“You make a picture—you two there!” called Kate Waddington from without. The transitory expression in his eyes—Eleanor saw it now with triumph—was that of one who has thrown a pearl away. But he followed.
Dining with Mark Heath in the Hotel Marseillaise that night, Bertram fell into a spell of musing, a visible melancholy uncommon in him; for his ill-humors, like his laughters, burned short and violent. Mark Heath—by this time he was growing into a point of view on his chum and room mate—remarked it with some amusement and more curiosity.
Mark was casting about for an opening, when Bertram anticipated him. Staring into the dingy wall of the Hotel Marseillaise, past the laborers, the outcasts, the French cabmen purring over their cabbage soup, he said in a tone of musings:
“When Bert Chester grows up and gets rich, he’ll take unto himself a wife. We’ll live in a big house in the Western Addition with a 122 bay frontage. It will be furnished with dinky old dull stuff, and those swell Japanese prints and paintings. And I’ll have two autos and a toy ranch in the country to play with. We’ll give little dances in the big hall downstairs. I’ll lead the opening dance with the missus, and then I’ll just take a dance or so with the best looking girls—the ones I take a special cotton to. I’ll have my home sweet home dance with the missus—” he fell again to musing.
“A man up a tree,” said Mark Heath, “would say you were in love.”
“I’ll be damned—I wonder if that ain’t the matter?” said Bertram Chester.