And it is a really serious thing when two
men, wholly dependent upon each other for company, begin to
quarrel.
Weatherbee loved to discourse blatantly on politics, while
Cuthfert, who had been prone to clip his coupons and let the
commonwealth jog on as best it might, either ignored the subject
or delivered himself of startling epigrams. But the clerk was too
obtuse to appreciate the clever shaping of thought, and this
waste of ammunition irritated Cuthfert.
He had been used to blinding people by his brilliancy, and it
worked him quite a hardship, this loss of an audience. He felt
personally aggrieved and unconsciously held his muttonhead
companion responsible for it.
Save existence, they had nothing in common--came in touch on no
single point.
Weatherbee was a clerk who had known naught but clerking all his
life; Cuthfert was a master of arts, a dabbler in oils, and had
written not a little. The one was a lower-class man who
considered himself a gentleman, and the other was a gentleman who
knew himself to be such. From this it may be remarked that a man
can be a gentleman without possessing the first instinct of true
comradeship. The clerk was as sensuous as the other was
aesthetic, and his love adventures, told at great length and
chiefly coined from his imagination, affected the supersensitive
master of arts in the same way as so many whiffs of sewer gas.
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