'Dark, eh?' bawled Mifflin, making night hideous.
'Yes,' said Jimmy, shutting the window.
'Jimmy!'
The window went up again.
'Well?'
'Me for blondes!'
'Go to bed!'
'Very well. Good-night.'
'Good-night.'
Jimmy withdrew his head, and sat down in the chair Mifflin had
vacated. A moment later, he rose, and switched off the light. It was
pleasanter to sit and think in the dark. His thoughts wandered off
in many channels, but always came back to the girl on the Lusitania.
It was absurd, of course. He didn't wonder that Arthur Mifflin had
treated the thing as a joke. Good old Arthur! Glad he had made a
success! But was it a joke? Who was it that said, the point of a
joke is like the point of a needle, so small that it is apt to
disappear entirely when directed straight at oneself? If anybody
else had told him such a limping romance, he would have laughed
himself. Only, when you are the center of a romance, however
limping, you see it from a different angle. Of course, told badly,
it was absurd. He could see that. But something away at the back of
his mind told him that it was not altogether absurd. And yet--love
didn't come like that, in a flash. You might just as well expect a
house to spring into being in a moment, or a ship, or an automobile,
or a table, or a--He sat up with a jerk. In another instant, he
would have been asleep.
He thought of bed, but bed seemed a long way off--the deuce of a
way. Acres of carpet to be crawled over, and then the dickens of a
climb at the end of it. Besides, undressing! Nuisance--undressing.
That was a nice dress the girl had worn on the fourth day out.
Tailor-made. He liked tailor-mades. He liked all her dresses. He
liked her. Had she liked him? So hard to tell if you don't get a
chance of speaking! She was dark. Arthur liked blondes, Arthur was a
fool! Good old Arthur! Glad he had made a success! Now, he could
marry if he liked! If he wasn't so restless, if he didn't feel that
he couldn't stop more than a day in any place! But would the girl
have him? If they had never spoken, it made it so hard to--
At this point, Jimmy went to sleep.
CHAPTER III
MR. McEACHERN
At about the time when Jimmy's meditations finally merged themselves
in dreams, a certain Mr. John McEachern, Captain of Police, was
seated in the parlor of his up-town villa, reading. He was a man
built on a large scale. Everything about him was large--his hands,
his feet, his shoulders, his chest, and particularly his jaw, which
even in his moments of calm was aggressive, and which stood out,
when anything happened to ruffle him, like the ram of a battle-ship.
In his patrolman days, which had been passed mainly on the East
side, this jaw of his had acquired a reputation from Park Row to
