"Everything going to the bowwows, as usual, dear friend?"
"As usual. Oh, read your paper, Tommy! You know well enough I'm not one of those tail-wagging imbeciles who wakes up in the morning singing like a half-witted lark. Why should I, with this taste in my mouth, and the laundress using vitriol, and Henry sneering at my cigars?" He yawned and cast his eyes toward the ceiling. "Besides, there's too much gilt all over this club! There's too much everywhere. Half the world is stucco, the rest rococo. Where's that Martini I bid for?"
Kerns, undisturbed, applied himself to cocoa and toasted muffins. Grapefruit and an amber-tinted accessory were brought for the other and sampled without mirth. However, a little later Gatewood said: "Well, are you going to read your paper all day?"
"What you need," said Kerns, laying the paper aside, "is a job—any old kind would do, dear friend."
"I don't want to make any more money."
"I don't want you to. I mean a job where you'd lose a lot and be scared into thanking Heaven for carfare. You're a nice object for the breakfast table!"
"Bridge. I will be amiable enough by noon time."
"Yes, you're endurable by noon time, as a rule. When you're forty you may be tolerated after five o'clock; when you're fifty your wife and children might even venture to emerge from the cellar after dinner—"
"Wife!"
"I said wife," replied Kerns, as he calmly watched his man.