“Every time you bribe these rascals for a franchise you entrench them,” he cried.  “You make it more difficult to oust them.  But you mark my words, we shall get rid of them some day, and when that fight comes, I want to be in it.”

He had grown very much excited; and it was as though this excitement suddenly revealed to me the full extent of the change that had taken place in him since he had left college.  As he stood facing me, almost glaring at me through his eye-glasses, I beheld a slim, nervous, fault-finding doctrinaire, incapable of understanding the world as it was, lacking the force of his pioneer forefathers.  I rather pitied him.

“I’m sorry we can’t look at this thing alike, Perry,” I told him.  “You’ve said solve pretty hard things, but I realize that you hold your point of view in good faith, and that you have come to me as an old friend.  I hope it won’t make any difference in our personal relations.”

“I don’t see how it can help making a difference,” he answered slowly.  His excitement had cooled abruptly:  he seemed dazed.  At this moment my private stenographer entered to inform me that I was being called up on the telephone from New York.  “Well, you have more important affairs to attend to, I won’t bother you any more,” he added.

“Hold on,” I exclaimed, “this call can wait.  I’d like to talk it over with you.”

“I’m afraid it wouldn’t be any use, Hugh,” he said, and went out.

After talking with the New York client whose local interests I represented I sat thinking over the conversation with Perry.  Considering Maude’s intimacy with and affection for the Blackwoods, the affair was awkward, opening up many uncomfortable possibilities; and it was the prospect of discomfort that bothered me rather than regret for the probable loss of Perry’s friendship.  I still believed myself to have an affection for him:  undoubtedly this was a sentimental remnant....

That evening after dinner Tom came in alone, and I suspected that Perry had sent him.  He was fidgety, ill at ease, and presently asked if I could see him a moment in my study.  Maude’s glance followed us.

“Say, Hugh, this is pretty stiff,” he blurted out characteristically, when the door was closed.

“I suppose you mean the Riverside Franchise,” I said.  He looked up at me, miserably, from the chair into which he had sunk, his hands in his pockets.

“You’ll forgive me for talking about it, won’t you?  You used to lecture me once in a while at Cambridge, you know.”

“That’s all right—­go ahead,” I replied, trying to speak amiably.

“You know I’ve always admired you, Hugh,—­I never had your ability,” he began painfully, “you’ve gone ahead pretty fast,—­the truth is that Perry and I have been worried about you for some time.  We’ve tried not to be too serious in showing it, but we’ve felt that these modern business methods were getting into your system without your realizing it.  There are some things a man’s friends can tell him, and it’s their duty to tell him.  Good God, haven’t you got enough, Hugh,—­enough success and enough money, without going into a thing like this Riverside scheme?”