But Lawrence shook his head. “I’m sorry, James, but—” he bowed low to the grinning circle of doctors and nurses, and assumed his most grandiloquent air—“you are now in the hands of the only acknowledged ruling class of the twentieth century, who hold you with a grip of steel, but whose touch is as gentle as a mother’s kiss. So get out your knitting, Old Socks; you are doomed.”
He turned with a laugh and a new impersonation to the surgeon as he left the room.
“Thank you, Doc. You’ve cert’nly been kind to me, a poor working girl. Just send the bill to Mr. Edestone. He is my greatest gentleman friend.”
In his room, which was reached by an elevator, he found the ship’s tailor waiting for him; but after this functionary had taken his measure and gone, he had an opportunity to look around.
He was in a room, he found, a parlour or sitting-room, about fifteen by twenty, neatly but handsomely furnished, and suggesting to him in its general appearance the owner’s apartments on the largest and most perfectly equipped yachts. There was this difference, however, that nothing about it indicated that it was ever off an even keel. There were no racks or other contrivances to suggest that it was prepared to turn in any direction at an angle of forty-five degrees, and which to the land-lubber causes qualms even while the ship is still tied to the dock.
It might indeed have been a handsome living-room in a bachelor’s apartment, but for the windows, which at the first glance seemed to be of the ordinary French casement form, running down to the floor, and looking as if they might open out onto a balcony; but to his surprise, he found, when he pulled aside the heavy curtains, that they looked into a perfectly blank white wall about two inches from the glass.
Adjoining the living-room was a bedroom furnished in similar style with the same sort of windows, and beyond, Lawrence found as attractive a bath-room as ever welcomed an American millionaire after a hot day in his office, or a game of polo.
After a boiling tub and a freezing shower, in the pink of condition—and nothing else—he went back into the bedroom.
“Now what,” he had wondered, “will the Fairy Godmother have for me in the way of a union suit, and a pair of jumpers?”
But he had not wondered very hard. He found, as he knew he would, for he had yachted with Edestone before, a complete outfit, not forgetting the cocktail, which was standing on the table as quietly and innocently as if it had always been there, although in reality it had just been placed there by a man who, with years of experience in listening to the sounds that come from a gentleman’s bathroom, had timed its arrival to the second.