People sitting on the verandas of neighboring cottages saw in he moonlight a sight that electrified them with horror. A powerful looking maniac, with a helpless woman in his arms, strode across the beach and began to wade out into the water. Hoping to save her, they ran to the shore and put out in boats and canoes.
"Oh," sighed the victim, blissfully, as Carson let her down into the water, "it feels so cool—and quiet!"
"Polly!"
"George!"
"Row harder, Doctor!" cried the steersman of the nearest boat. "He's trying to strangle her!"
[THE MAN WITH THE HOSE]
A feeling of elation is like a feeling of alcohol. Under its stimulus a person may do the most brilliant things—and also the most grotesque.
It was just this feeling that took hold of Jack Carrington when the senior member of the firm invited him to dine at his apartment on the following evening and meet "Mrs. Stockbridge and my daughter." During all the rest of the day the young college-man-learning-how-to-work-in-an-office fairly walked on air, and that night, in his hall bedroom, he went through a sort of dress-rehearsal of the rôle he hoped to play on the great occasion, resuscitating and donning his evening clothes to make sure that they looked as well as they did when he led the commencement prom six months before, and marshaling all the bons mots he could recollect, in order that his supply of "extempore" witticisms might be adequate.