The richness of colloquialism moved the vicar of Mount Dunstan to deep enjoyment.

“Would you mind—­I trust you won’t,” he apologised courteously, “telling me exactly the significance of those two last sentences.  In think I see their meaning, but——­”

G. Selden looked good-naturedly apologetic himself.

“Well, it’s slang—­you see,” he explained.  “I guess I can’t help it.  You—­” flushing a trifle, but without any touch of resentment in the boyish colour, “you know what sort of a chap I am.  I’m not passing myself off as anything but an ordinary business hustler, am I—­just under salesman to a typewriter concern?  I shouldn’t like to think I’d got in here on any bluff.  I guess I sling in slang every half dozen words——.”

“My dear boy,” Penzance was absolutely moved and he spoke with warmth quite paternal, “Lord Mount Dunstan and I are genuinely interested—­genuinely.  He, because he knows New York a little, and I because I don’t.  I am an elderly man, and have spent my life buried in my books in drowsy villages.  Pray go on.  Your American slang has frequently a delightful meaning—­a fantastic hilarity, or common sense, or philosophy, hidden in its origin.  In that it generally differs from English slang, which—­I regret to say—­is usually founded on some silly catch word.  Pray go on.  When you see a new book by Mr. Kipling, you are ready to ‘separate yourself from one fifty’ because he ’has the goods with him.’”

G. Selden suppressed an involuntary young laugh.

“One dollar and fifty cents is usually the price of a book,” he said.  “You separate yourself from it when you take it out of your clothes—­I mean out of your pocket—­and pay it over the counter.”

“There’s a careless humour in it,” said Mount Dunstan grimly.  “The suggestion of parting is not half bad.  On the whole, it is subtle.”

“A great deal of it is subtle,” said Penzance, “though it all professes to be obvious.  The other sentence has a commercial sound.”

“When a man goes about selling for a concern,” said the junior assistant of Jones, “he can prove what he says, if he has the goods with him.  I guess it came from that.  I don’t know.  I only know that when a man is a straight sort of fellow, and can show up, we say he’s got the goods with him.”

They sat after lunch in the library, before an open window, looking into a lovely sunken garden.  Blossoms were breaking out on every side, and robins, thrushes, and blackbirds chirped and trilled and whistled, as Mount Dunstan and Penzance led G. Selden on to paint further pictures for them.

Some of them were rather painful, Penzance thought.  As connected with youth, they held a touch of pathos Selden was all unconscious of.  He had had a hard life, made up, since his tenth year, of struggles to earn his living.  He had sold newspapers, he had run errands, he had swept out a “candy store.”  He had had a few years at the public school, and a few months at a business college, to which he went at night, after work hours.  He had been “up against it good and plenty,” he told them.  He seemed, however, to have had a knack of making friends and of giving them “a boost along” when such a chance was possible.  Both of his listeners realised that a good many people had liked him, and the reason was apparent enough to them.