“When I was your age,” said Clavering, laughing openly, “I hadn’t a room like this—I shared a board shanty with a fellow from God knows where, who had served a term in state’s prison. But he was the finest smelter expert I ever saw, and had the best eye for a pretty woman. You couldn’t see the boards in our walls for the pictures of ballet dancers and the like. Nothing in the least like this.” And he laughed.
Reginald’s pale face flushed with many emotions. His father’s tone and manner expressed a frank scorn for him and all his surroundings. Clavering kept on:—
“My roommate—nobody had a room to himself in those diggings—taught me how to differentiate among pretty women.” Clavering was diverted at the spectacle of a man shrinking from such a discussion. “Now, of your sisters, Anne is really the best looking—the most effective, that is. Élise and Lydia are of the tulip variety. Anne is something more and different.”
“Élise and Lydia are both of them strikingly like you, sir,” replied Reginald. It was the nearest approach to sarcasm he had ever made in his life. Clavering enjoyed the cut at himself immensely.
“Very neat; thank you. Now I should say that Mrs.—what’s her name?—old Brandon’s daughter is a remarkably attractive, even beautiful woman, although she strikes me at first glance as one of those women, not exactly young, who haven’t yet found themselves. Perhaps you’ll show the lady the way.”
“Sir,” said Reginald, after a pause, “you shock me!”
Clavering was not in the least annoyed at this. He looked at Reginald as one studies an amusing specimen, and said, as if to himself, “Good God! that you should be my son!” He then took up some of the books on the table and began to turn them over, laughing silently to himself the while. The books corresponded with the pictures and ornaments. Reginald Clavering found all of his family a cross, except his sister Anne, and his father the heaviest cross of all. He was sincerely relieved when Clavering took himself downstairs to his own library again.
It was a handsome library, and quite what the library of a senator, if not a statesman, should be. The walls were lined with encyclopædias, histories, and the English classics. Clavering, however, was a student of far more interesting documents than any ever printed in a book. He had studied unceasingly the human subject, and knew men and women as a Greek scholar knows his Sophocles. This knowledge of men had made him not only dazzlingly and superbly successful, but even happy in his way. The most saintly man on earth might have envied James Clavering his mind, ever at ease; for he knew no morals, and was unmoral rather than immoral.