“I was talkin’ nice and pretty to him,” she said, “askin’ him if he thought we’d ever have rain, and all of a sudden he gets displeased and wouldn’t speak to me at all—just sulked, he did.”
“That’s—uh—that’s Richard all right,” said Jawn. “He’s the champion sulker in New York city. I’ve known him to sit for six evenings in a row and never give anybody the gift of a word.”
“On board the Victoria he was that way, too,” Jerry corroborated.
“I never noticed it,” said Mrs. Wells.
“I mean all day on the way from Genoa to Naples,” Jerry hastened to explain.
“Why, child,” Mrs. Wells remembered, “you did not meet him until the Captain introduced you at Naples!”
“Ha! ha!” cried Phœbe, “more conspiracies for the movie man! Before she met him she had met him all day long, and when he talked to her he didn’t say a word! Doesn’t that strike you as about the time to have another fit, Jawn? It ought to begin:
‘There was a young lady from Naples——’”
“Wait!” Jawn raised a warning finger.
“Wait yourself!” retorted Phœbe, raising a finger, too. “‘There was a young lady from Naples——’ faples, saples, daples, raples, japles—ding it! There ain’t no more rhymes for Naples!”