“I tell you, Harrington,” replied Wentworth, “that fellow’s a perfect snake in the grass. The next thing was to pitch into my personal appearance.” “Yours!” exclaimed Harrington, laughingly. “Why, Richard, you’re the pink of fashion. You’re D’Orsay and Raphael Sanzio, in one.” Wentworth smiled faintly; too angry at Witherlee to be much amused. “Nevertheless,” he continued, “Witherlee poked his gibes at me, too—something about the Anti-Slavery Bazaar. Do they sell clothes there?” “Not exactly,” replied Harrington, laughing. “Then, I’m hanged if I know what he meant by that,” said Wentworth. “Well, probably he said you looked bizarre; and Johnny, not knowing the word, mistook it for its fellow in sound,” remarked Harrington. “That’s it I’ll bet,” burst out Wentworth, reddening. “Bizarre! The cursed snob! He wants me to cut my hair off, I suppose, and wear a stove-pipe hat instead of my Rubens. I’ll see him hanged first.” “Well, go on Richard,” said Harrington. “All this is unimportant.” “Then,” continued the young artist, fidgeting in his seat like a man who had to deal with an awkward subject, and looking very fixedly at the opposite wall, with his face redder than before, “then he proceeded to give Bagasse a sketch of us two with Cupid’s arrows stuck in our bleeding hearts—a regular Saint Valentine picture. O bother, I won’t report the stuff! It makes me crawl.” “Oh, go on, Richard, go on,” urged Harrington. “No, I won’t. Let it go. Come, Harrington, let’s drop it. Upon my word, I can’t repeat it, and I won’t,” said Wentworth. Harrington saw that it was no use to urge him, and was silent. The fact was, Wentworth did not like to have Harrington think of him as the lover of Emily, and Witherlee’s portraiture of him as such was too faithful for exhibition. No man likes to confess that he has been jilted by a woman, as Wentworth thought he had been by Emily, and to say that he had been reputed her lover by Witherlee was certainly an approximation at least to such a confession. “Very well,” remarked Harrington after a pause, “if you don’t care to talk about it, let it go. Now, Richard, I want you to leave this matter to me. There’s more in it, I’m convinced, than appears, and if you make a quarrel with Fernando we shall never know the whole of it. Just keep cool, say nothing to him of what you have heard, and let me track the fox through all his doublings. Will you promise?” Wentworth hesitated, but his own suspicions were roused, and he felt the good sense of Harrington’s proposal. “I agree, Harrington,” he said at length. “Yes, I promise, and I’ll keep dark.” “Good,” replied Harrington. “I declare, Richard, I can’t help feeling, in view of the serious grandeur of life, that all this is pitifully petty. These pigmy broils and imbroglios seem all the more trivial in contrast with such scenes and passions as I have been in to-day. I wish we could live only in the larger life, unvexed by this buzz and fribble.”