“My dear,” says I, “the newspaper reviewers couldn’t understand ’em. Be kind to them for it. Ye can’t make a silk purse out a sow’s ear any more than ye can make black pearls out of lollypops. Could it be, Timothy McShanus would be driving his own motor-car and not rejuiced to the back seat of the omnibus. ’Tis a strange world with more wrong than right in it.”
“You like my pearls, then?” she asked.
I said they were almost worthy of her wearing them.
“Papa bought them in Paris,” she ran on, as natural as could be. “They’re not black, you know, but bronze. I don’t care a bit about them myself—I like things that sparkle.”
“Like your eyes,” cried I, searching for the truth in them. For sure, I could have laughed aloud just now at my friend Fabos’s tale of her. “Like your eyes when you were dancing a while back with a doctor of my acquaintance.”
She flushed a hair’s-breadth, and turned her head away.
“Oh, Dr. Fabos? Do you know him, then?”
“We have been as brothers for a matter of ten short years.”
“Is he killing people in London, did you say?”
“No such honourable employment. He’s just a fine, honest, independent gentleman. Ye’ve nothing much richer in America, maybe. The man who says a word against him has got to answer Timothy McShanus. Let him make his peace with heaven before he does so.”