“I should think so,” growled Perry.

“I suppose it is not good form to drink beer with oysters,” I suggested mildly.

“I don’t know, I’m sure,” said George.

“I suppose not,” said Perry; “they go so well together.  I hope it isn’t, at any rate:  I like to do things that are bad form.”

So I relapsed into silence, and my speculations about George’s outbreak against gambling, and Mrs. Herbert’s beautiful face and sad eyes, and Lucretia Knowles’s wicked light-heartedness.

When we had finished eating and had opened the last bottle of beer, I asked George, as he stopped his talk with Perry for a moment to relight his cigar, who Mrs. Herbert was.

“She is the noblest and most unfortunate woman in the world,” he replied, “I will tell you her story some time, perhaps.”

“Let us hear it now,” I cried, looking at Perry with triumph.

“Yes, let us,” said Perry, nothing to my surprise, for I knew his heart was in the right place, if his ways were a little rough and unimpressionable-like.  “We have no recitations, no lectures, no anything, to-morrow, and there is no one else in the restaurant but the waiter, and he is asleep.”

And, in fact, we could hear him snoring.

“No, I would rather not tell it here,” George said simply; “but if you will come with me to the office you shall hear it.”  And when we had heard it we respected the feeling that had prompted him to consider even the walls of such a place as unfit listeners.  To be sure, it was a very comfortable restaurant, where the waiters were always attentive and skilful and the mutton-chops irreproachable, and many a pleasant evening had we three had there over our cigars and Milwaukee, and sometimes a bottle or two of claret.  But so had Tom Hagard, the faro-dealer, and Frank Sauter, who played poker over Sudden’s, and Dick Bander, who got his money from Madame Blank because he happened to be a swashing slugger, and many another Tom, Dick, and Harry whose reputations were, to say the least, questionable.  Of course we never associated with such characters, and plenty of estimable people besides ourselves frequented Bertrand’s.  The place was not in bad odor at all, but merely a little miscellaneous, and suited our plebeian fancies all the more on that account.  If young fellows want to be really comfortable in life, we thought, and see a little at first hand just what sort of people make up the world, they must not be too particular.  So we used to sit down at the next table to one where a gambler or a horse-jockey would perhaps be seated, or a man of worse fame, and order our humble repast with a quiet conscience and a strengthened determination never to become one among such people.  We would even see the gay flutter of skirts sometimes, as the waiter entered one of the private rooms with an armful of dishes, and hear the chatter and laughter of the wearers.

We did not wonder, therefore, at George’s preference for his own office, whose four walls had never looked down upon anything but innocent young fellows smoking and talking whatever harmless nonsense came into their heads, or playing chess or penny-ante, or upon his own generous thoughts and solitary contemplations, or hard work on some intricate lawsuit.  So we aroused the sleeping waiter, and walked back to the Academy of Music building in silence.