Now while Staff was receiving this impression, Mr. Iff looked sharply round; their glances crossed. Primarily embarrassed to be caught rudely staring, Staff was next and thoroughly shocked to detect a distinct if momentary eclipse of one of Mr. Iff's pale blue eyes. Bluntly, openly, deliberately, Mr. Iff winked at Mr. Staff, and then, having accomplished his amazement and discomfiture, returned promptly, twinkling, to the baiting of his clerk.
Mr. Iff enquired in simple surprise: "Do you really care to know?"
"Oh, well--if I must! But, mind you, strictly as man to man: you may write me down a freeborn American citizen, entitled to vote and more 'n half white."
"Oh!" The clerk wrote; then, bored, resumed: "Married or single, please?"
"Honestly--neither married nor unmarried."
But here Staff's clerk touched the exasperated catechist on the shoulder and said something inaudible. The response, while equally inaudible, seemed to convey a sense of profound personal shock. Staff was conscious that Mr. Iff's clerk glanced reproachfully in his direction, as if to suggest that he wouldn't have believed it of him.
Divining that he and Mr. Iff were bargaining for the same accommodations, Staff endeavoured to assume an attitude of distinguished obliviousness to the entire proceeding; and would have succeeded but for the immediate and impatient action of Mr. Iff.
That latter, seizing the situation, glanced askance at dignified Mr. Staff, then smiled a whimsical smile, cocked his small head to one side and approached him with an open and ingenuous air.
"If it's only a question of which berth," said he, "I'm quite willing to forfeit my option on the lower, Mr. Staff."
"Oh, lord, man!" said Iff tolerantly--"as if your portrait hadn't been published more times than you can remember!--as if all the world were unaware of Benjamin Staff, novelist!"
There was subtle flattery in this; and flattery (we are told) will warm the most austere of authors--which Staff was not. He said "Oh!" and smiled his slow, wry smile; and Mr. Iff, remarking these symptoms of a thaw with interest and encouragement, pressed his point.
"I don't mind an upper, really--only chose the lower because the choice was mine, at the moment. If you prefer it--"