“So sorry if I scared you,” he said. “Do you know what that is? It’s our college ‘yell.’ It’s what we do at base-ball matches.”
Vennie thought he was going to do it again, and in her apprehension she laid a hand on his sleeve.
“But don’t you really mind Miss Romer’s being like this? Did you know she was like this?” she enquired.
“Don’t let’s think about her any more,” cried the artist. “I don’t care what she’s like, now I can get rid of her. To tell you the honest truth, Miss Seldom, I’d come down here for no other reason than to think over this curst hole I’ve got myself into, and to devise some way out.
“What you tell me,—and I believe every word of it, I want to believe every word of it!—just gives me the excuse I need. Good-bye, Miss Gladys! Good-bye, Ariadne! ‘Ban-ban, Ca-Caliban, Have a new master, get a new man!’ No more engagements for me, dear Miss Seldom! I’m a free lance now, a free lance,—henceforward and forever!”
The exultant artist was on the point of indulging once more in his college yell, but the scared and bewildered expression on Vennie’s face saved her from a second experience of that phenomenon.
“Shall I tell you what I was thinking of doing, as I strolled along the Front this afternoon?”
Vennie nodded, unable to repress a smile as she remembered the difficulty she had in arresting this stroll.
“I was thinking of taking the boat for the Channel Islands tomorrow! I even went so far as to make enquiries about the time it started. What do you think of that?”
Vennie thought it was extremely singular, and she also thought that she had never heard the word “enquiries” pronounced in just that way.