They found Reggie in a state of great bewilderment and agitation at the hotel. They had told him at the club that Fleming had driven off with Mabel, and though he had not known of the latter’s offensive behavior toward his sister previously, he knew that Fleming had been drinking that afternoon and was in no condition to handle a car.
He was enormously relieved, therefore, when he saw Mabel return safely, though he wondered to see her escorted by Joe and Jim.
They told him all the circumstances and he was furious. He was for starting out at once to hunt up Fleming, but Joe dissuaded him.
“He’s had a good trimming already,” Joe assured him. “We don’t want anything that may bring notoriety to Mabel’s name. I don’t imagine we’ll ever be bothered by him again.”
In the meantime, Fleming, left battered and disheveled on the country road, was wild with pain and rage. His heart was a tumult of seething emotions. He had undergone that afternoon more humiliation than comes to most men in a lifetime. He had been thwarted in his impudent venture. He had been taken by the collar and shaken as a rat by a terrier. He had had to get down on his knees in the dirt of the road and humbly apologize. And then he had been bruised and beaten until he had begged for mercy.
He ground his teeth in unavailing fury. He had been accustomed all his life to have his way. Money had made his path easy. He was not used to the sensation of being the “under dog.”
He took out his handkerchief and wiped the blood and dust from his face, brushed and adjusted his disarranged clothing as well as he could, then climbed into the car and by a roundabout route made his way back to town.
His first visit was to a Turkish bath where he attempted to have some of the soreness rubbed from his battered frame. Then he visited one of the facial artists who make a specialty of painting black eyes into some semblance of flesh color.
In this way he managed to efface the worst traces of the afternoon’s encounter, though his face still remained somewhat swelled and puffy. Then he set out to make a night of it and drown his troubles in the way with which he was the most familiar.