Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/333

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THE VISIONARY
321

Don's unexpected attack on him. "What do you think of that?" he appealed to Pittsey. "Isn't that—isn't it——? G——! If you'd heard your father talking about you, going home on the train! You!" He pointed, his hand shaking. "The supe! Gee! If your father——"

Pittsey took him by the arm. "For Heaven's sake cut it out. Sit down and eat your dinner."

"I'm not saying anything," he protested, as Pittsey forced him into his chair. "It's that suping sneak. Shut him up."

"Go on and eat your dinners, both of you—before it turns cold. Here! Get busy with this."

But peace was not to be so easily restored. Conroy alternately worried his steak and attacked his cousin, who ate in a silence of evident contempt and disgust. Pittsey spread a newspaper beside his plate and read it, satisfied that the quarrel would subside now that Don was quiet. Conroy continued intermittently to point the moral that if he had disappointed his father, Don had done as much and more. "You ought to hear what they say about you at home! With your mother sick in bed from worrying about you, and your father ashamed to hear you mentioned! You're a great one to talk, you are! . . . Suping, on the stage with a lot of chorus girls. I haven't fallen as low as that, any way. . . . If you had left me alone before, there'd have been no trouble. Sneaking home letters about me. I told them what you were—borrowing money, and playing the cad to get rid of me."

"Oh, drop it," Pittsey said, turning his paper.