’d do most of the things she asked him to about food and clothes and so forth—­like the time he had the two gold teeth took out and replaced by real porcelain nature fakers—­but he never could understand why he wasn’t free to chat about the days when he earned what money he had.

“It was this time that I first saw little Angus since he had changed from a governess to a governor—­or whatever they call the he-teacher of a millionaire’s brat.  He was home for the summer vacation.  Naturally I’d been prejudiced against him not only by his mother’s praise but by his father’s steady coppering of the same.  Judiciously comparing the two, I was led to expect a kind of cross between Little Lord Fauntleroy and the late Sitting Bull, with the vices of each and the virtues of neither.  Instead of which I found him a winsome whelp of six-foot or so with Scotch eyes and his mother’s nose