“Oh, that’s all right,” he laughed. “I just left it with my uncle over night. My mother won’t give me a red cent when I ask her—thinks I ought to eat at home or beat it for the country, now college’s closed—but she gives it to me all right—with tears, Marion—when she sees me next day without my coat. So come along.”
My feelings were mingled. If I did not go with him, I knew he would spend it all on drink. Besides, he had pawned his coat for me, and I felt it would be ungrateful to refuse to go with him now.
Jimmy ordered us a splendid supper, oysters, a big steak, beer; but it would have tasted better if I had not known about that overcoat, and I almost cried when we got out to the street, and he had to turn the collar of his coat up.
XXX
THE following night Jimmy turned up sure enough, not only with his overcoat, but, as he said, “the price of another bang-out.”
He said his mother had wept when she saw him “shivering,” and “you better believe no one ever shivered better than I did,” said Jimmy.
So I went to supper again with Jimmy. When we were sitting at the table, and he started to order beer for me, I said:
“Now, look here, Jimmy, I’ll eat supper with you, but I won’t drink with you, and that’s all there is to it.”
“Be a sport, Marion.”
“I don’t pretend to be a sport,” I replied, “and anyway in Montreal that means to shoot or skate or snowshoe or toboggan. Here when you say ‘sport’ you mean to drink a lot of liquor. I think it’s horrid.”