"It was the work of your hands." "That's why I should remember to forget it--I am the child of modesty." Charley touched the corners of his mouth with his tongue, as though his lips were dry, and his eyes wandered to a saloon a little farther down the street.
"Modesty is your curse," rejoined Brown mockingly.
"Once when you preached at me you said that beauty was my curse." Charley laughed a curt, distant little laugh which was no more the spontaneous humour lying for ever behind his thoughts than his eye-glass was the real sight of his eyes, though since childhood this laugh and his eye-glass were as natural to all expression of himself as John Brown's outward and showy frankness did not come from the real John Brown.
John Brown looked him up and down quickly, then fastened his eyes on the ruddy cheeks of his old friend.

"Do they call you Beauty now as they used to ?" he asked, rather insolently.
"No.

They only say, 'There goes Charley Steele!'" The tongue again touched the corners of the mouth, and the eyes wandered to the doorway down the street, over which was written in French: "Jean Jolicoeur, Licensed to sell wine, beer, and other spirituous and fermented liquors." Just then an archdeacon of the cathedral passed them, bowed gravely to Charley, glanced at John Brown, turned colour slightly, and then with a cold stare passed on too quickly for dignity.
"I'm thinking of Bunyan," said the aforetime friend of Charley Steele.
"I'll paraphrase him and say: 'There, but for beauty and a monocle, walks John Brown.'" Under the bitter sarcasm of the man, who, five years ago, had gone down at last beneath his agnostic raillery, Charley's blue eye did not waver, not a nerve stirred in his face, as he replied: "Who knows!" "That was what you always said--who knows! That did for John Brown." Charley seemed not to hear the remark.

"What are you doing now ?" he asked, looking steadily at the face whence had gone all the warmth of manhood, all that courage of life which keeps men young.

The lean parchment visage had the hunted look of the incorrigible failure, had written on it self-indulgence, cunning, and uncertainty.
"Nothing much," John Brown replied.
"What last ?" "Floated an arsenic-mine on Lake Superior." "Failed ?" "More or less.