The joke pleased Symons. He laughed within a sixteenth of a note of the audibility permitted by the laws governing employees.
«Certainly, sir,» he tittered. «Of course, sir, I think I can see you at Coney, Mr. Blinker.»
Blinker got a pager and looked up the movements of Sunday steamboats. Then he found a cab at the first corner and drove to a North River pier. He stood in line, as democratic as you or I, and bought a ticket, and was trampled upon and shoved forward until, at last, he found himself on the upper deck of the boat staring brazenly at a girl who sat alone upon a camp stool. But Blinker did not intend to be brazen; the girl was so wonderfully good looking that he forgot for one minute that he was the prince incog, and behaved just as he did in society.
She was looking at him, too, and not severely. A puff of wind threatened Blinker's straw hat. He caught it warily and settled it again. The movement gave the effect of a bow. The girl nodded and smiled, and in another instant he was seated at her side. She was dressed all in white, she was paler than Blinker imagined milkmaids and girls of humble stations to be, but she was as tidy as a cherry blossom, and her steady, supremely frank gray eyes looked out from the intrepid depths of an unshadowed and untroubled soul.
«How dare you raise your hat to me?» she asked, with a smile–redeemed severity.
«I didn't,» Blinker said, but he quickly covered the mistake by extending it to «I didn't know how to keep from it after I saw you.»
«I do not allow gentlemen to sit by me to whom I have not been introduced,» she said, with a sudden haughtiness that deceived him. He rose reluctantly, but her clear, teasing laugh brought him down to his chair again.
«I guess you weren't going far,» she declared, with beauty's magnificent self–confidence.
«Are you going to Coney Island?» asked Blinker.
«Me?» She turned upon him wide–open eyes full of bantering surprise. «Why, what a question! Can't you see that I'm riding a bicycle in the park?» Her drollery took the form of impertinence.