Elfride looked silently and hopelessly out of the window with large heavy eyes and wet cheeks.
'I call it great temerity--and long to call it audacity--in Hewby,' resumed her father. 'I never heard such a thing--giving such a hobbledehoy native of this place such an introduction to me as he did. Naturally you were deceived as well as I was. I don't blame you at all, so far.' He went and searched for Mr. Hewby's original letter. 'Here's what he said to me: "Dear Sir,--Agreeably to your request of the 18th instant, I have arranged to survey and make drawings," et cetera. "My assistant, Mr. Stephen Smith,"--assistant, you see he called him, and naturally I understood him to mean a sort of partner. Why didn't he say "clerk"?'
'They never call them clerks in that profession, because they do not write. Stephen--Mr. Smith--told me so. So that Mr. Hewby simply used the accepted word.'
'Let me speak, please, Elfride! My assistant, Mr. Stephen Smith, will leave London by the early train to-morrow morning...MANY THANKS FOR YOUR PROPOSAL TO ACCOMMODATE HIM...YOU MAY PUT EVERY CONFIDENCE IN HIM, and may rely upon his discernment in the matter of church architecture." Well, I repeat that Hewby ought to be ashamed of himself for making so much of a poor lad of that sort.'
'Professional men in London,' Elfride argued, 'don't know anything about their clerks' fathers and mothers. They have assistants who come to their offices and shops for years, and hardly even know where they live. What they can do--what profits they can bring the firm--that's all London men care about. And that is helped in him by his faculty of being uniformly pleasant.'
'Uniform pleasantness is rather a defect than a faculty. It shows that a man hasn't sense enough to know whom to despise.'
'It shows that he acts by faith and not by sight, as those you claim succession from directed.'
'That's some more of what he's been telling you, I suppose! Yes, I was inclined to suspect him, because he didn't care about sauces of any kind. I always did doubt a man's being a gentleman if his palate had no acquired tastes. An unedified palate is the irrepressible cloven foot of the upstart. The idea of my bringing out a bottle of my '40 Martinez--only eleven of them left now--to a man who didn't know it from eighteenpenny! Then the Latin line he gave to my quotation; it was very cut-and-dried, very; or I, who haven't looked into a classical author for the last eighteen years, shouldn't have remembered it. Well, Elfride, you had better go to your room; you'll get over this bit of tomfoolery in time.'