Mr. Brill had listened to all this with his great-jowled face slack-jawed and agape with astonishment. Now, he said heavily: “He’s goin’to have everything, is he? Where are you goin’to take him to git it?”
“Why, sir!” Bascom said in an annoyed tone, “I have told you all along—we are going to the modest but excellent establishment in the basement of this very building.”
“Why, Reverend,” Brill said in a protesting tone, “you ain’t goin’to take your nephew there, are you? I thought you said you was goin’to git somethin’to eat.”
“I had supposed,” Bascom said with bitter sarcasm, “that one went there for that purpose. I had not supposed that one went there to get shaved.”
“Well,” said Brill, “if you go there you’ll git shaved, all right. You’ll not only git shaved, you’ll git skinned alive. But you won’t git anything to eat.” And he hurled himself back again, roaring with laughter.
“Pay no attention to him!” Bascom said to the boy in a tone of bitter repugnance. “I have long known that his low and vulgar mind attempts to make a joke of everything, even the most sacred matters. I assure you, my boy, the place is excellent in every way:—do you suppose,” he said now, addressing Brill and all the others, with a howl of fury—“do you suppose, if it were not, that I should for a single moment dream of taking him there? Do you suppose that I would for an instant contemplate taking my own nephew, my sister’s son, to any place in which I did not repose the fullest confidence? Not on your life!” he howled. “Not on your life!”
And they departed, followed by Brill’s great bellow, and a farewell invitation which he shouted after the young man. “Don’t worry, son! When you git through with that cockroach stew, come back an’I’ll take you out to lunch with me!”
Although Brill delighted in teasing and baiting his partner in this fashion, there was, at the bottom of his heart, a feeling of deep humility, of genuine respect and admiration for him: he respected Uncle Bascom’s intelligence, he was secretly and profoundly impressed by the fact that the old man had been a minister of the gospel and had preached in many churches.
Moreover, in the respect and awe with which Brill greeted these evidences of Bascom’s superior education, in the eagerness he showed when
