"I never thought of that," I said humbly.
"I have known retail liars," he went on. "But I guess you are the only wholesaler in the business. When other people are content with ones and twos you get them out in grosses, packed for export!"
He went on slamming me like this for miles. Anybody else would have given him up as hopeless. I don't want to praise myself, but if I have one good quality it's staying power. I pleaded and argued, and expostulated and explained, with the determination of a man whose back is to the wall. I wasn't going to lose Freddy so long as there was breath in my body. However, it wasn't the least good in the world. Jones was as impervious as sole-leather, and as unshaken as a marble pillar.
Then I played my last card.
I told him the truth! Not the whole truth, of course, but within ten per cent of it. About Freddy, you know, and how she was determined not to marry before her elder sister, and how Eleanor's only preference seemed to be for him, and how with such a slender clue to work on I had engineered everything up to this point.
"If I have seemed to you intolerably prying and officious," I said, "well, at any rate, Jones, there's my excuse. It rests with you to give me Freddy or take her from me. Turn back, and you'll make me the happiest man alive; go forward, and—and—"
I watched him out of the corner of my eye.
His tread lost some of its elasticity. He was short-circuiting inside. Positively he began to look sort of sympathetic and human.
"Westoby," he said at last, in a voice almost of awe, "when they get up another world's fair you must have a building to yourself. You're colossal, that's what you are!"
"I'm only in love," I said.