“You will hear from him in due time,” she said with what was plainly a valedictory smile, as she preceded her persecutor to the door.
But her persecutor exhibited no signs of taking his departure. Instead, he stepped closer, seeming to suffer some mysterious inward deliquescence as he studied her with a sympathetic if slightly watery eye.
“My dear girl,” he softly intoned, with one hand stretched out in her direction, “as a friend of your family—and I trust I may regard myself as such—but more as a friend of your own, I am compelled to say that I think you are taking the wrong course in this. I know whereof I speak. You are too young, too innocent, too—er—too sweet, to be dragged without knowing what you have to face into the brutalities and humiliations of litigation like this. Indeed, my child, I think too much of you, of your——”
“Good afternoon,” interrupted Teddie with that rising inflection which can make two innocent words so unmistakably dismissive. For Teddie was worried. For a moment or two, indeed, she felt terribly afraid that he was going to kiss her. And during the last day or so, she remembered, there had been altogether too much of that sort of thing. “Good afternoon,” she repeated with frappéd finality, as she opened the door and swung it wide, with her back against the wall.
She stood there, even after he had bowed himself pompously out, with a frown of perplexity on her smooth young brow and a weight on her troubled young heart. She felt like a harried front-liner whose supports have failed to come up. She felt like a thirty-footer being pounded by a big and brutal Atlantic. She felt like a hothouse orchid that had been blown out of a coupelet window and was being trampled on by all the heels and run over by all the wheels of Fifth Avenue.
She was awakened from that little reverie of self-pity by the repeated shrill of her telephone bell. So she crossed wearily to her desk and took up the receiver.
“This is Ruby Reamer speakin’,” said the voice over its thread of metal, “and I guess I’ve got considerable speakin’ to do with you.”
“About what?” somewhat indifferently inquired Teddie.
“About my Gunnie,” was the prompt and shrill-noted reply. “I want ’o know just what call you’ve got to come between Gunboat and me after we’ve been going together for a year and a half! I want ’o know what right, just b’cause you’re rotten with money, you’ve got to turn a poor boy’s head and have him say the things that Gunnie’s just been sayin’ to me! I want——”
“Ruby,” interrupted Teddie, steadying herself, “you are saying things yourself that are utterly ridiculous. I haven’t either the intention or the desire to come in any way whatever between you and the young gentleman you speak of as Gunnie. I——”