Don't understand. Wilkins arrived, left clothes and departed. You must have mixed your dates. Wedding to-morrow.
F. C.
The Governor-General's Trunk
I
McAllister was in the tank. His puffing and blowing as he dove and tumbled like a contented, rubicund porpoise, reverberated loudly among the marble pillars of the bath at the club. It was all part of a carefully adjusted and as rigorously followed regimen, for McAllister was a thorough believer in exercise (provided it was moderate), and took it regularly, averring that a fellow couldn't expect to eat and drink as much as he naturally wanted to unless he kept in some sort of condition, and if he didn't he would simply get off his peck, that was all. Hence "Chubby" arose regularly at nine-thirty, and wrapping himself in a padded Japanese silk dressing-gown, descended to the tank, where he dove six times and swam around twice, after which he weighed himself and had Tim rub him down. Tim felt a high degree of solicitude for all this procedure, since he was a personal discovery of McAllister's, and owed his present exalted position entirely to the clubman's interest, for the latter had found him at Coney Island earning his daily bread by diving, in the presence of countless multitudes, into a six-foot glass tank, where he seated himself upon the bottom and nonchalantly consumed a banana. McAllister's delight and enthusiasm at this elevating spectacle had been boundless.
"Wish I could do any one thing as well as that feller dives down and eats that banana!" he had confided to his friend Wainwright. "Sometimes I feel as if my life had been wasted!" The upshot of the whole matter was that Tim had been forthwith engaged as rubber and swimming teacher at the club.
McAllister had just taken his fifth plunge, and was floating lazily toward the steps, when Tim appeared at the door leading into the dressing-rooms and announced that a party wanted to speak to him on the 'phone, the Lady somebody, evidently a very cantankerous old person, who was in the devil of a hurry, and wouldn't stand no waitin'.
The clubman turned over, sputtered, touched bottom, and arose dripping to his feet. The "old person" on the wire was clearly his aunt, Lady Lyndhurst, and he knew very much better than to irritate her when she was in one of her tantrums. Still, he couldn't imagine what she wanted with him at that hour of the morning. She'd been placid enough the evening before when he'd left her after the opera. But ever since she had married Lord Lyndhurst for her second husband ten years before she'd been getting more and more dictatorial.
"Tell her I'm in this beastly tank; awful sorry I can't speak with her myself, don'cher know, and find out what she wants. And Tim—handle her gently—it's my aunt."