“You’ve been drinking,” said Gerald severely to me.
“Billy Goat’s won the two-thirty,” wheezed the little bent old man. His hat was the captain of Gerald’s hat.
One didn’t, perhaps, look one’s best in the middle of a removal. But Gerald, confound the man, looked positively healthy, taut, tempered, weathered. Ach, le sale type anglais! I told him that his sister had called. “On an Impulse,” I said.
Gerald stared at me, his cigarette half-way to his mouth. “Oh!” he said. “Oh!...”
“Here’s her telephone number,” I said. He didn’t take the slip of paper I held out.
“’Ere,” said the little bent old man, “I’ll give it ’im when he’s better.” Gerald lowered his cigarette, scowling at me pathetically. No one else would have known it was “pathetically.”
“Iris called hell!” he accused me. “How you lie! What?”
“Honest to God, Gerald!”
He flipped away his cigarette and dug his free hand into his pocket as though it was a weapon. Those deep eyes scowled at me, but I wondered what they saw.
“That beast,” he whispered, “oh, that beast....”