“Oh, I guess you’d make good all right. You’ve got brains and I’ve never caught you touching up your complexion.”
“Which isn’t any sign I don’t,” she laughed. “I’ve all the necessary articles right here in my sweater pocket.”
“Well, somebody has to use the talcum; we handle it in carload lots. It’s one of the Copeland-Farley specialties I used to brag about easiest when I bore the weighty sample-case down the line. It was a good stunt to ask the druggist to introduce me to some of the girls that’s always loafing round the soda-counter in country-town drug stores, and I’d hand ’em out a box and ask ’em to try it on right there. It cheered up the druggist and the girls would help me pull a bigger order than I’d get on my own hook. A party like that on a sleepy afternoon in a pill-shop would lift the sky-line considerable.”
“Well, if you saw me in a drug store wrestling with a chocolate sundae and had your sample-case open and were trying to coax an order out of a druggist, just how would you approach me?”
“I wouldn’t!” he responded readily. “I’d get your number on the quiet and walk past your house when your mother was sitting on the porch all alone, darning socks, and I’d beg her pardon and say that, having heard that her daughter was the most beautiful girl in town, Copeland-Farley had sent me all the way from the capital to ask her please to accept, with the house’s compliments, a gross of our Faultless Talcum. If mother didn’t ask me to supper, it would be a sign that I hadn’t put it over.”
“But if father appeared with a shotgun—”
“I’d tell him it was the closed season for drummers, and invite him down to the hotel for a game of billiards.”
“You think you always have the answer, don’t you?” she taunted.
“I don’t think it; I’ve got to know it!”
“Well, I haven’t seen you miss fire yet. My trouble is,” she deliberated, touching the water lightly with her hand, “that I don’t have the answer most of the time.”