Just to show my own good-nature and my fearlessness of him, I invited the author to come to Flurry's with us, but he had an engagement with the other Underbunks.
There was a little trouble at supper, as Joshua's party took a table right next to ours, but on a plea of draughts I managed to change to a cozy corner far from this disagreeable company.
Everything passed off most delightfully. I had Mrs. Underbunk on my right and Mrs. Tattler on my left, with Constance Twitter across the table, between Tommy and Winthrop Jumpkin, 7th. Then I was in my best form. Mrs. Underbunk responded splendidly. She seemed to have no end of subjects of conversation, and never allowed any of those embarrassing pauses, but skipped lightly from one topic to another, till we touched life in its every phase.
Her maid was on hand to chaperon her back to the hotel, but it did seem to me that as we parted at the elevator she held my hand longer than convention absolutely required.
"I have learned much from you to-night," she said simply.
So this morning I am in high feather, though my appetite is as poor as ever.
A careful study of Mr. Mudison's pages, covering his life for some weeks following, does not reveal much of vital interest. He deals largely with matters that are purely personal. Here we find that he has changed his breakfast-food; again, that he has discovered that gin and champagne are not wholesome, and is keeping entirely to rye and plain water. Later we learn that, with a handicap of thirty points, he won the annual billiard tournament at the Ping-pong Club. His comments on the houses at which he has dined and on the people he has met there, are sometimes interesting as bits of gossip, but we are dealing only with matters of larger interest in his life. Such is his account of Roardika's début as Isolde, which forms the next chapter of his edited memoirs.