“But great guns! What’s she done to you?”
“I know, but I can’t help that. You go ahead and rip things up any way you want to, but I’d better stay out. It may be foolish, but that’s how I feel about it.”
“It’s your own affair. I think you’re too blamed easy, but you suit yourself.... And about the big noise, why I guess all we can do is wait and see what happens.”
Miss Starkweather, who met him on the 151 street that morning, told him the same thing. “Some people,” she remarked, altitudinously, “are always getting their toes stepped on, aren’t they? Well, there’s another way to look at it––the toes oughtn’t to have been there.”
“Oh, give us time,” said Henry, pleasantly. “Even the worm turns, you know.”
“Humph!” said Aunt Mirabelle. “Let a dozen worms do a dozen turns! I never thought I’d see the day when a Devereux––almost the same thing as a Starkweather––’d figure in a disgrace such as yours. You’ve heaped muck on your uncle’s parlour-carpet. But some day you’ll see the writing on the wall, Henry.”
He was tempted to remind her of another city ordinance against bill-posting, but he refrained, and saved it up for Anna.
“I’ll watch for it,” he said.
“Well, you better. All I’ve got to say is this: you just wait and see what happens.”
And then, to complete the record, he got identically the same suggestion from Bob Standish.