"He will be quite as he was before?"
"Quite, as I keep repeating. A few little scars that will go away in time. You see, it was a peculiar kind of side-wipe; doesn't need much skin grafting. Why, what you can do with people's faces! If everybody were taken young nobody need be bad-looking. We straighten crooked teeth, reconstruct mouths. Why not faces? Why, there was a woman in New York who felt badly about her face and I gave her a brand-new one. Could have had plenty of patients of that kind and made loads of money. It might have been 'Bricktop on Beauty' instead of 'Bricktop on Jaws.' Suggestion was too alliterative—I stuck to jaws."
Helen was laughing. One had to laugh when Bricktop, red-headed, freckled, with a manner as distinctly his own as any great comedian's, was going full tilt. Besides, they were comrades, these two; they understood each other.
"Why shouldn't everybody be pleasing to the eye? They will be, one of these days," he went on excitedly. "Why, Helen, I could make you good-looking——"
He clapped his hand over his mouth.
"My mother said that I would talk myself to death some day!" he gasped. "Well, I've said it!"
She was smiling at his confusion in a way that cured it.
"You could! You could!" she exclaimed banteringly, as if she were teasing him for such a good opinion of himself.
"Yes, you bet I could!" he declared.
"Even my nose?" she said, with a defiant sort of scepticism.