of massive strength that suggested he had been a powerfully built man in his prime. His white mane of hair was soft as silk and gave his wide brow and ruddy, pleated old man’s face a kind of noble lion-like fierceness, and this impression was enhanced by his grizzled moustache and his old, rather growling voice, which had in it nothing surly or ill-tempered, but rather a kind of old and noble masculinity, an aristocratic kind of growl that seemed perfectly adjusted to a kind of Pendennis-like language, a “Dammit-all, -sir, -it’s-not-the-fellow’s-drinking-that-I-mind, -it’s-only-that-he’s-proved-himself-incapable-of-holding-his-liquor-like-a-gentleman” kind of voice.
The inference was warranted: even as they stood there in a spacious, airy big room, the guests standing and talking in groups, drinking small glasses of a fine dry sherry, the youth could hear Joel’s eager whispering voice engaged in earnest, but respectful, debate, with his leonine grand-sire, and Mr. Joel’s nobly growled out answers. The conversation was about books—about the artist’s right to use the materials of his own experience and conversation—and it hinged particularly upon a certain book in which the writer had apparently made use of personal letters and private documents that people he knew, a woman chiefly, had written him.
“No, sir,” Mr. Joel growled, “I do not care what the circumstances may be or what the nature of the work. If I had a friend, sir, who would deliberately make public letters which a woman had written him, why, sir, I should drop him from my acquaintance—I should be forced to conclude, sir,”—here the old growling voice fell to an ominous whisper of irrevocable judgment, and he looked out at his grandson with a fierce glint of his old eyes under bushy brows—“I should be forced to conclude, sir, that he was nothing but a cad,” old Mr. Joel whispered, and with a suddenly fierce glint of his old eyes, a sudden movement of his leonine head, he growled out in a low and savage tone: “And I should tell him so, sir. I should be compelled to tell him that he was nothing but a cad!”
“Yes, grandfather,” Joel whispered eagerly, his thin figure bent forward in an attitude of devoted and attentive reverence—“But after all, some pretty great people have done it—Rousseau did it, and The Confessions are pretty great, you know—You’ve got to admit that.—And Byron did it in his poems—at least, everyone knew whom he was talking about, and then there was De Musset and George Sand.”
“It makes no difference, sir,” growled Mr. Joel implacably, “it makes no difference who they were or how great they may be considered in the realm
