“That was the very problem,” said George.
“Say, listen,” said Mr. Waddington, “I’ll just push these potbellied guys off upstairs, and then you and I will sneak off to my study and have a real talk.”
II
Nothing spoils a tête-à-tête chat between two newly-made friends more than a disposition towards reticence on the part of the senior of the pair: and it was fortunate therefore, that, by the time he found himself seated opposite to George in his study, the heady influence of Zane Grey and the rather generous potations in which he had indulged during dinner had brought Sigsbee H. Waddington to quite a reasonably communicative mood. He had reached the stage when men talk disparagingly about their wives. He tapped George on the knee, informed him three times that he liked his face, and began.
“You married, Winch?”
“Finch,” said George.
“How do you mean, Finch?” asked Mr. Waddington, puzzled.
“My name is Finch.”
“What of it?”
“You called me Winch.”
“Why?”
“I think you thought it was my name.”
“What was?”
“Winch.”
“You said just now it was Finch.”
“Yes, it is. I was saying. …”
Mr. Waddington tapped him on the knee once more.
“Young man,” he said, “pull yourself together. If your name is Finch, why pretend that it is Winch? I don’t like this shiftiness. It does not come well from a Westerner. Leave this petty shilly-shallying to Easterners like that vile rabble of widow-and-orphan oppressors upstairs, all of whom have got incipient Bright’s Disease. If your name is Pinch, admit it like a man. Let your yea be yea and your nay be nay,” said Mr. Waddington a little severely, holding a match to the fountain-pen which, as will happen to the best of us in moments of emotion, he had mistaken for his cigar.
“As a matter of fact, I’m not,” said George.
“Not what?”
“Married.”
“I never said you were.”
“You asked me if I was.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure of that?” said Mr. Waddington keenly.
“Quite. Just after we sat down, you asked me if I was married.”
“And your reply was … ?”
“No.”
Mr. Waddington breathed a sigh of relief.
“Now we have got it straight at last,” he said, “and why you beat about the bush like that, I cannot imagine. Well, what I say to you, Pinch—and I say it very seriously as an older, wiser, and better-looking man—is this.” Mr. Waddington drew thoughtfully at the fountain-pen for a moment. “I say to you, Pinch, be very careful, when you marry, that you have money of your own. And, having money of your own, keep it. Never be dependent on your wife for the occasional little sums which even the most prudent man requires to see him through the day. Take my case. When I married, I was a wealthy man. I had money of my own. Lots of it. I was beloved by all, being generous to a fault. I bought my wife—I am speaking now of my first wife—a pearl necklace that cost fifty thousand dollars.”
He cocked a bright eye at George, and George, feeling that comment was required, said that it did him credit.
“Not credit,” said Mr. Waddington. “Cash. Cold cash. Fifty thousand dollars of it. And what happened? Shortly after I married again I lost all my money through unfortunate speculations on the Stock Exchange and became absolutely dependent on my second wife. And that is why you see me today, Winch, a broken man. I will tell you something, Pinch—something no one suspects and something which I have never told anybody else and wouldn’t be telling you now if I didn’t like your face. … I am not master in my own home!”
“No?”
“No. Not master in my own home. I want to live in the great, glorious West, and my second wife insists on remaining in the soul-destroying East. And I’ll tell you something else.” Mr. Waddington paused and scrutinised the fountain-pen with annoyance. “This darned cigar won’t draw,” he said petulantly.
“I think it’s a fountain-pen,” said George.
“A fountain-pen?” Mr. Waddington, shutting one eye, tested this statement and found it correct. “There!” he said, with a certain moody satisfaction. “Isn’t that typical of the East? You ask for cigars and they sell you fountain-pens. No honesty, no sense of fair trade.”
“Miss Waddington was looking very charming at dinner, I thought,” said George, timidly broaching the subject nearest his heart.
“Yes, Pinch,” said Mr. Waddington, resuming his theme, “my wife oppresses me.”
“How wonderfully that bobbed hair suits Miss Waddington.”
“I don’t know if you noticed a pie-faced fellow with an eyeglass and a toothbrush moustache at dinner? That was Lord Hunstanton. He keeps telling me things about etiquette.”
“Very kind of him,” hazarded George.
Mr. Waddington eyed him in a manner that convinced him that he had said the wrong thing.
“What do you mean, kind of him? It’s officious and impertinent. He is a pest,” said Mr. Waddington. “They wouldn’t stand for him in Arizona. They would put hydrophobia skunks in his bed. What does a man need with etiquette? As long as a man is fearless and upstanding and can shoot straight and look the world in the eye, what does it matter if he uses the wrong fork?”
“Exactly.”
“Or wears the wrong sort of hat?”
“I particularly admired the hat which Miss Waddington was wearing when I first saw her,” said George. “It was of some soft material and of a light brown colour and. …”
“My wife—I am still speaking of my second wife. My first, poor soul, is dead—sicks this Hunstanton guy on to me, and for financial reasons, darn it, I am unable to give him the good soak on the nose to which all my better instincts urge me. And guess what she’s got into her head now.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“She wants Molly to marry the fellow.”
“I should not advise that,” said George seriously. “No, no, I am strongly opposed to that. So many of these Anglo-American marriages turn out
