"One moment, Toddy," said Haskins, taking out a silver case, "I want to light a cigarette first. Have one?"
"These," said the outraged Tod significantly, "are business hours."
"So I should think from your ridiculously serious face. Nature intended you for a chubby Bacchus without any clothes, Toddy; but circumstance has stuffed you into a stupid little office to mislead people on points of law."
"The office is capital," said Tod heatedly. "I pay a very high rent."
"You are being cheated then."
"I'll--I'll--I'll have a cigarette," ended Tod weakly. "It was too hot to argue."
Haskins had come up on the previous day, and having slept on his business had repaired to the grimy office in Chancery Lane to consult his solicitor. Mr. James Ian Robert Roy Macandrew--which was the lawyer's gorgeous name, usually shortened to Tod by his friends because of his ruddy hair--possessed two rooms, sparsely furnished. The outer room contained two lean clerks and an office boy, who labored to increase a gradually growing business, while the inner room was sacred to the master brain that was building up that same business. There was a green-painted safe, an important-looking escritoire with a sliding lid, three or four chairs, a battered bookcase containing Tod's somewhat limited library, and piles of japaned deed-boxes in iron frames. Everything looked very legal and very dry and very dusty, with the exception of Tod himself, spick and span, and far too fashionably dressed for Chancery Lane. Tod should have been strolling in the Row--and if dead-and-gone Macandrews had not squandered their money he probably would have been--beside Charity Bird, if possible. As it was, Tod, looking fresh and well fed and well groomed and alert, dwelt for many hours daily in a dull room, which his ancestors would have scorned. But Tod had been compelled to lay down the ancestral claymore and take up the pen, which was hard on Tod, who much preferred a kilt to a lawyer's wig.
However, it was useless to be dignified with Jerry Haskins, as Tod decided, so after a glance at the door to see that it was closed, he unbent. He lighted a cigarette and produced a bottle of whisky and two glasses and a syphon. Not wishing that his clerks should see him unbend to this bacchanalian extent Mr. Macandrew cast a second look at the door, and advised Gerald, in scarcely legal language, to "Fire away." "You've been playing the high-kick-oh, houp-la, since I left you," said Tod with a jolly grin.
"I've been doing nothing of the sort," cried Haskins indignantly. "This is very serious."
"Is it now?" bantered the lawyer. "Well, when a man decides to marry a girl whom he has only seen for five minutes I rather think it is infernally serious. How did she manage to hook you?"