“Didn’t he, now!” silently soliloquized Gerry as he swung slowly back in his swivel-chair and sat staring at her. Then he added, aloud: “And what happened after that?”
“He presumed on his privileges to the extent of taking my car out of the garage and going joy-riding in it.”
“Without your knowledge and permission?”
“Entirely! And bumped into a street-bus and broke my lamps.”
“That’s much better,” Gerry surprised her by saying.
“Why?” asked Teddie, vaguely disturbed by her remembered failure to mention an offhanded proffer of this same car to this same knight with the cauliflower ear.
“Because we can settle his hash with a larceny action,” retorted Gerry. “But our biggest nut to crack, I imagine, will be Uhlan!”
“What can we do about him?” asked Teddie, with the faintest trace of a tremor in her voice.
“There are quite a number of things we can do,” coolly explained her solemn-eyed counsellor. “I can have him put out of the Camperdown Club, for one thing, before the week-end. I can demand an impartial appraisement of his physical injuries. I can see Shotwell, this attorney of his, and accept service. I can even get after ’em for blackmail. And there are several other things I can do. But each and every one of them will result in exactly the end we are most anxious to obviate. By that I mean publicity, newspaper talk, the reporters you spoke of as chasing you all over the map. That’s the one thing, Teddie, we must not and shall not have!”
“No, we mustn’t have that!” echoed Teddie, mysteriously comforted by the masterfulness of this new-found sage who could achieve such a cool-headed and clear-eyed view of the entire tangled-up muddle. It took a load off her mind, to know that she had some one so adroit and dependable as Gerry to stand beside her in this fight against the forces of evil. She felt sorry, in fact, that she hadn’t come to Gerry in the first place. Then she felt rather glad in remembering that since she had come to him, she hadn’t come looking like a frump.