“You do have to furnish a diagram, though.”
“Yes? You’re not usually stupid. Whether you try for it or not—and I think there’s a dash of the theatrical in your make-up—you’re a picturesque sort of animal. And I—well, I help out the picture; make you the more conspicuous. It isn’t your good looks alone—you’re handsome as the devil, you know, Ban,” she twinkled at him—“nor the super-tailored effect which you pretend to despise, nor your fame as a gun-man, though that helps a lot.... I’ll give you a bit of tea-talk: two flappers at The Plaza. ‘Who’s that wonderful-looking man over by the palm?’—‘Don’t you know him? Why, that’s Mr. Banneker.’—‘Who’s he; and what does he do? Have I seen him on the stage?’—‘No, indeed! I don’t know what he does; but he’s an ex-ranchman and he held off a gang of river-pirates on a yacht, all alone, and killed eight or ten of them. Doesn’t he look it!’”
“I don’t go to afternoon teas,” said the subject of this sprightly sketch, sulkily.
“You will! If you don’t look out. Now the same scene several years hence. Same flapper, answering same question: ‘Who’s Banneker? Oh, a reporter or something, on one of the papers.’ Et voilà tout!”
“Suppose you were with me at the Plaza, as an asset, several years hence?”
“I shouldn’t be—several years hence.”
Banneker smiled radiantly. “Which I am to take as fair warning that, unless I rise above my present lowly estate, that waxing young star, Miss Raleigh, will no longer—”
“Ban! What right have you to think me a wretched little snob?”
“None in the world. It’s I that am the snob, for even thinking about it. Just the same, what you said about ‘only a reporter or something’ struck in.”
“But in a few years from now you won’t be a reporter.”