“If you’d rather tell me that story,” I said, “instead of the one about Simcox, I’d just as soon have it. In fact, I’d prefer it. Sob stories are always trying.”
“But I’m not sure that the Simcox one is a sob story, though there’s a certain amount of slosh in it. Anyhow, I’ve got to tell it to you, for my wife says you’re the only man she knows who can advise what ought to be done.”
“All right,” I said, “but Pat Singleton’s escapades always amuse me. I’d like to hear about his making an apple-pie bed for that nurse.”
Daintree chuckled again, and I gathered from the expression of his face that the nurse had endured something worse than an apple-pie bed.
“Or about the boat-races,” I said. “I didn’t know you had anything which floated on that lake of yours.”
“I haven’t,” said Daintree, “except the kind of wooden box in which the gardener goes out to clear away the duck-weed. However, Pat Singleton comes into the Simcox story in the end. It’s really about him that my wife wants your advice.”
“No one,” I said, “can give advice about Pat Singleton.”
“Knowing the sort of man Simcox is,” said Daintree, “you’ll understand that he was rather out of it at first in a house full of boys just out of hospital and jolly glad to have a chance of running about a bit. Pat Singleton wasn’t there when Simcox arrived. But the others were nearly as bad; silly jokes from morning to night and an infernal row always going on. My wife likes that sort of thing, fortunately.”
“Simcox, I suppose, just sat by himself in a corner of the veranda and glowered?”
“Exactly. And at first my wife could do nothing with him. In the end, of course——”