Randolph followed her into the cool marble interior. "Oh, in town, you mean? Quite well, I think. I'm sure my young man took a good honest appetite with him!"
"I know. We don't do half enough for these poor boys."
"Yes, he rose to the food. But not to the drinks. I took him, after all, to my club. I innocently suggested cocktails; but, no. He declined—in a deft but straightforward way. Country principles. Small-town morals. He made me feel like a—well, like a corrupter of youth."
"You didn't mind, though,—of course you didn't. You liked it. Wasn't it noble! Wasn't it charming! So glad that we had nothing but Apollinaris and birch beer! Still, it would have been a pleasure to hear him refuse."
The receiving-teller gave her her vouchers. She put them in her handbag and somehow got round a perambulator, and the two went out on the street.
"And how did your 'show' go?" she continued. "That's about as much as we can call the drama in these days."
"That, possibly, didn't go quite so well. I took him to a 'comedy,'—as they nowadays call their mixture of farce and funniment. 'Comedy'!—I wish Meredith could have seen it! Well, he laughed a little, here and there,—obligingly, I might say. But there was no 'chew' in the thing for him,—nothing to fill his intellectual maw. He's a serious youngster, after all,—exuberant as he seems. I felt him appraising me as a gay old irresponsible…."
"'Old'—you are not to use that word. Come, don't say that he—that he venerated you!"
"Oh, not at all. During the six hours we were together—train, club, theatre, and train again—he never once called me 'sir'; he never once employed our clumsy, repellent Anglo-Saxon mode of address, 'mister'; in fact, he never employed any mode of address at all. He got round it quite cleverly,—on system, as I soon began to perceive; and not for a moment did he forget that the system was in operation. He used, straight through, a sort of generalized manner—I might have been anywhere between twenty and sixty-five."
They were now in front of the stationer's show-window, and there were few people in the quiet thoroughfare to jostle them.