“I don’t want to rub it in, but if you just hadn’t been so brutal about it——” I said as we left the house. “Did you have to call it a steal? And couldn’t you have said something besides ‘blew his brains out’?”
He gave me a rueful glance. “I’m sorry,” he said briefly.
We were walking toward Walnut Street in silence after that, because it seemed to me that it was hardly sufficient apology for such an incredibly inept breach of courtesy.
“I guess it must have been that Ibsen quotation,” he said as we reached the corner. He repeated the lines Judge Whitney had spoken:
“Our lives should be pure and white
Tablets whereon God may write.”
He was silent a moment.
“You see, I knew Douglas Elliot,” he said. “He was in the Judge Advocate General’s Department in the last war. I never knew a man
