because it somehow seemed to me that this whole performance was very like
an exaggeration of conduct which I myself had sometimes been guilty of in
my intercourse with familiar friends–but never, never with strangers, I
observed to myself. I wanted to kick the pygmy into the fire, but some
incomprehensible sense of being legally and legitimately under his
authority forced me to obey his order. He applied the match to the pipe,
took a contemplative whiff or two, and remarked, in an irritatingly
familiar way:
“Seems to me it’s devilish odd weather for this time of year.”
I flushed again, and in anger and humiliation as before; for the language
was hardly an exaggeration of some that I have uttered in my day, and
moreover was delivered in a tone of voice and with an exasperating drawl
that had the seeming of a deliberate travesty of my style. Now there is
nothing I am quite so sensitive about as a mocking imitation of my
drawling infirmity of speech. I spoke up sharply and said:
“Look here, you miserable ash-cat! you will have to give a little more
attention to your manners, or I will throw you out of the window!”
The manikin smiled a smile of malicious content and security, puffed a
whiff of smoke contemptuously toward me, and said, with a still more
elaborate drawl:
“Come–go gently now; don’t put on too many airs with your betters.”
This cool snub rasped me all over, but it seemed to subjugate me, too,
for a moment. The pygmy contemplated me awhile with his weasel eyes,
and then said, in a peculiarly sneering way:
“You turned a tramp away from your door this morning.”
I said crustily:
“Perhaps I did, perhaps I didn’t. How do you know?”
“Well, I know. It isn’t any matter how I know.”
“Very well. Suppose I did turn a tramp away from the door–what of it?”
“Oh, nothing; nothing in particular. Only you lied to him.”
“I didn’t! That is, I–”
“Yes, but you did; you lied to him.”
I felt a guilty pang–in truth, I had felt it forty times before that
tramp had traveled a block from my door–but still I resolved to make a
show of feeling slandered; so I said:
“This is a baseless impertinence. I said to the tramp–”
“There–wait. You were about to lie again. I know what you said to him.
You said the cook was gone down-town and there was nothing left from
breakfast. Two lies. You knew the cook was behind the door, and plenty
of provisions behind her.”
This astonishing accuracy silenced me; and it filled me with wondering
speculations, too, as to how this cub could have got his information.
Of course he could have culled the conversation from the tramp, but by
what sort of magic had he contrived to find out about the concealed cook?
Now the dwarf spoke again:
“It was rather pitiful, rather small, in you to refuse to read that poor
young woman’s manuscript the other day, and give her an opinion as to its
literary value; and she had come so far, too, and so hopefully. Now
wasn’t it?”
I felt like a cur! And I had felt so every time the thing had recurred
to my mind, I may as well confess. I flushed hotly and said:
“Look here, have you nothing better to do than prowl around prying into
other people’s business? Did that girl tell you that?”
“Never mind whether she did or not. The main thing is, you did that
contemptible thing. And you felt ashamed of it afterward. Aha! you feel
ashamed of it now!”
This was a sort of devilish glee. With fiery earnestness I responded:
“I told that girl, in the kindest, gentlest way, that I could not consent
to deliver judgment upon any one’s manuscript, because an individual’s
verdict was worthless. It might underrate a work of high merit and lose
it to the world, or it might overrate a trashy production and so open the
way for its infliction upon the world: I said that the great public was
the only tribunal competent to sit in judgment upon a literary effort,