“You got the wrong number,” I says. “I don’t feel flighty.”
“Oh, I’d just love it!” said Kate.
“Well,” says Codd, “you ain’t barred. But I don’t want to have no passengers along till I’m sure she’s working OK.”
When I and Ella was upstairs she said that Codd had told them he expected to sell his invention to the Williamses for a cold million. And he had took a big fancy to Kate.
“Well,” I said, “they say that the reckless aviators makes the best ones, so if him and Kate gets married he’ll be better than ever. He won’t give a damn after that.”
“You’re always saying something nasty about Sis,” said the Mrs.; “but I know you just talk to hear yourself talk. If I thought you meant it I’d walk out on you.”
“I’d hate to lose you,” I says, “but if you took her along I wouldn’t write it down as a total loss.”
The following morning I and the two gals was down on the porch bright and early and in a few minutes, sure enough, along came Lady Perkins, bringing the menagerie back from the parade. She turned them over to the nurse and joined us. She said that Martha, the nurse, had used the rash poison and it had made a kind of a lather on the dogs’ necks and she didn’t know whether to wash it off or not, but it had dried up in the sun. She asked me how many times a day the dope should ought to be put on, and I told her before every meal and at bedtime.
“But,” I says, “it’s best to not take the dogs right out in the sun where the lather’ll dry. The blanny germ can’t live in that kind of lather, so the longer it stays moist, why, so much the better.”
Then she asked me was I going to Haverton to see my pets that day and I said yes, and she said she hoped I’d find them much improved. Then Ella cut in and said she understood that Lady Perkins was very fond of bridge.
“Yes, I am,” says Perk. “Do you people play?”
“No, we don’t,” says Ella, “but we’d like to learn.”
“It takes a long wile to learn to play good,” said Perk. “But I do wished they was another real player in the hotel so as we wouldn’t have to take Doctor Platt in. He knows the game, but he don’t know enough to keep still. I don’t mind people talking wile the cards is being dealt, but once the hands is picked up they ought to be absolute silence. Last night I lost about three hundred and seventy dollars just because he talked at the wrong time.”
“Three hundred and seventy dollars!” said Kate. “My, you must play for big stakes!”
“Yes, we do,” says Lady Perkins; “and when a person is playing for sums like that it ain’t no time to trifle, especially when you’re playing against an expert like Mrs. Snell.”
“The game must be awfully exciting,” said Ella. “I wished we could watch it sometime.”
“I guess it wouldn’t hurt nothing,” says Perkie; “not if you kept still. Maybe you’d bring me luck.”
“Was you going to play tonight?” asked Kate.
“No,” says the Lady. “They’s going to be a little dance here tonight and Mr. Snell’s dance mad, so he insists on borrowing his wife for the occasion. Doctor Platt likes to dance too.”
“We’re all wild about it,” says Kate. “Is this an invitation affair?”
“Oh, no,” says Perk. “It’s for the guests of the hotel.”
Then she said goodbye to us and went in the dining room. The rest of our conversation all day was about the dance and what should we wear, and how nice and democratic Lady Perkins was, and to hear her talk you wouldn’t never know she had a title. I s’pose the gals thought she ought to stop every three or four steps and declare herself.
I made the announcement about noon that I wasn’t going to partake in the grand ball. My corn was the alibi. But they wasn’t no way to escape from dressing up and escorting the two gals into the grand ballroom and then setting there with them.
The dance was a knockout. Outside of Ella and Kate and the aviator and myself, they was three couple. The Snells was there and so was Doctor Platt. He had a gal with him that looked like she might be his mother with his kid sister’s clothes on. Then they was a pair of young shimmy shakers that ought to of been give their bottle and tucked in the hay at six p.m. A corn wouldn’t of bothered them the way they danced; their feet wasn’t involved in the transaction.
I and the Mrs. and Kate was the only ones there in evening clothes. The others had attended these functions before and knew that they wouldn’t be enough suckers on hand to make any difference whether you wore a monkey suit or rompers. Besides, it wasn’t Saturday night.
The music was furnished by the three-piece orchestra that usually done their murder in the summer parlor.
Ella was expecting me to introduce her and Kate to the Snell gal, but her and her husband was so keen for dancing that they called it off in the middle of the second innings and beat it upstairs. Then Ella said she wouldn’t mind meeting Platt, but when he come past us and I spoke to him he give me a look like you would expect from a flounder that’s been wronged.
So poor Codd danced one with Kate and one with Ella, and so on, and so on, till finally it got pretty late, a quarter to ten, and our party was the only merrymakers left in the joint. The orchestra looked over at us to
