GUARANTEED.
"You recognize, of course, that the situation is exceptional," said Edith's mother. "You left New York on December 2, and arrived at Euston on December 13. To-day, December 18, you ask me for my daughter's hand, after a three days' acquaintance. Is this the usual American pace?"
"That is hardly my fault," I said. "We ran into a nasty bit of weather off Cape Race and lost twelve hours."
"Still," she said, "under the circumstances you will admit that I have the right to put a few questions. Edith is all I have. She has naturally not told me everything, but I gather you have spoken to her a good deal about yourself."
"Not more than three or four hours at a sitting," I replied.
"And you have never spoken to anyone else as you have to Edith?"
"I have."
"Oh," she said.
"I wish it had been otherwise," I pleaded; "but life is very complex nowadays on both sides of the Atlantic. Much that I have told Edith I have also revealed to the passport clerk at Washington and the keeper of birth records in New York. Something too I confided to the assistant-book-keeper in the War Zone Bureau at the Custom-House in New York, to the cashier of the French consulate at home, and to the gateman of Cunard Pier 54, at the foot of West Fourteenth Street. I am sorry; I wish Edith had been the first to whom I gave up the inner secrets of my soul, but the fact is that to some extent she was anticipated by your Military Control-Officer at Liverpool."
"It might have been worse," she sighed. "You have nice manners and a good face. At home I suppose you are quite popular?"
"Up to the twenty-fifth of October I shouldn't have said so," I replied. "But since then a great many people have taken to me. Not quite like DORIS KEANE, you know, but still I have distributed in a little more than a month no fewer than three dozen photographs of myself two and a-half inches square. Your consul at New York took two, the French Chamber of Commerce took three, and I am having some more ready for the time when I go to make application for my emergency ration card, in case your food department proves equally susceptible. I have been asked out a great deal. The State Department at Washington made me come down for several weekends and your Military Officer at home had me in on three successive days."
"Mr. Smith," she said, "you seem an honest man. Do you, in your heart, believe yourself good enough for my Edith?"
"Had you asked me that six weeks ago," I said, "I should have answered 'No.' Before I spoke to Edith, that very same question flashed up within me. I saw the golden sheen of her hair in the moonlight—for you do sometimes have moonlight here in London—and wondered whether I had the right to speak. Of course I was not good enough for her, but still I felt that I was not altogether unfit. I might justly ask for her in the face of high Heaven, the Passport Bureau at Washington, the War Zone Bureau at the Custom-House, the head clerk at the Cunard office, the watchman at the pier, the official who changed my American money into your own very confusing monetary system, the man at the head of the gang-plank, the man at the foot of the gang-plank, the steward who filled my alien's declaration, the steward who gave me my landing-card, several battalions of control officers, and approximately half the Allied diplomatic services. When I spoke to Edith I had all the documents in my breast-pocket, and my heart glowed with justifiable confidence beneath them. The dear girl never asked for my college certificate and my luggage check, but I have them all here."
"Perhaps it isn't necessary," she said. "You may have her, my dear boy."
"Without even looking at my Czecho-Slovak visé my club dues for 1918, and my inoculation receipt for typhoid and paratyphoid A and B?" I stammered.
"You have a nice face," she said.
"WOT'S OUR NOO M.P.'S BIZNESS?"
"'E'S IN THE JOBMASTERING LINE I THINK. I 'EARD 'E ARST TO BE SENT BACK TO 'ELP CLEAN OUT THE ORGEAN STABLES."