"Oh, hell.... Oh, I'm sorry. That just slipped."
"It shouldn't have slipped, you know. I'm afraid it can't be passed over so easily." Gertie might have been a bustling Joralemon school-teacher pleasantly bidding the dirty Ericson boy, "Now go and wash the little hands."
Carl said nothing. He was bored. He wished that he had not become entangled in their vague discussion of "temperament."
Even more brightly Gertie announced: "I'm afraid you're not in a very good humor this afternoon. I'm sorry that my plans don't interest you. Of course, I should be very temperamental if I expected you to apologize for cursing and swearing, so I think I'll just leave you here, and when you feel better——" She was infuriatingly cheerful. "——I should be pleased to have you call me up. Good-by, Carl, and I hope that your walk will do you good."
She turned into a footpath; left him muttering in tones of youthful injury, "Jiminy! I've done it now!"
He was in Joralemon.
A victoria drove by with a dowager who did not seem to be humbly courting the best set in Joralemon. A grin lightened Carl's face. He chuckled: "By golly! Gertie handled it splendidly! I'm to call up and be humble, and then—bing!—the least I can do is to propose and be led to the altar and teach a Sunday-school class at St. Orgul's for the rest of my life! Come hither, Hawk Ericson, let us hold council. Here's the way Gertie will dope it out, I guess. ('Eltruda!') I'll dine in solitary regret for saying 'hell'——No. First I'm to walk down-town, alone and busy repenting, and then I'll feed alone, and by eight o'clock I'll be so tired of myself that I'll call up and beg pretty. Rats! It's rotten mean to dope it out like that, but just the same——Me that have done what I've done—worried to death over one accidental 'hell'!... Hey there, you taxi!"
Grandly he rode through the Park, and in an unrepentant manner bowed to every pretty woman he saw, to the disapproval of their silk-hatted escorts.
He forgot the existence of Gertie Cowles and the Old Home Folks.
But he really could not afford a taxicab, and he had to make up for it by economy. At seven-thirty he gloomily entered Miggleton's Restaurant, on Forty-second Street, the least unbearable of the "Popular Prices—Tables for Ladies" dens, and slumped down at a table near the window. There were few diners. Carl was as much a stranger as on the morning when he had first invaded New York, to find work with an automobile company, and had passed this same restaurant; still was he a segregated stranger, despite the fact that, two blocks away, in the Aero Club, two famous aviators were agreeing that there had never been a more consistently excellent flight in America than Hawk Ericson's race from Chicago to New York.