We said some sharp things about the
little Welsh attorney who was beginning to be England's humiliation.
Then it was time for me to go.
The moment was rather awkward, for the Honourable George, to my great
embarrassment, pressed upon me his dispatch-case, one that we had
carried during all our travels and into which tidily fitted a quart
flask. Brandy we usually carried in it. I managed to accept it with a
word of thanks, and then amazingly he shook hands twice with me as we
said good-night. I had never dreamed he could be so greatly affected.
Indeed, I had always supposed that there was nothing of the
sentimentalist about him.
So the Honourable George and I were definitely apart for the first
time in our lives.
It was with mingled emotions that I set sail next day for the foreign
land to which I had been exiled by a turn of the cards. Not only was I
off to a wilderness where a life of daily adventure was the normal
life, but I was to mingle with foreigners who promised to be quite
almost impossibly queer, if the family of Flouds could be taken as a
sample of the native American--knowing Indians like the Tuttle person;
that sort of thing. If some would be less queer, others would be even
more queer, with queerness of a sort to tax even my _savoir
faire_, something which had been sorely taxed, I need hardly say,
since that fatal evening when the Honourable George's intuitions had
played him false in the game of drawing poker.
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