"You might be a spy," he added, putting a cigar in his mouth and scowling horribly at his visitor. The latter replied in a quiet and dignified but judiciously injured tone. "Mr. Burley, you have my card. Go into my personal history all you like. But first, let me refer to the service I did you at the ball. It was a small matter—" "Don’t get puffed up about it then," growled Burley, with much less hostility, however. "No fear," continued Mark Pryor, as terse as his host and much more urbane. "I mention it only because an ounce of action is worth a ton of talk. Or a cartload of stuffy introductions. The point is this. Having learned that you had discharged Mr. Lloyd—" "Who says I discharged him?" Burley noisily cut in. "He discharged himself." "Oh, did he?" "Yes, damn him. I wasn’t good enough for him, I suppose. You know his kind, brains, fatted brains. But no guts! Sticks his nose up at everything and hangs out with a lot of super-highbrows—New Republic gas-bags." "The sort that cut a pie from the periphery to the center?" "Yah! That’s their lingo. Still, Lloyd’s got a head on his shoulders. I’ll say that for him. And I don’t fire a man that’s worth his salary. Why should I?" "You believe in keeping your grudges out of your business?" "That’s me. I could have given him his walking papers for a hundred good reasons. But I didn’t. And what thanks did I get? He left me in the lurch. That’s what he did. Left me on his own hook at a damn critical time." "A case of bad conscience, perhaps." "You said it! He’d done me all the harm he could. He and Claude Fontaine who put him up to it." Burley enlarged on his two-fold grievance. First, Robert and Claude had circulated a malicious story about Harry Kelly (a professional bruiser) making a punching bag of him; this story had ruined his prestige among the Outlaws of Kips Bay. Then, they had freely slandered him in Cornelia Covert’s inner circle, with the result that Cornelia’s friend, Janet Barr, had conceived an insane and utterly baseless dislike of him. His story was full of evasions and suppressions. Thus he forgot to tell Mark Pryor that he had twice waylaid Janet on the street and had been coldly repulsed each time. It was clear that these repulses had added fuel to his hatred of Claude and Robert, the two men who found favor in her eyes. Against them, rather than against her, he vented his spleen. When he spoke of her, his diatribe degenerated into a whine. "I know," said Pryor, laconically, cheering him up. "You have that ’nobody loves me,’ feeling. Nastiest feeling in the world. We all get it once in a while. I find there’s only one remedy for it, and that’s to stop bullying people." "Bullying people!" shouted Burley, jumping up and glaring at his visitor. "Say that again, if you dare."