“This is Pearson, who will valet you,” exclaimed Mr. Palford.
“Thank you, sir,” said Pearson in a low, respectful voice. His manner was correctness itself.
There seemed to Mr. Palford to be really nothing else to say. He wanted, in fact, to get to his own apartment and have a hot bath and a rest before dinner.
“Where am I, Burrill?” he inquired as he turned to go down the corridor.
“The crimson room, sir,” answered Burrill, and he closed the door of the tapestry chamber and shut Tembarom in alone with Pearson.
CHAPTER XI
For a few moments the two young men looked at each other, Pearson's gaze being one of respectfulness which hoped to propitiate, if propitiation was necessary, though Pearson greatly trusted it was not. Tembarom's was the gaze of hasty investigation and inquiry. He suddenly thought that it would have been “all to the merry” if somebody had “put him on to” a sort of idea of what was done to a fellow when he was “valeted.” A valet, he had of course gathered, waited on one somehow and looked after one's clothes. But were there by chance other things he expected to do,—manicure one's nails or cut one's hair,—and how often did he do it, and was this the day? He was evidently there to do something, or he wouldn't have been waiting behind the door to pounce out the minute he appeared, and when the other two went away, Burrill wouldn't have closed the door as solemnly as though he shut the pair of them in together to get through some sort of performance.
“Here's where T. T. begins to feel like a fool,” he thought. “And here's where there's no way out of looking like one. I don't know a thing.”
But personal vanity was not so strong in him as healthy and normal good temper. Despite the fact that the neat correctness of Pearson's style and the finished expression of his neat face suggested that he was of a class which knew with the most finished exactness all that custom and propriety demanded on any occasion on which “valeting” in its most occult branches might be done, he was only “another fellow,” after all, and must be human. So Tembarom smiled at him.