“You’re not a painter?” queried the inquisitive fiend of the curling-tongs.
No, he wasn’t.
“Ah, my mistake. Seemed to me you’d been eating yellow ochre to-day. Natural color of your teeth, I suppose?”
Fred looked disgusted. These personal reflections were becoming monotonous. However, he admitted that the speculator who bought his teeth to retail as imitation pearl studs would scarcely realize a fortune by the investment.
“You really ought to take a bottle of our Fluid Dentifrice. Brush your teeth every night with a few drops, and in a short time ivory would look gloomy beside them. Never knew it to fail. Dirt cheap. Sevenpence-halfpenny, bottle included.”
Frederick purchased, and then, happy in the possession of the magic talismans which were to transform him into an Adonis, he left the hair dresser’s and made his way to a convenient liquor saloon, where he had arranged to meet some of his civil-service associates, ejaculating every now and then en route, “Won’t little Norah be surprised?” much to the bewilderment of the passers-by who overheard him. He met his friends. He was so elated with visions of conquest that he “set ’em up” twice. Then another fellow set ’em up. In fact, they set ’em up more or less for about two hours. It must have been more, for, on the occasion of the last reviver, in response to a query about the population of Shanghai, he replied, inanely, “Won’t little Norah be surprised?” When shaking hands for the seventh time with his friends on leaving them, he volunteered the mystifying information that little Norah wouldn’t know him in the morning. He even propounded the problem about Norah’s astonishment to the cabman who drove him home, and that unromantic personage, thinking that it referred to the feelings of the lady of the house when his Bacchanalian passenger should be deposited on the domestic doorstep, replied emphatically, “I should rather think so!” upon which Fred shook hands with the Jehu most effusively.
When he reached the abode of his virtuous but far-seeing landlady, that Roman matron, knowing Fred’s weakness for reading in bed, but doubting his capacity for remaining awake much longer, took the precaution of supplying him with a brevity of a candle some ninety per cent. below Griffith’s valuation. When, in the solitude of his two-pair back, Fred gazed upon the diminutive specimen of the chandler’s art, he felt that there was not a second to lose. He ranged his beautifying treasures on the table, read the directions, secured the tooth-brush, divested himself of his outer clothing, and prepared for action.
At that momentous instant, with a splutter and a gasp, like the warning sob of fate, the candle went out!
For a moment Fred deliberated. Should he kick up a row for more composite? No. The Gorgon of the house might suspect something. Besides, he knew where each wonderful phial lay. To work! to work! Won’t little Norah be surprised? Won’t he whelm those conceited Irish rivals of his with envy and chagrin?
He grabbed the Depilatory, and gave his nose five minutes’ determined friction. He seized the tooth-brush, and, saturating that toilet requisite with Fluid Dentifrice, he applied it to his teeth till his jaws ached. He groped around till his fingers closed upon the Balsam of Peru, and he drenched his fiery locks with it until his head felt like a sponge. And then with loving hand he sought the Formula. He found it. He tenderly moistened his upper lip. Should he have an imperial? Why not? He traced the imperial artistically out. And now, his task of decoration complete, he stumbled into bed, and murmuring softly, “Won’t little Norah be surprised?” sank peacefully to slumber—to dream he had Hyperion curls and pearly teeth, the mustachios of D’Artagnan the Musketeer, and the nose of an Adonis.