"I should say so!" said Kitty, simulating a virtuous indignation. "Little savages!"
"Why?" said Ralph teasingly. "Old bones are all right. Don't you like their nice earthy smell?"
"Horrible!" said Kitty.
"Did you ever see Hamlet?" asked Ralph. He apostrophized, a teacup in his extended hand. "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well, Horatio. He was a fellow of infinite jest!"
Ralph acted out the speech for her with improvisations. Kitty was obliged to sit down suddenly, and to hold her sides. Kitty was one of those shy, admiring, easily shocked, and easily moved-to-laughter girls, that inspire a man to the highest flights of audacious wit.
"Speaking of bones," Ralph went on; "when I was a student at McGill, my room-mate and I saved up enough to buy a whole skeleton all properly articulated. It was a peach! We kept it in the closet hanging from a clothes-hook."
"Mercy!" said Kitty.
"The landlady had a daughter who had a beau, and the two of them used to make us fellows tired with their goings-on. They'd stand for half an hour at the foot of the stairs saying good-night. Yes, it sounded like a cow drawing her foot out of a boggy place!"
"Aren't you awful!" said Kitty, blushing.
"We decided that something must be done," Ralph went on. "I got some phosphorus paint, and we painted the skeleton all over and fastened a long line to the hook in his skull that was used to hang him up by. And that night when the pair of them came out in the hall downstairs, and turned down the light, we crept out on the upper landing, and leaned over the rail, and let Mr. Bones go walking slowly step by step down the stairs. He was a lovely blue colour; every bone stood out!"