"Well," said Henry, "it isn't any of it _my_ fault, is it?"
"That remains to be seen. Are you going to _run_ that--dive?"
"Oh, yes, you're probably thinking how selfish I am. You wouldn't recognize a pure motive if you met one in the street. But to think of a Devereux--almost the same thing as a Starkweather--"
"What's your idea? To have me be a jolly little martyr?"
"There's this much to say, Henry--at least I'd put John's money to a nobler use than you ever would."
He was an impulsive young man, and sometimes he made up his mind by contraries. "I wouldn't count too much on it," he said cheerfully. "I might astonish you."
"You--Henry Devereux! Am I going to see my own sister's son in a polluted enterprise like--"
"You're going to see your own grandfather's great-grandson make P. T. Barnum look a Kickapoo medicine man--if necessary," said Henry. "Only don't you worry about any pollution. That's where I draw the line. I'm not going to stage one single pollute."
"Why certainly," said Henry. "And speaking of operations, I've got a hunch the patient's going to recover. I've just been holding a clinic.... Well--good-bye, Aunt Mirabelle." He turned back to his wife and his friend Standish. "So _that's_ settled," said Henry, and grinned, a trifle apprehensively. "We're off in a cloud of dust.... Waiter, where's those two portions of crow I ordered four months ago? The service in this place is getting something rotten."
Mr. Theodore Mix, sprawled in his desk chair, gazed with funereal gloom at the typewritten agreement which lay before him, unsigned. It was barely twenty minutes ago that Mr. Mix had risen to welcome the man who was to save his credit and his reputation; but during those twenty minutes Mr. Mix, who had felt that he was sitting on top of the world, had been unceremoniously shot off into space.
His creditors surrounded him, (and because they were small creditors they were inclined to be nasty), he owed money to his New York correspondents, whose letters were becoming peremptory, and his brokerage business was pounding against the rocks. Quietly, overnight he had located a purchaser for the Orpheum, and as soon as Henry's name had been safe on the dotted line, Mr. Mix would have been financed for many months ahead. And then came Henry--and Henry, who had been cast for the part of the lamb, had suddenly become as obstinate as a donkey. Mr. Mix, gazing at that agreement, was swept by impotent rage at Henry, and he took the document and ripped it savagely across and across, and crumpled it in both his hands, and jammed it into his scrap-basket.