eard one of the men say
afterward that Cobbens was as friendly with them as if he were n't rich
at all. It's a fact that he was flattered by the fellow, even when he
saw through him."

There was something rather magnificent in the scorn that blazed in the
speaker's eyes as he told this incident, and Leigh felt that, no matter
what his faults might be, sycophancy never was and never could be one
of them.

"It's all the more pitiful," he remarked, "because he gets nothing for
it but the contempt he deserves. But I 've heard of this Cobbens. It
seems to me that Miss Wycliffe compared him to a weasel."

Emmet laughed, but almost immediately the intensity of his mood
returned. "Cobbens is one of your own graduates," he went on, almost
as if he held his listener responsible for that fact. "I knew him as a
boy, and played with him on the streets. Perhaps that's the reason he
's my worst enemy to-day. His mother was a dressmaker and a widow, but
somehow, by hook and by crook, he managed to work his way through St.
George's Hall. Then he became a lawyer and married one of the richest
girls in town. What she saw in him, nobody knows, but he's a
hypnotist, and no mistake. Now she's dead, and so are her parents, and
Cobbens and his mother live in her great house and ride in her
carriages. He 's a high roller, right in with the judge and his crew,
and there is n't a more corrupt politician in this town. There 's a
fine specimen of your college graduate!"

"I hope you don't regard him as a typical college graduate," Leigh
protested good-naturedly.

Had he been familiar with the alumni of the Hall, he could have made
his argument strong by personal examples unlike Anthony Cobbens, but he
made his defence of the college graduate general, answering the
well-known objections to him in the well-known way. It was evident
that Emmet regarded colleges and universities as identified with
entrenched privilege everywhere, and with corruption in local politics
particularly. It was inevitable that he should have been influenced in
this view by his own concrete experiences. The iron had entered into
his soul, and its scar was not to be effaced by an evening's
conversation. Not infrequently life will be interpreted to a
passionate nature by one or two persons, be they friends or enemies.
To Emmet, Cobbens and the bishop loomed much larger in the general
scheme of things than their intrinsic importance warranted. It was
inter