‘Think so?—Perhaps you’re right. I’d be safe to make a mess of it, and then, if she were to see me at it, it’d be the devil! ’Pon my word, I’ve been wishing, lately, I was clever.’
He rubbed his nose with the rim of his eyeglass, looking the most comically disconsolate figure.
‘Put black care behind you, Percy!—buck up, my boy! The division’s over—you are free—now we’ll go “on the fly.”’
And we did ‘go on the fly.’
CHAPTER XVI.
ATHERTON’S MAGIC VAPOUR
I bore him off to supper at the Helicon. All the way in the cab he was trying to tell me the story of how he proposed to Marjorie,—and he was very far from being through with it when we reached the club. There was the usual crowd of supperites, but we got a little table to ourselves, in a corner of the room, and before anything was brought for us to eat he was at it again. A good many of the people were pretty near to shouting, and as they seemed to be all speaking at once, and the band was playing, and as the Helicon supper band is not piano, Percy did not have it quite all to himself, but, considering the delicacy of his subject, he talked as loudly as was decent,—getting more so as he went on. But Percy is peculiar.
‘I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to tell her,—over and over again.’
‘Have you now?’
‘Yes, pretty near every time I met her,—but I never seemed to get quite to it, don’t you know.’
‘How was that?’