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قراءة كتاب A Gentleman's Gentleman 1909
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
his arms, pushed his slouch hat from his forehead—he was still on his back drinking in the sunshine—and with a yawn cried:
"They ought to be exterminated."
"The spiders?" grumbled Lonnegan.
"No, millionaires. They throw their money away like water; they crowd the hotels. Nothing good enough for them. Prices all doubled, everything slimed up by the trail of their dirty dollars. And the saddest thing in it all to me is that you generally find one or two able-bodied American citizens kotowing to them like wooden Chinese mandarins when the great men take the air."
"Who, for instance?" I asked. No millionaires with any such outfit had thus far come my way.
"Lonnegan, for one," answered Mac.
The architect raised his head and shot a long, horizontal glance at the prostrate form of the painter.
"Yes, Lonnegan, I am sorry to say," continued Mac, his eyes fixed on the yellow greens in the swaying tree-tops.
"I was only polite," protested the architect. "Lambert is a client of mine; building a stable for him. Very level-headed man is Mr. Samuel Lambert; no frills and no swelled head. It was Tommy Wing who was doing the mandarin act 32 the other day at the Carlton—not me. Got dead intimate with him on the voyage over and has stuck to him like a plaster ever since. Calls him 'Sam' already—did to me."
"Behind his back or to his face?" spluttered Mac, tugging at his pipe.
"Give it up," said Lonnegan, pulling his hat over his face to shield his eyes from the sun.
Mac raised himself to a sitting posture, as if to reply, fumbled in his watch-pocket for a match, instead; shook the ashes from his brier-wood, filled the bowl with some tobacco from his rubber pouch, drew the lucifer across his shoe, waited until the blue smoke mounted skyward and resumed his former position. He was too happy mentally—the girl in the steamer chair was responsible—and too lazy physically to argue with anybody. Lonnegan rolled over on his elbows, and feasted his eyes on the sweep of the sleepy river, dotted with punts and wherries, its background of foliage in silhouette against the morning sky. The Thames was very lovely that June, and the trained eye of the distinguished architect missed none of its beauty and charm. I picked up my brushes and continued work. The spirit of perfect camaraderie makes such silences not only possible but enjoyable. It is the restless chatterer that tires.
Lonnegan's outbreak had set me to thinking. Lambert I knew only by reputation—-as half the world knew him—a man of the people: lumber boss, mill owner, proprietor of countless acres of virgin forest; many times a millionaire. Then came New York and the ice-cream palace with the rock-candy columns on the Avenue, and "The Samuel Lamberts" in the society journals. This was all the wife's doings. Poor Maria! She had forgotten the day when she washed his red flannel shirts and hung them on a line stretched from the door of their log cabin to a giant white pine—one of the founders of their fortune. If Tommy Wing called him "Sam" it was because old "Saw Logs," as he was often called, was lonely, and Tommy amused him.
Tommy Wing—Thomas Bowditch Wing, his card ran—I had known for years. He was basking on the topmost branches now, stretched out in the sunshine of social success, swaying to every movement made by his padrones. He was a little country squirrel when I first came across him, frisking about the root of the tree and glad enough to scamper close to the ground. He had climbed a long way since then. All the blossoms and tender little buds were at the top, and Tommy was fond of buds, especially when they bloomed out into yachts and four-in-hands, country houses, winters in Egypt (Tommy an invited guest), house parties on Long Island or at Tuxedo, or gala nights at the opera with seats in a first tier.
In the ascent he had forgotten his beginnings—not an unnatural thing with Tommies: Son of a wine merchant—a most respectable man, too; then "Importer" (Tommy


