“That’s all very well, but a fellow doesn’t want ex-convicts hanging about the home.”
“Nonsense! You must rid yourself of this old-fashioned prejudice against men who have been in Sing-Sing. Try to look on the place as a sort of University which fits its graduates for the problems of the world without. Morally speaking, such men are the student body. You have no fault to find with Mullett, have you?”
“No, I can’t say I have.”
“Does his work well?”
“Yes.”
“Not stole anything from you?”
“No.”
“Then why worry? Dismiss the man from your mind. And now let me hear all about this girl of yours.”
“How do you know anything about it?”
“Mullett told me.”
“How did he know?”
“He followed you a couple of afternoons and saw all.”
George turned pink.
“I’ll go straight in and fire that man. The snake!”
“You will do nothing of the kind. He acted as he did from pure zeal and faithfulness. He saw you go out, muttering to yourself. …”
“Did I mutter?” said George, startled.
“Certainly you muttered. You muttered, and you were exceedingly strange in your manner. So naturally Mullett, good zealous fellow, followed you to see that you came to no harm. He reports that you spend a large part of your leisure goggling at some girl in Seventy-Ninth Street, East.”
George’s pink face turned a shade pinker. A sullen look came into it.
“Well, what about it?”
“That’s what I want to know—what about it?”
“Why shouldn’t I goggle?”
“Why should you?”
“Because,” said George Finch, looking like a stuffed frog, “I love her.”
“Nonsense!”
“It isn’t nonsense.”
“Have you ever read my booklet on ‘The Marriage Sane’?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“I show there that love is a reasoned emotion that springs from mutual knowledge, increasing over an extended period of time, and a community of tastes. How can you love a girl when you have never spoken to her and don’t even know her name?”
“I do know her name.”
“How?”
“I looked through the telephone directory till I found out who lived at Number 16, East Seventy-Ninth Street. It took me about a week, because. …”
“Sixteen East Seventy-Ninth Street? You don’t mean that this girl you’ve been staring at is little Molly Waddington?”
George started.
“Waddington is the name, certainly. That’s why I was such an infernal time getting to it in the book. Waddington, Sigsbee H.” George choked emotionally, and gazed at his friend with awed eyes. “Hamilton! Hammy, old man! You—you don’t mean to say you actually know her? Not positively know her?”
“Of course I know her. Know her intimately. Many’s the time I’ve seen her in her bathtub.”
George quivered from head to foot.
“It’s a lie! A foul and contemptible. …”
“When she was a child.”
“Oh, when she was a child?” George became calmer. “Do you mean to say you’ve known her since she was a child? Why, then you must be in love with her yourself.”
“Nothing of the kind.”
“You stand there and tell me,” said George incredulously, “that you have known this wonderful girl for many years and are not in love with her?”
“I do.”
George regarded his friend with a gentle pity. He could only explain this extraordinary statement by supposing that there was some sort of a kink in Hamilton Beamish. Sad, for in so many ways he was such a fine fellow.
“The sight of her has never made you feel that, to win one smile, you could scale the skies and pluck out the stars and lay them at her feet?”
“Certainly not. Indeed, when you consider that the nearest star is several million. …”
“All right,” said George. “All right. Let it go. And now,” he went on simply, “tell me all about her and her people and her house and her dog and what she was like as a child and when she first bobbed her hair and who is her favourite poet and where she went to school and what she likes for breakfast. …”
Hamilton Beamish reflected.
“Well, I first knew Molly when her mother was alive.”
“Her mother is alive. I’ve seen her. A woman who looks like Catherine of Russia.”
“That’s her stepmother. Sigsbee H. married again a couple of years ago.”
“Tell me about Sigsbee H.”
Hamilton Beamish twirled a dumbbell thoughtfully.
“Sigsbee H. Waddington,” he said, “is one of those men who must, I think, during the formative years of their boyhood have been kicked on the head by a mule. It has been well said of Sigsbee H. Waddington that, if men were dominoes, he would be the double-blank. One of the numerous things about him that rule him out of serious consideration by intelligent persons is the fact that he is a synthetic Westerner.”
“A synthetic Westerner?”
“It is a little known, but growing, subspecies akin to the synthetic Southerner—with which curious type you are doubtless familiar.”
“I don’t think I am.”
“Nonsense. Have you never been in a restaurant where the orchestra played Dixie?”
“Of course.”
“Well, then, on such occasions you will have noted that the man who gives a rebel yell and springs on his chair and waves a napkin with flashing eyes is always a suit-and-cloak salesman named Rosenthal or Bechstein who was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and has never been farther South than Far Rockaway. That is the synthetic Southerner.”
“I see.”
“Sigsbee H. Waddington is a synthetic Westerner. His whole life, with the exception of one summer vacation when he went to Maine, has been spent in New York State: and yet, to listen to him, you would think he was an exiled cowboy. I fancy it must be the effect of seeing too many Westerns in the movies. Sigsbee Waddington has been a keen supporter of the motion-pictures from their inception: and was, I believe, one of the first men in this city to hiss the villain. Whether it was Tom Mix who caused the trouble, or whether his weak intellect was gradually sapped by seeing William H. Hart kiss his horse I cannot say: but the fact remains that he now yearns for the great open spaces and, if you want to ingratiate yourself with him, all you have to do is to mention that
