“Whichever you prefer. There’s Caroline coming in at the gate now.”
“Well, then, I know which I prefer,” Billy said, swimming realistically toward the stairs.
“You are getting fat, Billy,” Caroline informed him critically after the amenities were over, and the meal appropriately begun. “You ought to watch your diet a little more carefully.”
“No,” Billy said firmly, “I don’t need to watch my diet, I’m perfectly healthy, and therefore my natural cravings will point the way to my most judicious nourishment. Nancy has explained all to me.”
“That’s a very interesting theory of Nancy’s,” Caroline said, “but I don’t altogether agree with it.”
“I do,” said Billy, then he added hastily, “but 76 I agree with you, too, Caroline. You are to all other women what moonlight is to sunlight, or I mean—what sunlight is to moonlight. In other words—you are the goods.”
“Don’t be silly, Billy.”
“There’s only one thing in all this wide universe that you can’t say to me, Caroline, and ‘don’t be silly, Billy,’ is that thing,—express this same thing in vers libre if you must say it! Look at the handsome soup you’re getting. What is the name of that soup, Molly?”
He smiled ingratiatingly at the little waitress, who always beamed at any one of Nancy’s particular friends that came into the restaurant, and made a point of serving them if she could possibly arrange it.
“Cream of spinach,” she said, “it’s a special to-day.”