"Wait a bit, will you, Adams?" said Perry, waving one heavily gloved hand while he reached up with the other to pay the driver. "You're the very man I'm after," he added an instant later as he turned from the curbing, "so if you don't mind I'll walk a couple of blocks in your direction. I'd just got into my dinner clothes," he explained, fastening his fur-lined overcoat more snugly across his chest, "when I found that Miss Wilde was going down alone to Gramercy Park. That's where I've come from, and now I'm rushing back to keep an engagement Gerty has made for dinner. I'll be hanged if I know where she's taking me—it's all one to me, half the time I forget to ask whose house we're going to until I bolt into the drawing-room. Beastly life, this everlasting eating in other people's houses."
His tone was one of amiable discontentment, but there was a look of positive annoyance upon his handsome face, and he turned presently to regard his companion with an enquiry which might have been darkly furtive had not the luminous publicity in which he moved rendered the smallest of his mental processes so brilliantly overt. It was immediately plain to Adams that the jerky sentences were shot out at random in order that Perry's slow mind might gain a larger space in which to grope for the word he really wanted. There was something evidently behind it all, and until the situation should disclose itself they walked on in an embarrassed and waiting silence. In his top hat and his mink-lined overcoat Perry presented an ample dignity which his companion found almost overpowering in its male magnificence. That hesitation should manifest itself amid such a pageantry of personality reminded Adams of the beggars in the old nursery rhyme who had come to town sporting velvet gowns. Everything about Perry Bridewell was built on so opulent a scale that in thinking of him one found oneself using almost unconsciously a Romanesque and florid diction.
"There is something you'd like to say to me," suggested Adams presently. "I'm in no hurry, of course, but isn't this as good a time as any other?"
"By Jove, that's just what I was thinking," returned Perry, with a burst of confidence, "but it isn't really anything, you know—that is, I mean, it isn't anything that—that's real business."
A pretty woman passed suddenly under the electric light, and even in his embarrassment, which was great, he followed her with the animated glance which he instinctively devoted to vanishing feminine beauty.
"Thank God, there's no real business between us," retorted Adams, "and that's why it's a rest to spend a half-hour with you—because you don't know a piece of literature from a publisher's advertisement."
"We're such old friends, you know," pursued Perry, forgetting the moment which he had wasted upon the pretty woman, "that when there's a thing on my mind I feel—well, I feel a—a deuced queer fish not to tell you."
Adams laughed good naturedly.
"For heaven's sake don't remain long in a fishy sensation," he rejoined. "Let's have it out and over. By the way, may I ask if it concerns you or me?"
Perry shook his head as he tugged nervously at his fair moustache. "Look here, old man," he said at last, "I know, of course, that Mrs. Adams is as innocent as a baby—Gerty's just like her and there are plenty of women made that way. It's the men who are such confounded brutes," he commented with pensive morality.