“I won’t run away yet, then,” she laughed. “You are too encouraging. I have just estranged a lifelong friend by telling her much the same thing, and I was in danger—well, of caving a little.”
“Dear me! Don’t cave when you have as good ground as that under your feet! What will you do when you get to a real quicksand? I evidently appeared on the scene just in time. I shall give you all the moral support you want. I dare say I can damn and double-damn books in more kinds of ways than you ever dreamed. Life is so amusing that I continually wonder how people can turn their eyes from it long enough to look at a book.”
“How about the Higher Life?” inquired Mrs. Derwall demurely.
“What in the world is that?” demanded the caller, mystified. He looked about the room, much as if he expected to see its legs sticking out from behind the curtains.
“Don’t ask me!” Mrs. Derwall waved it from her. “Ask any other woman but me. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I’ve just refused to go to town with my lifelong friend and find out. There’s a Professor Richard Church, or Birch, or Smirch, or somebody, who tells people at two dollars a head. But it’s not too late for you. The eleven-five train will do you quite nicely.”
“Ah!” ejaculated the caller. “I don’t think I’m in such a hurry as all that.” He still looked rather curiously about, however. “But you frighten me. You frighten me more than I expected. I don’t know whether I shall dare to tell you what I came for.”
Mrs. Derwall, who found that things were going very well, encouraged him.
“Don’t be afraid of me. I am quite harmless. More than that, I am the most helpless of creatures in the face of a determined appeal. What are you—patent medicine? Needles? Charity? Gold mines? I may invest in you yet.”
“But it’s nothing of that kind! It’s just the opposite. I don’t want to take money out of your pocket. I want to put it in.”
“Then you’re the man for me!” cried Mrs. Derwall. “Christmas has gone, and ruin stares me in the face!”