Central Ideas (detail)

The following text is from Henry Blake Fuller's 1893 novel The Cliff-Dwellers. A young man has taken a small sum that was not his; the men gathered include his father and Brainard, the wronged party. Pratt is the father.

[His father] was attempting to treat the matter as something rather slight and trivial. The pettiness of the amount involved, the perfect ease of restitution, the youth of the offender … all these he touched upon with a feint of light-handed ease. But Pratt was not the man to do it. He soon left the upper air of informal jocularity for the firmer ground of argument and expostulation, and this ground, before he ended, was almost pressed by the knees of entreaty. "It's plain enough," said Brainard, at length; "he took it, and he kept it."