That was it! He repeated the line once or twice under his breath, finding in it a new and surprising significance. He ran his hand caressingly along the smoothness of her teak rail, sleek and glossy and warm in the sun as a living thing.
“Maid of Athens, ere we part——”
“There’s a deuce of a lot of water to go under the bridge before it comes to that, old lady!” he said aloud.
By the time he reached the dock gates the proposition had grown so rosy that his only fear was lest someone else should discover its attractiveness and get in ahead of him. By the time he got off the bus in Saint Paul’s Churchyard it seemed to him that he was doing his half-brother a really good turn in allowing him the first chance of so advantageous a business opportunity.
The spruce-looking master mariner who gave in his name at a little hole marked “Inquiries” on the ground-floor of a warehouse just behind the Church of Saint Sempronius Without was a very different person from the haggard being who had glared back at him from the glass an hour ago.
Edward Broughton’s place of business was a large, modern edifice each of whose many ground-floor windows displayed a device representing a nude youth running like hell over the surface of a miniature globe, holding in his extended hand a suit of Elasto Underwear—“Fits where it Hits.” This famous slogan it was which had made Elasto Underwear and Edward Broughton’s fortune; for he was by way of doing very well indeed, was Edward, and had even been spoken of as a possible Lord Mayor. David remembered him in the old days, when he was at home from sea, as a pert little snipe of a youngster with red cheeks and sticking-out eyes.
A stylish youth, looking like a clothed edition of the young gentleman on the placards, ushered him into a small, glass-sided compartment and left him alone there with two little plaster images wearing miniature suits of Elasto Underwear. One was after—a long way after—Michael Angelo’s David, the other (also a long way) after the Venus of Milo.
Broughton looked round him with all the sailorman’s lordly contempt of the ways of traders. He looked out through the glass sides of his cage on long vistas of desks where girls sat at typewriters and between which there scurried young exquisites with sleek hair and champagne-coloured socks—dozens of them, presumably engaged on the one all-important task of distributing Elasto Underwear to the civilized and uncivilized world.
So this was where brother Edward made all his money! Rum sort of show—“Fits where it Hits,” indeed—what a darned silly idea! And how much longer were they going to keep him waiting?
His eyes wandered for the twentieth time to the clock. Half-past eleven—he had been here half an hour. The two underclothed statuettes were beginning to get on his nerves. He should smash ’em if he stopped there much longer.