Archie goggled dumbly. She dived at a table, and picked up a magazine, pointing to one of the advertisement pages.
"Read!" she cried. "Read it aloud."
And in a shaking voice Archie read:
You think you are perfectly well, don't you? You wake up in the
morning and spring out of bed and say to yourself that you have
never been better in your life. You're wrong! Unless you are
avoiding coffee as you would avoid the man who always tells you
the smart things his little boy said yesterday, and drinking
SAFETY FIRST MOLASSINE
for breakfast, you cannot be
Perfectly Well.
It is a physical impossibility. Coffee contains an appreciable
quantity of the deadly drug caffeine, and therefore——
"I wrote that," she said. "And I wrote the advertisement of the Spiller Baby Food on page ninety-four, and the one about the Preeminent Breakfast Sausage on page eighty-six. Oh, Archie, dear, the torments I have been through, fearing that you would some day find me out and despise me. I couldn't help it. I had no private means, and I didn't make enough out of my poetry to keep me in hats. I learned to write advertisements four years ago at a correspondence school, and I've been doing them ever since. And now I don't mind your knowing, now that you have told me this perfectly splendid news. Archie!"
She rushed into his arms like someone charging in for a bowl of soup at a railway station buffet. And I drifted out. It seemed to me that this was a scene in which I was not on. I sidled to the door, and slid forth. They didn't notice me. My experience is that nobody ever does—much.
THE TEST CASE
Well-meaning chappies at the club sometimes amble up to me and tap me on the wishbone, and say "Reggie, old top,"—my name's Reggie Pepper—"you ought to get married, old man." Well, what I mean to say is, it's all very well, and I see their point and all that sort of thing; but it takes two to make a marriage, and to date I haven't met a girl who didn't seem to think the contract was too big to be taken on.
Looking back, it seems to me that I came nearer to getting over the home-plate with Ann Selby than with most of the others. In fact, but for circumstances over which I had no dashed control, I am inclined to think that we should have brought it off. I'm bound to say that, now that what the poet chappie calls the first fine frenzy has been on the ice for awhile and I am able to consider the thing calmly, I am deuced glad we didn't. She was one of those strong-minded girls, and I hate to think of what she would have done to me.