--Your affectionate uncle,
SAMUEL PEEL.
"_P.S._--The expenses connected with my County Council election will be
terrible. S.P."
George lifted his eyebrows, as if to indicate that in his opinion there
was no accounting for the wild stupidity of human nature, and that he as
a philosopher refused to be startled by anything whatever.
"Curt!" he muttered coldly.
Mary uneasily laughed.
"What shall you do?" she inquired.
"Without!" replied George, with a curtness that equalled Mary's uncle's.
"And what about the rent?"
"The rent will have to wait."
A brave young man! Nevertheless he saw in that moment chasms at his
feet--chasms in which he and his wife and child and his brilliant
prospects might be swallowed up. He changed the subject.
"You didn't see this cutting," he said, and passed a slip from a
newspaper gummed to a piece of green paper.
George, in his quality of rising young sculptor, received Press cuttings
from an agency. This one was from a somewhat vulgar Society journal, and
it gave, in two paragraphs, an account of the recent festivity at
George's studio. It finished with the words: "Heidsieck flowed freely.
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