Nicolovius was sitting where he had left him, except that now he was not reading but merely staring out of the window. He glanced around with a look of pleased surprise and welcome.
"Ah-h! Did genius fail to burn?" he asked, employing a bromidic phrase which Queed particularly detested.
"That is one way of putting it, I suppose."
"Or did you take pity on my solitariness? You must not let me become a drag upon you."
Queed, dropping into a chair, rather out of humor, made no reply. Nicolovius continued to look out of the window.
"I see in the _Post_," he presently began again, "that Colonel Cowles, after getting quite well, broke himself down again in preparing for the so-called Reunion. It seems rather hard to have to give one's life for such a rabble of beggars."
"That is how you regard the veterans, is it?"
"I have lived here long enough to learn something of them. Look at them for yourself next week. Mix with them. Talk with them. You will find them worth a study--and worth nothing else under the sun."
"I have been looking forward to doing something of that sort," said Queed, introspectively.
Had not Miss Weyland, the last time he had seen her--namely, one evening about two months before,--expressly invited him to come and witness the Reunion parade from her piazza?
"You will see," said Nicolovius, in his purring voice, "a lot of shabby old men, outside and in, who never did an honest day's work in their lives."
He paused, finished his cigarette and suavely resumed:
"They went to war as young men, because it promised to be more exciting than pushing a plow over a worn-out hillside. Or because there was nothing else to do. Or because they were conscripted and kicked into it. They came out of the war the most invincible grafters in history. The shiftless boor of a stable-boy found himself transformed into a shining hero, and he meant to lie back and live on it for the rest of his days. Be assured that he understood very well the cash value of his old uniform. If he had a peg-leg or an empty sleeve, so much the more impudently could he pass around his property cap. For forty years, he and his mendicant band have been a cursed albatross hung around the necks of their honest fellows. Able-bodied men, they have lolled back and eaten up millions of dollars, belonging to a State which they pretend to love and which, as they well know, has needed every penny for the desperate struggle of existence. Since the political party which dominates this State is too cowardly to tell them to go to work or go to the devil, it will be a God's mercy when the last one of them is in his grave. You may take my word for that."