Henry's writing always startled you a little. Words fairly flowed through his pencil, long words, striking words. He had the word sense; this when writing. In speech he remained just about where he had been all through his teens, loose of diction, slurring and eliding and using slang as did most of the Middle-Westerners among whom he had always lived, and, like them, swallowing his tongue down his throat.
Humphrey initialed the copy, tossed it into the devil's basket, turned to a pile of proofs, paused as if recollecting something, picked up the copy again, glanced rapidly through it, and turned on his assistant.
'Look here, Hen,' he remarked, 'you don't tell what they sang, either of 'em. Or who were among those present.'
Henry was reading his little book at the moment, and fumbling at his moustache. A mournful object.
He turned now, with a start, and stared, wide-eyed, at Humphrey. His lips parted, but he didn't speak. A touch of colour appeared in his cheeks.
Then, as abruptly, he went limp in his chair.
'I thought she left a list here and a programme,' he said, eyes now on the floor.
Humphrey's practised eye ran swiftly over the double row of pigeonholes before him. 'Right you are!' he exclaimed.
It was a quarter past eleven that night when Humphrey scrawled his last 'O.K.'; stretched out his long form in his swivel chair; yawned; said, 'Well, that's done, thank God!'; and hummed and tapped out on his bare desk the refrain of a current song:—
'But you'd look sweet