"You certainly were. You laid it on too thick."
"Not too thick to please the girls, did I?"
"Suited some of the girls first rate, but it's bad to write so much. It's apt to come back at you when you least expect it."
"What do you care so long as the girls were pleased? You were not courting the father. If you had intended to have the old gentleman read them I could easily have changed the style from a Grade A love to a nice assortment of short business phrases. But, say, Jim, you ought to tell me what happened. Come, now! Any bull's-eyes?"
"Do you know that you wrote enough letters to my girls to have married me off a dozen times or more? There are some streets I dare not pass through now—there's that foolish creature in West Thirty-eighth Street, for example."
I knew that Jim would leak a little if persistently tapped with interrogations.
"What about her? Did we send her many or was she easily won?" I asked. "Hard or soft?" As the middleman it was purely business with me.
"That girl was a queer case," said Jim, and he reflected for a moment. "Why, do you know, you had her running to clairvoyants for advice. She didn't think anything of putting up five dollars to learn how it was going to turn out. As soon as I heard that I quit calling and shut you off, for it was either that or get shot, I believed."
"That's quite a case, Jim. Let me into all of that, won't you?"
"I'm not going to tell you. It's past now, so let it go. You got me into enough trouble to fill a book. The book won't be written, though, for the inside story dies with me."