“What’s the matter with you backing it?”
“That’s what I was just thinking about,” was the answer. “I’ll look into it and if it’s all right I’ll see my broker and give you a chance to see what you can do as a star.”
He was talking like an old timer and he had her going in a minute. But that was only one of his jokes and for two weeks he kept it up. Then he told her of some enormous investments he had made which had tied him up temporarily, while she had to go around explaining to her friends that it was all off about what she had been telling them.
There was one proposition this gay young sport hadn’t figured on, for all going out and nothing coming in makes a quick and, as a rule, a spectacular finish. A fellow starts out like a three-time winner and comes under the wire with nothing but a bundle of junk, without even knowing his right name.
Two months of the three had gone by and the most remarkable part of the whole affair was that there was any money left. But toward the latter part of the game he had been growing wise, or he thought he was, at any rate. He stopped the five-dollar tips and he was cutting out a night here and there. He might have retired with honors if he hadn’t met Blanche.
Good-looking, slick, clever Blanche, the regret of whose life was that she hadn’t met him first and got it all in one solid chunk. He didn’t know it, but he was made for Blanche, and what was more to the point, she knew it. In fact, there were very few things she didn’t know.
His talk about his brokers didn’t switch her in the least. There had been a time in her life when she might have believed it, but that time had gone by. She had lived in a fool’s paradise just once and that was enough for her.
He actually wanted to marry her, but she wouldn’t consider it for a moment, because she didn’t figure him out as a future proposition for more than a couple of thousand at the most.
“You’re all right, Harry,” she said once, “but we won’t have any marrying just now. What we will do is go shopping. I want to furnish a flat so I can really have a home of my own and you will be just as welcome there as if you owned it yourself, so come along and we’ll pick the things out. You have very nice taste in such matters, I know, and we can have a good time buying.”
Good speech that, and very nicely delivered, and he liked her well enough to find no flaw in it. But when the time really came for the buying there was something else she had to do, so she said: