“Oh!” says he, “I didn’t finish telling you about my fool idea. I’ve been getting one every spring, the best I could pick out in Chicago, and carrying it up there on the knoll where Marthy is—and just leaving it. Go on now, Mr. McCabe; laugh if you want to. I won’t mind. I can almost laugh at myself. Of course, Marthy’s beyond caring for hats now. Still, I like to leave ’em there; and I like to think perhaps she does know, after all. So—so I want to get that purple one, providing it would be the right shade. What do you say?”
Talk about your nutty propositions, eh? But honest, I didn’t feel even like crackin’ a smile.
“Daggett,” says I, “you’re a true sport, even if you have got a few bats in the loft. Let’s go back and get quotations on the lid.”
“I wish,” says he, “I could see it tried on that manicure young woman first. Suppose we go down and bring her up?”
“What makes you think she’ll come?” says I.
“Oh, I guess she will,” says he, quiet and thoughtful. “We’ll try, anyway.”
And say, right there I got a new line on him. I could almost frame up how it was he’d started in as a bacon borrowin’ homesteader, and got to be the John D. of his county. But I could see he was up against a new deal this trip. And as it was time for me to be gettin’ down towards 42d-st. anyway, I goes along. As we strikes the hotel barber shop I hangs up on the end of the cigar counter while Daggett looks around for the young woman who’d put the chappy polish on his nails.
“That’s her,” says he, pointing out a heavyweight Titian blonde in the far corner, and over he pikes.
I couldn’t help admirin’ the nerve of him; for of all the l’ongoline queens I ever saw, she’s about the haughtiest. Maybe you can throw on the screen a picture of a female party with a Lillian Russell shape, hair like Mrs. Leslie Carter’s, and an air like a twelve-dollar cloak model showin’ off a five hundred-dollar lace dress to a bookmaker’s bride.
Just as Daggett tiptoes up she’s pattin’ down some of the red puffs that makes the back of her head look like a burnin’ oil tank, and she swings around languid and scornful to see who it is that dares butt in on her presence. All the way she recognizes him is by a little lift of the eyebrows.