“I know. Nothing doing in second thoughts?” She shook her head.
“All right. I only got drunk last time. This time it will need the binge of my life. I’d cherished hopes of this.”
“Drunk,” she said reproachfully. “With a stiff upper lip?”
“Oh, I dunno,” he said. “It takes a stiff upper lip to get me to the dentist’s, but I make him use an anæsthetic all the same. Still, if you’d rather I didn’t——”
“I think it would be braver.”
“Right. But I’d like to hit something. There’s nobody you’d like me to hit, is there?”
“Of course not.”
“Sure?” he said. He had it well in mind that somebody ought to hit Sam. “Let’s get back to where we were before I made a stump oration—to when I came in and you looked at me like a friend.”
“I hope I always shall.”
“All right. It’s the privilege of a friend to be impertinent, and I’m rather good at impertinence. You see, Effie old thing, you’re supposed to be one of the world’s workers, and you’re not at the office to-day. You haven’t been at the office for weeks. I know, because I gave Florrie half a crown.” Florrie was the maid. “And it isn’t that you’ve come into money, because Florrie tells me you’ve been starving yourself.”