"Well," says I, after I'd said all the joyful things I could think of, "one point ain't settled even yet—who's goin' to get that screen contract? There ain't any love in business, you know."
"Humph!" says Jim Henry. "I wonder!"
I laughed out loud.
"Why," says I, "that's exactly what Georgianna here said t'other day—she wondered!"
[CHAPTER XIV—THE EPISTLE TO ICHABOD]
Mary came in a few minutes later and she had to be told the news. She was as pleased as I was and there was more congratulatin'. Then Georgianna had to go home and, as she was altogether too precious to be allowed to walk, Jim Henry went and got his auto and they left in that.
When he got back—that car must have been sufferin' from a stroke of creepin' paralysis, for it took him two hours to run that little distance—he and I had a good confidential talk. He was way up above this common earth, soarin' around in the clouds, and all he wanted to talk was Georgianna. The whole of creation had been set to music and was dancin' to the one tune—"Georgianna."
It was astonishin' to me who had been in the habit of considerin' him just a sharp, up-to-date buyer and seller, a man whose whole soul was wrapped up in business with no room in it for anything else. I found myself lookin' at him and wonderin': "Is the world comin' to an end, I wonder? Is this my partner? Is this moon-struck critter Jim Henry Jacobs, doctor of sick businesses?"
I couldn't help jokin' him a little.
"Jim," says I, "for a feller who hadn't any use for females you're doin' pretty well, I must say. Either you was mistaken in your old opinions or your new ones are wrong. Which is it? 'Women and business don't mix,' you know. That ain't an original notion; that is quoted from the Gospel according to Jacobs, Chapter 1,000; two hundred and eightieth verse."