"Of course, if Galloway could make me come to him, he'd be a fool to come to me. But when he finds I'm not coming, why, he'll behave himself--if his business is important enough for me to bother with."
"But if he doesn't come, Fred?"
"Then--my Universal Fuel scheme, or some other equally good. But you will never see me limbering my knees in the anteroom of a rich man, when he needs me and I don't need him."
"Well, we'll see," said Tetlow, with the air of a sober man patient with one who is not sober.
"By the way," continued Norman, "if Galloway says he's too ill to come--or anything of that sort--tell him I'd not care to undertake the affairs of a man too old or too feeble to attend to business, as he might die in the midst of it."
Tetlow's face was such a wondrous exhibit of discomfiture that Norman laughed outright. Evidently he had forestalled his fat friend in a scheme to get him to Galloway in spite of himself. "All right--all right," said Tetlow fretfully. "We'll sleep on this. But I don't see why you're so opposed to going to see the man. It looks like snobbishness to me--false pride--silly false pride."
"It IS snobbishness," said Norman. "But you forget that snobbishness rules the world. The way to rule fools is to make them respect you. And the way to make them respect you is by showing them that they are your inferiors. I want Galloway's respect because I want his money. And I'll not get his money--as much of it as belongs to me--except by showing him my value. Not my value as a lawyer, for he knows that already, but my value as a man. Do you see?"
"No, I don't," snapped Tetlow.
"That's what it means to be Tetlow. Now, I do see--and that's why I'm Norman."
Tetlow looked at him doubtfully, uncertain whether he had been listening to wisdom put in a jocose form of audacious egotism or to the effervescings of intoxication.
The hint of a smile lurking in the sobriety of the powerful features of his extraordinary friend only increased his doubt. Was Norman mocking him, and himself as well? If so, was it the mockery of sober sense or of drunkenness?
"You seem to be puzzled, Billy," said Norman, and Tetlow wondered how he had seen. "Don't get your brains in a stew trying to understand me. I'm acting the way I've always acted--except in one matter. You know that I know what I'm about?"
"I certainly do," replied his admirer.
"Then, let it go at that. If you could understand me--the sort of man I am, the sort of thing I do--you'd not need me, but would be the whole show yourself --eh? That being true, don't show yourself a com-monplace nobody by deriding and denying what your brain is unable to comprehend. Show yourself a somebody by seeing the limitations of your ability. The world is full of little people who criticise and judge and laugh at and misunderstand the few real intelligences.
And very tedious interruptions of the scenery those little people are. Don't be one of them. . . . Did you know my wife's father?"
Tetlow startled. "No--that is, yes," he stammered.
"That is, I met him a few times."
"Often enough to find out that he was crazy?"
"Oh, yes. He explained some of his ideas to me.
Yes--he was quite mad, poor fellow."
Norman gave way to a fit of silent laughter. "I can imagine," he presently said, "what you'd have thought if Columbus or Alexander or Napoleon or Stevenson or even the chaps who doped out the telephone and the telegraph--if they had talked to you before they arrived. Or even after they arrived, if they had been explaining some still newer and bigger idea not yet accomplished."
"You don't think Mr. Hallowell was mad?"
"He was mad, assuming that you are the standard of sanity. Otherwise, he was a great man. There'll be statues erected and pages of the book of fame devoted to the men who carry out his ideas."
"His death was certainly a great loss to his daughter," said Tetlow in his heaviest, most bourgeois manner.
"I said he was a great man," observed Norman.
"I didn't say he was a great father. A great man is never a great father. It takes a small man to be a great father."
"At any rate, her having no parents or relatives doesn't matter, now that she has you," said Tetlow, his manner at once forced and constrained.
"Um," muttered Norman.
Said Tetlow: "Perhaps you misunderstood why I--I acted as I did about her, toward the last."
"It was of no importance," said Norman brusquely.
"I wish to hear nothing about it."
"But I must explain, Fred. She piqued me by showing so plainly that she despised me. I must admit the truth, though I've got as much vanity as the next man, and don't like to admit it. She despised me, and it made me mad."
An expression of grim satire passed over Norman's face. Said he: "She despised me, too."
"Yes, she did," said Tetlow. "And both of us were certainly greatly her superiors--in every substantial way. It seemed to me most--most----"
"Most impertinent of her?" suggested Norman.
"Precisely. MOST impertinent."
"Rather say, ignorant and small. My dear Tetlow, let me tell you something. Anybody, however insignificant, can be loved. To be loved means nothing, except possibly a hallucination in the brain of the lover.
But to LOVE--that's another matter. Only a great soul is capable of a great love."
"That is true," murmured Tetlow sentimentally, preening in a quiet, gentle way.
Said Norman sententiously: "YOU stopped loving.
It was _I_ that kept on."
Tetlow looked uncomfortable. "Yes--yes," he said.
"But we were talking of her--of her not appreciating the love she got. And I was about to say--"
Earnestly-- "Fred, she's not to be blamed for her folly!
She's very, very young--and has all the weaknesses and vanities of youth----"
"Here we are," interrupted Norman.
The hansom had stopped in Forty-second Street before the deserted but still brilliantly lighted entrances to the great hotel. Norman sprang out so lightly and surely that Tetlow wondered how it was possible for this to be the man who had been racketing and roistering day after day, night after night for nearly a week.
He helped the heavy and awkward Tetlow to descend, said:
