“B—”
“And golf tees!” he added, excitedly, as they took a seat in front atop the bus.
“Puns are a beginning at least,” she reflected.
“But how many kinds of tea are there, Istra?… Oh say, I hadn’t ought to—”
“Course; call me Istra or anything else. Only, you mustn’t call my bluff. What do I know about tea? All of us who play are bluffers, more or less, and we are ever so polite in pretending not to know the others are bluffing…. There’s lots of kinds of tea. In the New York Chinatown I saw once—Do you know Chinatown? Being a New-Yorker, I don’t suppose you do.”
“Oh yes. And Italiantown. I used to wander round there.”
“Well, down at the Seven Flowery Kingdoms Chop Suey and American Cooking there’s tea at five dollars a cup that they advertise is grown on ‘cloud-covered mountain-tops.’ I suppose when the tops aren’t cloud-covered they only charge three dollars a cup…. But, serious-like, there’s really only two kinds of teas—those you go to to meet the man you love and ought to hate, and those you give to spite the women you hate but ought to—hate! Isn’t that lovely and complicated? That’s playing. With words. My aged parent calls it ‘talking too much and not saying anything.’ Note that last—not saying anything! It’s one of the rules in playing that mustn’t be broken.”
He understood that better than most of the things she said. “Why,” he exclaimed, “it’s kind of talking sideways.”
“Why, yes. Of course. Talking sideways. Don’t you see now?”
Gallant gentleman as he was, he let her think she had invented the phrase.