He had been used to blinding people by his brilliancy, and it
worked him quite a hardship, this loss of an audience. He felt
personally aggrieved and unconsciously held his muttonhead
companion responsible for it.

Save existence, they had nothing in common--came in touch on no
single point.

Weatherbee was a clerk who had known naught but clerking all his
life; Cuthfert was a master of arts, a dabbler in oils, and had
written not a little. The one was a lower-class man who
considered himself a gentleman, and the other was a gentleman who
knew himself to be such. From this it may be remarked that a man
can be a gentleman without possessing the first instinct of true
comradeship. The clerk was as sensuous as the other was
aesthetic, and his love adventures, told at great length and
chiefly coined from his imagination, affected the supersensitive
master of arts in the same way as so many whiffs of sewer gas. He
deemed the clerk a filthy, uncultured brute, whose place was in
the muck with the swine, and told him so; and he was reciprocally
informed that he was a milk-and-water sissy and a cad. Weatherbee
could not have defined 'cad' for his life; but it satisfied its
purpose, which after all seems the main point in life.

Weatherbee flatted every third note and sang such songs as 'The
Boston Burglar' and 'the Handsome Cabin Boy,' for hours at a
time, while Cuthfert wept with rage, till he could stand it no
longer and fled into the outer cold. But there was no escape. The
intense frost could not be endured for long at a time, and the