“Her stage name, then?”
“Not sure of that!” Doubtfully.
“But Dan must have called her something?” With a gay little laugh.
“Yes.” Bob hesitated. In spite of that funereal feeling, he couldn’t suppress a grin. “He called her Gee-gee.”
“Gee-gee!” almost shrieked the lady. Then she laughed harder than ever. She was certainly a good actress. At that moment she caught Mrs. Clarence Van Duzen’s eye; it was coldly questioning.
“And what did the pony Clarence got, look like?” Mrs. Dan had passed the stage of analyzing or reasoning clearly. She didn’t even ask herself why Bob wasn’t more evasive. She didn’t want to know whether it was that “good-fellow” manner on her part that had really deceived him into unbosoming the truth to her, or whether—well, he had been drinking too much? He held himself soberly enough, it is true, but there are strong men who look sober and can walk a chalk line, when they aren’t sober at all. Bob might belong to that class. She thought she had detected something on his breath when he passed on the links and he might have been “hitting it up” pretty hard since, on the side, with some of the men. In “vino veritas”! But whether “vino,” or denseness on his part, she was sure of the “veritas.” Instinct told her she had heard the truth.
“And Clarence’s pony—did she have red hair, too?” She put the question in a different way, for Bob was hesitating again.
“No.”
“What was its hue?”
“Peroxide, I guess.” Gloomily.