He had intended to avoid a scene or quarrel, but when he began to speak, something kept rising in his throat and retarded his utterance, and his own voice frightened him, it sounded so distant, low, and resonant. “I understand,” he began, “that Melissa Smith, an orphan, and one of my scholars, has talked with you about adopting your profession. Is that so?” The man with the glazed hat leaned over the table and made an imaginary shot that sent the ball spinning round the cushions. Then, walking round the table, he recovered the ball and placed it upon the spot. This duty discharged, getting ready for another shot, he said: “S'pose she has?” The master choked up again, but, squeezing the cushion of the table in his gloved hand, he went on: “If you are a gentleman, I have only to tell you that I am her guardian, and responsible for her career. You know as well as I do the kind of life you offer her. As you may learn of anyone here, I have already brought her out of an existence worse than death--out of the streets and the contamination of vice. I am trying to do so again. Let us talk like men. She has neither father, mother, sister, or brother. Are you seeking to give her an equivalent for these?” The man with the glazed hat examined the point of his cue, and then looked around for somebody to enjoy the joke with him. “I know that she is a strange, willful girl,” continued the master, “but she is better than she was. I believe that I have some influence over her still. I beg and hope, therefore, that you will take no further steps in this matter, but as a man, as a gentleman, leave her to me. I am willing--” But here something rose again in the master's throat, and the sentence remained unfinished. The man with the glazed hat, mistaking the master's silence, raised his head with a coarse, brutal laugh, and said in a loud voice: “Want her yourself, do you? That cock won't fight here, young man!” The insult was more in the tone than in the words, more in the glance than tone, and more in the man's instinctive nature than all these. The best appreciable rhetoric to this kind of animal is a blow. The master felt this, and, with his pent-up, nervous energy finding expression in the one act, he struck the brute full in his grinning face. The blow sent the glazed hat one way and the cue another, and tore the glove and skin from the master's hand from knuckle to joint. It opened up the corners of the fellow's mouth, and spoilt the peculiar shape of his beard for some time to come.