“No, I tell you; I’m sick of ’em.”
“Well,” said Macy consolingly, “the Tates’ is just for college kids anyways.”
“I tell you——”
“I thought you’d be going to one of ’em anyways. I see by the papers you haven’t missed a one this Christmas.”
“Hm,” grunted Perry morosely.
He would never go to any more parties. Classical phrases played in his mind—that side of his life was closed, closed. Now when a man says “closed, closed” like that, you can be pretty sure that some woman has double-closed him, so to speak. Perry was also thinking that other classical thought, about how cowardly suicide is. A noble thought that one—warm and inspiring. Think of all the fine men we should lose if suicide were not so cowardly!
An hour later was six o’clock, and Perry had lost all resemblance to the young man in the liniment advertisement. He looked like a rough draft for a riotous cartoon. They were singing—an impromptu song of Baily’s improvisation:
“One Lump Perry, the parlor snake,
Famous through the city for the way he drinks his tea;
Plays with it, toys with it