“Then I'll go with you, and talk to your sister—she doesn't play.”
He glanced at me in a way that made me pass my hand over my face. I learned at least part of the reason for my feeling at disadvantage before him. I had forgotten to shave; and as my beard is heavy and black, it has to be looked after twice a day. “Oh, I can stop at my rooms and get my face into condition in a few minutes,” said I.
“And put on evening dress, too,” he suggested. “You wouldn't want to go in a dinner jacket.”
I can't say why this was the “last straw,” but it was.
“Bother!” said I, my common sense smashing the spell of snobbishness that had begun to reassert itself as soon as I got into his unnatural, unhealthy atmosphere. “I'll go as I am, beard and all. I only make myself ridiculous, trying to be a sheep. I'm a goat, and a goat I'll stay.”
That shut him into himself. When he re-emerged, it was to say: “Something doing down town to-day, eh?”
A sharpness in his voice and in his eyes, too, made me put my mind on him more closely, and then I saw what I should have seen before—that he was moody and slightly distant.
“Seen Tom Langdon this afternoon?” I asked carelessly.
He colored. “Yes—had lunch with him,” was his answer.
I smiled—for his benefit. “Aha!” thought I. “So Tom Langdon has been fool enough to take this paroquet into his confidence.” Then I said to him: “Is Tom making the rounds, warning the rats to leave the sinking ship?”