The Four Fists

At the present time no one I know has the slightest desire to
hit Samuel Meredith; possibly this is because a man over fifty
is liable to be rather severely cracked at the impact of a
hostile fist, but, for my part, I am inclined to think that all
his hitable qualities have quite vanished. But it is certain
that at various times in his life hitable qualities were in his
face, as surely as kissable qualities have ever lurked in a
girl's lips.

I'm sure every one has met a man like that, been casually
introduced, even made a friend of him, yet felt he was the sort
who aroused passionate dislike--expressed by some in the
involuntary clinching of fists, and in others by mutterings
about "takin' a poke" and "landin' a swift smash in ee eye." In
the juxtaposition of Samuel Meredith's features this quality was
so strong that it influenced his entire life.

What was it? Not the shape, certainly, for he was a pleasant-
looking man from earliest youth: broad-bowed with gray eyes that
were frank and friendly. Yet I've heard him tell a room full of
reporters angling for a "success" story that he'd be ashamed to
tell them the truth that they wouldn't believe it, that it
wasn't one story but four, that the public would not want to
read about a man who had been walloped into prominence.

It all started at Phillips Andover Academy when he was fourteen.
He had been brought up on a diet of caviar and bell-boys' legs
in half the capitals of Europe, and it was pure luck that his
mother had nervous prostration and had to delegate his education
to less tender, less biassed hands.

At Andover he was given a roommate named Gilly Hood. Gilly was
thirteen, undersized, and rather the school pet. From the
September day when Mr. Meredith's valet stowed Samuel's clothing
in the best bureau and asked, on departing, "hif there was
hanything helse, Master Samuel?" Gilly cried out that the
faculty had played him false. He felt like an irate frog in
whose bowl has been put goldfish.

"Good gosh!" he complained to his sympathetic contemporaries,
"he's a damn stuck-up Willie. He said, 'Are the crowd here
gentlemen?' and I said, 'No, they're boys,' and he said age
didn't matter, and I said, 'Who said it did?' Let him get fresh
with me, the ole pieface!"

For three weeks Gilly endured in silence young Samuel's comments
on the clothes and habits of Gilly's personal friends, endured
French phrases in conversation, endured a hundred half-feminine
meannesses that show what a nervous mother can do to a boy, if
she keeps close enough to him--then a storm broke in the aquarium.

Samuel was out. A crowd had gathered to hear Gilly be wrathful