“Shure, didn’t the gintleman in the corner tell me I was comin’ further away from Putney ivery minit?”
“Wal, and so yer was.”
“Thin whoy didn’t you tell me?”
“How was I to know yer wanted to go to Putney? Yer sings out Putney, and I stops and in yer jumps.”
“And for what d’ye think I called out Putney thin?”
“’Cause it’s my name, or rayther the bus’s name. This ’ere is a Putney.”
“How can it be a Putney whin it isn’t goin’ to Putney, ye gomerhawk?”
“Ain’t you an Hirishwoman?” retorted the conductor. “Course yer are. But yer aren’t always goin’ to Ireland. We’re goin’ to Putney in time, only we’re a-going to Liverpool Street fust. ’Igher up, Jim.”
The bus moved on, and I was about cross the road, when a man, muttering savagely to himself, walked into me. He would have swept past me had I not, recognizing him, arrested him. It was my friend B—, a busy editor of magazines and journals. It was some seconds before he appeared able to struggle out of his abstraction, and remember himself. “Halloo,” he then said, “who would have thought of seeing you here?”
“To judge by the way you were walking,” I replied, “one would imagine the Strand the last place in which you expected to see any human being. Do you ever walk into a short-tempered, muscular man?”