"Oh, the fantasia of women!" he stormed. "The—the exaggeration!"
He was perfectly right—Mrs. Tome Gallien was often fantastic, and certainly quite exaggerative anent the present situation.
The threatened "adventure" did not happen at once! It didn't happen indeed for at least two hours!
Yet the fact remains, of course, that the big piano was at the bottom of the adventure. Science no doubt would have refuted the connection. But Fancy is no such fool. Surely 42if there hadn't been a big piano the Young Doctor would never have worked himself up into such a bad temper on that particular afternoon. And if he hadn't worked himself up into such a bad temper he never would have flounced himself out into the dreary February streets to try and "walk it off." And if he hadn't tried so hard to "walk it off" he never would have developed such a perfectly ravenous hunger. And if he hadn't developed such a perfectly ravenous hunger he never would have bolted at just exactly six o'clock for the brightest lighted restaurant in sight. And it was on the street right in front of the brightest lighted restaurant that the adventure happened.
Even Fancy, though, would never have boasted that it was anything except a very little adventure. Skies didn't fall, I mean, nor walls topple, nor bags of gold roll gaily to the Young Doctor's feet. Just a car stopped,—a great plain, clumsy everyday electric car, and from the front platform of it a girl with a suitcase in one hand, a hat box in the other, and goodness-knows-what tucked under one elbow, jumped down into the mud.
Even so the adventure would never have 43started if the goodness-knows-what hadn't slipped suddenly from the girl's elbow and exploded all over the street into a goodness-knows- how-many! It would have been funny of course if it hadn't been so clumsy. But even while deprecating the digital clumsiness of women, the Young Doctor leaped instinctively to the rescue. There were certainly enough things that needed rescuing! Toys they proved to be. And such a scattering! A brown plush coon under the wheels of a stalled automobile! A flamboyant red-paper rose bush trampled to pulp beneath a cart horse's hoofs! A tin steam engine cackling across a hobbly brick sidewalk! A green-feathered parrot disappearing all too quickly in a fox terrier's mouth! A doll here! A paint box there! And the girl herself standing perfectly helpless in the midst of it all blushing twenty shades of pink and still hanging desperately tight to the leather suitcase in one hand and the big hat box in the other.
"And it isn't at all that I am so—so stupid!" she kept explaining hectically. "But it is that when an accident occurs so in English I cannot think in English what to do! If I 44put down my suitcase!" she screamed, "a dog will bite it! And if I drop my box a trample might get it!"
It was not until the Young Doctor had succeeded in reassembling owner and articles on the safe edge of the curbing that he noticed for the first time how tall the girl was and how shiningly blonde. "Altogether too tall and too blonde to behave like such an idiot!" he argued perfectly illogically. With a last flare of courtesy he sought to end the incident. "Were you going to take another car?" He gestured toward her crowded hands.
"Oh, no," said the girl with a wave of her hat box. "I was going to that restaurant over there."
"Why so was I," said the Young Doctor very formally. "So if you wish I will take your suitcase for you. That will at least help a little."