Gordon Lee rose unsteadily. Holding to a chair, he reached the table, then the door, through which he shambled, and sheepishly took his old place at the foot of the table. Amanda outdid herself in serving him, emptying the larder in honor of the occasion; but neither of them spoke until the apple-dumpling was reached. Then Gordon Lee turned toward her and said confidentially:
"I wished we knowed some corpse we could sell dat coffin to."
A Matter Of Friendship
When a jovial young person in irreproachable pongee, and a wholly reproachable brown topi, scrambled up the lifting gang-plank of the big Pacific liner, setting sail from Yokohama, he was welcomed with acclaim. The Captain stopped swearing long enough to megaphone a greeting from the bridge, the First Officer slapped him on the back, while the half dozen sailors, tugging at the ropes, grinned as one man.
Three months before this good ship East India had carried Frederick Reynolds out to the Orient and deposited him on the alien soil, an untried youth of unimpeachable morals with a fatal facility for making friends.
The temporary transplanting had had a strange and exotic effect. The East has a way of developing crops of wild oats that have been neglected in the West, and by the end of his sojourn Mr. Frederick Reynolds had seen more, felt more, and lived more than in all of his previous twenty-four years put together. He had learned the difference between a "straight flush" and a "full house" under the palms at Raffles Hotel in Singapore; he had been instructed in the ways of the wise in Shanghai by a sophisticated attaché of the French Legation, who imparted his knowledge between sips of absinthe, as he looked down on the passing show from a teahouse on the Bubbling Well Road; he had rapturously listened to every sweet secret that Japan had to tell, and had left a wake of smiles from Nagasaki to Yokohama.
In fact, in three short months he was fully qualified to pass a connoisseur's judgment on a high-ball, to hold his own in a game of poker, and to carry on a fairly coherent flirtation in four different languages.
With this newly acquired wisdom he was now setting sail for home, having accomplished his downward career with such alacrity that he did not at all realize what had happened to him.