that showed the seriousness of the words he had to utter: “The lady to whom you refer,” he would begin, “the very charming and cultivated lady whose name, sir”—here his voice would rise on its howling note and he would wag his great bony forefinger—“whose name, sir, you have so foully traduced and blackened—”
“No, I wasn’t, Reverend. I was only tryin’to whiten it,” said Mr. Brill, beginning to burble with laughter.
“—Whose name, sir, you have so foully traduced and blackened with your smutty suggestions,” Bascom continued implacably, “—that lady is known to me, as you very well know, sir,” he howled, wagging his great finger again, “solely and simply in a professional capacity.”
“Why, hell, Reverend,” said Mr. Brill innocently, “I never knew she was a perfessional. I thought she was an amatoor.”
At this conclusive stroke, Mr. Brill would make the whole place tremble with his laughter, Mr. Friedman would laugh almost noiselessly, holding himself weakly at the stomach and bending across a desk, Mr. Ward would have short bursts and fits of laughter, as he gazed out the window, shaking his head deprecatingly from time to time, as if his more serious nature disapproved, and Miss Brill would snicker, and turn to her machine, remarking: “This conversation is getting too rough for me!”
And Bascom, if this jesting touched his complex soul at one of those moments when such profanity shocked him, would walk away, confiding into vacancy, it seemed, with his powerful and mobile features contorted in the most eloquent expression of disgust and loathing ever seen on any face, the while he muttered, in a resonant whisper that shuddered with passionate revulsion: “Oh, bad! Oh, bad! Oh, bad! bad! bad!”—shaking his head slightly from side to side with each word.
Yet there were other times, when Brill’s swingeing vulgarity, the vast coarse sweep of his profanity not only found Uncle Bascom in a completely receptive mood, but evoked from him gleeful responses, counter-essays in swearing which he made slyly, craftily, snickering with pleasure and squinting around at his listeners at the sound of the words, and getting such stimulus from them as might a renegade clergyman exulting in a feeling of depravity and abandonment for the first time.
To the other people in this office—that is, to Friedman, Ward, and Muriel, the stenographer—the old man was always an enigma; at first they had observed his peculiarities of speech and dress, his eccentricity of manner, and the sudden, violent, and complicated fluctuation of his temperament, with astonishment
