"Ye'll be takin out yere lassie, nae doot," he said when this was done.
"Not on this," said Woody. He didn't want to sound ungrateful, but the money was just not enough.
"Laddie," said Worm, "I'm a man that knows a great deal aboot womenfolk. And there's naething truer aboot them than that if they really love ye, they'll be wanting ye to save yere money and not go splashing it around on them."
Woody wondered what kind of girl friends they had in Scotland when Worm was a boy. Mary Jane wasn't a gold digger. But she liked to be taken out now and again, and he didn't blame her for it. He looked at the long, pale length of Worm standing before him as solemn as a preacher and decided that he probably hadn't had any girl friends when he was serving his apprenticeship in Scotland. From what he could gather, his closest friends seemed to have been a kit of mechanic's tools and a book called Davie's Problems and Principles of Internal Combustion Engines.
There was just about time, now that Worm had failed to come through with a loan, to call up Mary Jane and see whether he could postpone their date. He hated to do it, because he suspected that Mary Jane had had her hair done or received some other kind of unnecessary and expensive beauty treatment in preparation for the evening.
He dialed her number, not knowing quite how he would put it, and was further distressed when she answered the phone right away. Almost her first statement was, "Oh, Woody, there's a movie based on one of Somerset Maugham's books at the Criton, and I'm just dying to see it. You ought to see it too. It got raves from the really good critics. It would do you a lot of good."
Woody groaned. Somerset Maugham. That meant that his instincts were correct and Mary Jane was intent upon an adult-type evening out.
"Gee," he said. "I don't think I can make it tonight, Mary Jane. I've, er ... well, something's happened."
It seemed to Woody that the temperature around him fell about ten degrees when he said that, and the slight silence that followed seemed to last about five years.
"What's happened?" asked Mary Jane, and Woody could have sworn that there was cold water trickling from the receiver which he held to his ear.