“Be serious, can’t you?” he said. “I am.”
“Manifestly absurd,” grinned Merton. “Get your banjo and sing that song about the chap they hired to get into the cage with the lion. You know—the one with the beller in the chorus.”
“That’s better than your fourth-dimension joke,” urged Fredericks. “Go on.”
Swinnerton was experiencing what was rare with him, anger.
“Do you people imagine,” he asked, “that because a man goes about six days in the seven making a silly ass of himself for the happiness of humanity that he pines to be placed beyond the pale of all that is beautiful and wholesome in life? I ask you.”
His round eyes snapped. His quirks of hair fairly trembled. Secretly the three were wary of Swinnerton. They feared some colossal hoax, some trap. The suspicion that he was serious did not come.
“Postulate one,” growled Merton, guardedly. “Grind out the logic. We do not think this thing.”
“If a good woman is blind enough to intrust her heart to me, is there any reason why I, of all men, shouldn’t accept it?”
“I should say not,” chuckled Fredericks, pleased with the possibilities of his own idea, “not when you can offer her an existence which is a breathing enactment of all for which the Sunday supplements are read. ‘My dear, allow me to present my esteemed confrère of the colored page, Dippy Dick, Mrs. Swinnerton. And this is Little Nemo.’”
The anger was leaving Swinnerton’s red face. These men did not believe him, and only because he was he. His twinkling eyes dulled, his round mouth straightened. He rose, and something in his drooping attitude arrested Fredericks.