"Oh, bless my soul!" remarked Fogg, as he surveyed himself in the mirror, "you have ruined Draper's Melnotte blouse. What the blazes did you inundate me with that confounded red stuff for?"
Handy looked at him seriously for a minute, and then replied: "There's gratitude for you. Ah! well, it's the way of the world all over. Help a man to get out of a scrape, and do you think he will appreciate your meritorious act? Not even a little bit, and the chances are he will begin to find fault with your manner of saving him. Darn it, man! that fiddler, costumer, and stage carpenter would never have swallowed an ordinary, common garden, every-day fit, but when they saw the gore, the blood-red gore, they caved-in. It was a demonstration in red, and it did the work. And now, then, when you are going to have your next testimonial you can get someone else to manage your fits. Come, Smith. Good-night, Fogg!"
CHAPTER XV
"Come what, come may,
Time and the hour runs through the roughest day."
—Macbeth.
Never be it said that fate itself could awe the soul of Fogg. Next day, when Handy called on him, he found his irrepressible friend preparing to saunter forth. That he failed to appreciate the humiliation of the previous evening there was not the slightest reason to believe. His restless spirit, however, was too strong to compel him willingly to remain indoors. He was nothing, if not active. In fact, he was miserable unless when employed in some optimistic scheme. No matter how impracticable it might appear to others, he invariably perceived a means to circumvent its difficulties. He believed in taking the biggest kind of chance on the smallest possibility of success. He was a remarkably unique proposition.
"Hello, hello!" exclaimed Handy. "What's all this about? Up and dressed. Say, don't you know you're a sick man?" Fogg gazed at his friend more in surprise than anger, and turned his head aside. "Did you hear what I said? You don't mean to tell me that you are going out in the streets to-day?"
"Why not?" replied Fogg.
"After what took place last night?"