“Pas si bête,” said the manager, who did his own adapting from the French.
“Well, you're scholar, and you're gentleman,” said Bartley. The indefinite articles would drop out, in spite of all his efforts to keep them in. “'N I want ask you what you do—to—ask—you—what—would—you—do,” he repeated, with painful exactness, but he failed to make the rest of the sentence perfect, and he pronounced it all in a word, “'fyour-wifelockyouout?”
“I'd take a walk,” said the manager.
“I'd bu'st the door in,” said the little man.
Bartley turned and gazed at him as if the little man were a much more estimable person than he had supposed. He passed his arm through the little man's, which the other had just crooked to lift his whiskey to his mouth. “Look here,” said Bartley, “tha's jus' what I told her. I want you to go home 'th me; I want t' introduce you to my wife.”
“All right,” answered the little man. “Don't care if I do.” He dropped his tumbler to the floor. “Hang it up, Charley, glass and all. Hang up this gentleman's nightcaps—my account. Gentleman asks me home to his house, I'll hang him—I'll get him hung,—well, fix it to suit yourself,—every time!”
They got themselves out of the door, and the manager said to the bar-keeper, who came round to gather up the fragments of the broken tumbler, “Think his wife will be glad to see 'em, Charley?”
“Oh, they'll be taken care of before they reach his house.”