"For Heaven's sake, Jack——"
"Sure. I'm through with 'em all. I'm wise to the sex. That was merely a word picture. I'm talking like a writer, that's all. That's how you boobs talk, isn't it, Karl?"
"Always," said Westguard gravely.
"Me for Mrs. Leeds," remarked O'Hara frankly. "I'd ask her to marry me on the drop of a hat."
"Well, I'll drop no hat for you!" said Lacy. "And there'll be plenty of lunatics in this town who'll go madder than you or me before they forget Mrs. Leeds. Wait! Town is going to sit up and take notice when this new planet swims into its social ken. How's that epigram, Karl?"
Westguard said thoughtfully: "There'll be notoriety, too, I'm afraid. If nobody knows her everybody knows about that wretched boy she married."
Quarren added: "I have always understood that the girl did not want to marry him. It was her mother's doings."
O'Hara scowled. "I also have heard that the mother engineered it.... What was Mrs. Leeds's name? I forget——"
"Strelsa Lanark," said Quarren who never forgot anything.
"Ugh," grunted Westguard. "Fancy a mother throwing her daughter at the head of a boy like Reggie Leeds!—as vicious and unclean a little whelp as ever—Oh, what's the use?—and de mortius nihil—et cetera, cock-a-doodle-do!"