"Oh, thanks awfully," I said, realising as I said it the miserable inadequacy of the English language. At a crisis when I would have given a month's income to have said something neat, epigrammatic, suggestive, yet withal courteous and respectful, I could only find a hackneyed, unenthusiastic phrase which I should have used in accepting an invitation from a bore to lunch with him at his club.
"Of course you understand my friends—must be my father's friends."
"Yes," I said gloomily, "I suppose so."
"So you must not think me rude if I—I——"
"Cut me," said I, with masculine coarseness.
"Don't seem to see you," said she, with feminine delicacy, "when I am with my father. You will understand?"
"I shall understand."
"You see,"—she smiled—"you are under arrest, as Tom says."
Tom!
"I see," I said.