But after he'd gone Graemer looked after him and laughed.
"Middle name is Cynic—but he's pretty young yet."
"And the best looking thing," sighed Edwina pulling on her gloves, bored with her long silence.
Graemer was thoughtful.
"He's given me an idea," he announced suddenly. "Or perhaps it was Tom's gossip about him. How'd you like to do an ingenue part like that missing lady affair—start with your head over a garden wall—call it 'The Heart of a Boy,' say—fill it up with this stuff Hamilt calls youth—"
Tommie absorbed his last pastry.
"I've just remembered the girl's name," he announced, wiping a crumb from his moist lips. "It was Felicia something or other—sort of sad, wasn't it?"
"Maybe it would have been sadder if she'd married him," suggested
Edwina ironically. "He is a grouch, you can't get around that."
And the grouch, striding briskly up the avenue, was trying to be fair.
"Poor old Tommie!" he thought ruefully, "I don't know why I should go on hating him because he will blab—it's the nature o' the beast—that stupid little much-divorced animal that married him—" he glared at two innocent young shoppers who were passing, "Gad, women are such sophisticated cows nowadays—" Spring always made him wretched, spring always made him fretful, spring always sent him off for the woods somewhere, any woods so long as it was woods. He pondered over whether he could get away Friday or would have to wait till Saturday morning, and eventually decided on Saturday, consulting a memorandum book scowlingly as he did so, jotting down appointments. He noted that he would have to be in his office at five o'clock on Friday. Somebody or other was going to telephone him about something. Which made him reflect irritably that of all the mechanical devices of a mechanical age the thing he hated most of all was a telephone! He could scarcely endure the stupid way everybody shrieked "Hello!" through it. He wished morosely that he could take a week-end trip without any luggage whatever because he always had a row about his luggage. He wished there was some system whereby one needn't always lose half one's luggage.