“About whom? Alice? That’s absurd,—perfectly absurd! Why, she thinks me an idiot because I don’t jabber like one of you lawyers. All women do. Unless you gabble, gabble, gabble, you are a fool. They are all alike. A woman is always a woman; a man may be a philosopher.”
“My dear boy, your anxieties are misplaced.”
“Who spoke of anxieties?”
“Don’t you—a philosopher—know that talkative girls prefer taciturn men? I am perfectly certain that Alice thinks your silence admirable,—dotes on it, in fact.”
“Jack-Whack,” said Charley, rising up in bed and—rare sight—though I felt rather than saw or heard it—shaking with laughter, “you are the most immeasurable, the most unspeakable, the most—”
Down came a pillow on my head. Down it came again and again as I attempted to rise. We grappled, and for a few minutes no two school-boys could have had a more boisterous romp.
“Now just look at this bed,” said Charley, out of breath; “see what you have done!” And he fell back exhausted, as well with the struggle as from his unwonted laughter. “We have not had such a tussle since I used to tease you as a boy. Whew! Let’s go to sleep now.”
“She’s a bewitching creature.”
“Idiot!” said Charley, turning his back to me with a laugh, and settling himself for the night.
“Poor fellow! Well, he got me to pronounce her name, at any rate, by his manœuvring.”