"
"Good heavens above!" exclaimed Mr. Wendell, utterly bewildered.
"Uncomfortable!--you, a mercantile man like myself--you, whose
character stands so high everywhere--you uncomfortable when you
hear a man who was hanged for forgery called a villain! In the
name of wonder, why?"
"Because," answered Mr. Trowbridge, with perfect composure,
"Fauntleroy was a friend of mine."
"Excuse me, my dear sir," retorted Mr. Wendell, in as polished a
tone of sarcasm as he could command; "but of all the friends whom
you have made in the course of your useful and honorable career,
I should have thought the friend you have just mentioned would
have been the very last to whom you were likely to refer in
respectable society, at least by name."
"Fauntleroy committed an unpardonable crime, and died a
disgraceful death," said Mr. Trowbridge. "But, for all that,
Fauntleroy was a friend of mine, and in that character I shall
always acknowledge him boldly to my dying day. I have a
tenderness for his memory, though he violated a sacred trust, and
die d for it on the gallows. Don't look shocked, Mr. Wendell. I
will tell you, and our other friends here, if they will let me,
why I feel that tenderness, which looks so strange and so
discreditable in your eyes. It is rather a curious anecdote, sir,
and has an interest, I think, for all observers of human nature
quite apart from its connection with the unhappy man of whom we
have been talking.
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