“She did remember you!” she cried out. “How delightful! I don’t see how she ever got onto you”--she made the slang her own--“in the first place, and she must have worked hard to be sure of you since.”
Verrian hung up his coat and put his suit-case behind his chair, the porter having put it where he could not wheel himself vis-a-vis with the girl. “She took all the time there was,” he answered. “I got my invitation only the day before yesterday, and if I had been in more demand, or had a worse conscience--”
“Oh, do say worse conscience! It’s so much more interesting,” the girl broke in.
“--I shouldn’t have the pleasure of going to Seasands with you now,” he concluded, and she gave her laugh. “Do I understand that simply my growing fame wouldn’t have prevailed with her?”
Anything seemed to make Miss Macroyd laugh. “She couldn’t have cared about that, and she wouldn’t have known. You may be sure that it was a social question with her after the personal question was settled. She must have liked your looks!” Again Miss Macroyd laughed.
“On that side I’m invulnerable. It’s only a literary vanity to be soothed or to be wounded that I have,” Verrian said.
“Oh, there wouldn’t be anything personal in her liking your looks. It would be merely deciding that personally you would do,” Miss Macroyd laughed, as always, and Verrian put on a mock seriousness in asking:
“Then I needn’t be serious if there should happen to be anything so Westangular as a Mr. Westangle?”
“Oh, I believe so. But not probably at Seasands.”
“Yes. Every other name had been used, and she couldn’t say Soundsands.”
“Then where would the Mr. Westangular part more probably be found?”
“Oh, in Montana or Mesopotamia, or any of those places. Don’t you know about him? How ignorant literary people can be! Why, he was the Amalgamated Clothespin. You haven’t heard of that?”
She went on to tell him, with gay digressions, about the invention which enabled Westangle to buy up the other clothes-pins and merge them in his own--to become a commercial octopus, clutching the throats of other clothespin inventors in the tentacles of the Westangle pin. “But he isn’t in clothespins now. He’s in mines, and banks, and steamboats, and railroads, and I don’t know what all; and Mrs. Westangle, the second of her name, never was in clothespins.”