“No, but you've got ideas. You give them something to think about when they go home. I wish I had a mind like yours.”
He was so astonished that he stopped dead on the pavement. “My Scottish blood,” he said despondently. “A Scot is always a reformer and a preacher, in his heart. I used to orate to my mother, but she liked it. She is a Scot, too. Besides, it put her to sleep. But I thought I'd outgrown it.”
“You don't make speeches. I didn't mean that.”
But he was very crestfallen during the remainder of the way, and rather silent. He wondered, that night before he went to bed, if he had been didactic to Lily Cardew. He had aired his opinions to her at length, he knew. He groaned as he took off his coat in his cold little room at the boarding house which lodged and fed him, both indifferently, for the sum of twelve dollars per week.
Jinx, the little hybrid dog, occupied the seat of his one comfortable chair. He eyed the animal somberly.
“Hereafter, old man,” he said, “when I feel a spell of oratory coming on, you will have to be the audience.” He took his dressing gown from a nail behind the door, and commenced to put it on. Then he took it off again and wrapped the dog in it.
“I can read in bed, which you can't,” he observed. “Only, I can't help thinking, with all this town to pick from, you might have chosen a fellow with two dressing gowns and two chairs.”
He was extremely quiet all the next day. Miss Boyd could hear him, behind the partition with its “Please Keep Out” sign, fussing with bottles and occasionally whistling to himself. Once it was the “Long, Long Trail,” and a moment later he appeared in his doorway, grinning.
“Sorry,” he said. “I've got in the habit of thinking to the fool thing. Won't do it again.”