"Rewrite it nothing! It's the goods."
"Garroway!"
"I said New York was full of lepers, and so it is. Nasty, oily, lop-eared lepers that creep up to a fellow and sell him scabrous stock that's not worth the paper it's printed on. That poem is right, and I don't alter a word of it. No, sir!"
Hamilton Beamish shook his head.
"One of these days, Garroway, love will awaken in your heart and you will change your views."
"One of these days," replied the policeman frigidly, "I shall meet that red-faced guy again, and I'll change his face. It won't be only my heart that'll be aching by the time I've finished with him."
CHAPTER EIGHT
George Finch's wedding-day dawned fair and bright. The sun beamed down as if George by getting married were doing it a personal favour. The breezes, playing about him, brought with them a faint but well-defined scent of orange-blossom. And from the moment when they had finished the practical business of getting outside their early worm, all the birds for miles around had done nothing but stand in the trees singing Mendelssohn's Wedding March. It was the sort of day to make a man throw out his chest and say "Tra-la!": and George did so.
Delightful, he reflected, as he walked up from the inn after lunch, to think that in a few short hours he and Molly would be bowling away together in a magic train, each revolution of its wheels taking them nearer to the Islands of the Blest and—what was almost more agreeable—farther away from Mrs. Waddington.
It would be idle to deny that in the past three weeks George Finch had found his future mother-in-law something of a trial. Her consistent failure to hide the pain which the mere sight of him so obviously caused her was damping to an impressionable young man. George was not vain, and if Molly's stepmother had been content to look at him simply as if she thought he was something the cat had dragged out of the ash-can, he could have borne up. But Mrs. Waddington went further. Her whole attitude betrayed her belief that the cat, on inspecting George, had been disappointed. Seeing what it had got, her manner suggested, it had given him the look of chagrin which cats give when conscious of effort wasted and had gone elsewhere to try again. A lover, counting the days until the only girl in the world shall be his, will see sweetness and light in practically everything: but George Finch, despite his most earnest endeavours, had been compelled to draw the line at Mrs. Waddington.