“But I mustn’t keep him waiting too long,” said Fledgeby, “or he’ll revenge it on my unfortunate friend. How’s your very clever and agreeable wife? She knows we have broken down?”
“I showed her the letter.”
“Very much surprised?” asked Fledgeby.
“I think she would have been more so,” answered Lammle, “if there had been more go in you ?”
“Oh!—She lays it upon me, then?”
“ Mr. Fledgeby, I will not have my words misconstrued.”
“Don’t break out, Lammle,” urged Fledgeby, in a submissive tone, “because there’s no occasion. I only asked a question. Then she don’t lay it upon me? To ask another question.”
“No, sir.”
“Very good,” said Fledgeby, plainly seeing that she did. “My compliments to her. Goodbye!”
They shook hands, and Lammle strode out pondering. Fledgeby saw him into the fog, and, returning to the fire and musing with his face to it, stretched the legs of the rose-coloured Turkish trousers wide apart, and meditatively bent his knees, as if he were going down upon them.
“You have a pair of whiskers, Lammle, which I never liked,” murmured Fledgeby, “and which money can’t produce; you are boastful of your manners and your conversation; you wanted to pull my nose, and you have let me in for a failure, and your wife says I am the cause of it. I’ll bowl you down. I will, though I have no whiskers,” here he rubbed the places where they were due, “and no manners, and no conversation!”