“You’ll be calling me ‘Una’ next, and think how shocked the girls will be.”
“Oh no. I’ve quite decided to call you ‘Goldie.’ Sounds nice and sentimental. But for heaven’s sake go on telling me why you like me. That isn’t a hackneyed subject.”
“Oh, I’ve never known anybody with fire, except maybe S. Herbert Ross, and he—he—”
“He blobs around.”
“Yes, something like that. I don’t know whether you are ever going to do anything with your fire, but you do have it, Mr. Babson!”
“I’ll probably get fired with it.... Say, do you read Omar?”
In nothing do the inarticulate “million hall-room boys who want to be geniuses,” the ordinary, unshaved, not over-bathed, ungrammatical young men of any American city, so nearly transcend provincialism as in an enthusiasm over their favorite minor cynic, Elbert Hubbard or John Kendrick Bangs, or, in Walter Babson’s case, Mr. Fitzgerald’s variations on Omar. Una had read Omar as a pretty poem about roses and murmurous courts, but read him she had; and such was Walter’s delight in that fact that he immediately endowed her with his own ability to enjoy cynicism. He jabbed at the menu with a fork and glowed and shouted, “Say, isn’t it great, that quatrain about ‘Take the cash and let the credit go’?”
While Una beamed and enjoyed her boy’s youthful enthusiasm. Mother of the race, ancient tribal woman, medieval chatelaine, she was just now; kin to all the women who, in any age, have clapped their hands to their men’s boasting.
She agreed with him that “All these guys that pride themselves on being gentlemen—like in English novels—are jus’ the same as the dubs you see in ordinary life.”
And that it was not too severe an indictment to refer to the advertising-manager as “S. Herbert Louse.”