“It’s a beautiful evening, isn’t it?” said Fannie, as Wallingford caught step with her.
Wallingford had to hark back. Time had been when the line of conversation which went with Miss Bubble’s opening remark had been as familiar to him as his own safety razor, but of late he had been entertaining such characters as Beauty Phillips, and conversation with the Beauty had consisted of lightning-witted search through the ends of the earth and the seas therein for extravagant hyperbole and metaphor. Harking back was so difficult that J. Rufus gave it up.
“Lovely evening,” he admitted. “I’ve just been thinking about this weather. I’ve about decided to build a factory to put it up in boxes for the Chicago Market. They’d pay any price for it there in the fall.”
Miss Fannie considered this remark in silence for a moment, and then she laughed, a quiet, silvery laugh that startled J. Rufus by its musical quality.
“I don’t see why you should laugh,” protested Wallingford gravely. “If a man can get a monopoly on weather-canning it would be even better than the sleep-factory idea I’ve been considering.”
“What was that like?” asked Fannie, interested in spite of the fact that these jokes were not at all the good old standards, which could be laughed at without the painful necessity of thought.
“Well,” Wallingford explained, “I figured on building an immense dormitory and hiring about a thousand fat hoboes to sleep for me night and day. Then I intended to take that sleep and condense it and put it up in eight-hour capsules for visitors to New York. There ought to be a fortune in that.”
Again a little silence and again that little silvery laugh which Wallingford found himself watching for.
“You’re so funny,” said Miss Fannie.
“For a long time I was divided between that and my anti-bum serum as a permanent investment,” he went on, glancing down at her as he extended himself along the line which had seemed to catch her fancy. She was looking up at him, her eyes shining, her lips half parted in an anticipatory smile, and unconsciously her hand had crept upon his arm, where it lay warm and vibrant. “You know,” he explained, “they inoculate a guinea-pig or a sheep or something with disease germs, and from this animal, somehow or other, they extract a serum which cures that disease. Well, I propose to get a herd of billy-goats boiling spifflicated, and extract from them the jag serum, and with that inoculate all the rounders on Broadway at so much per inoc. Then they can stand up in front of an onyx bar and guzzle till it oozes out of their ears, without any worse effects than a lifting pain in the right elbow.”