"What?" I questioned, when she held her idea suspended there.
"I don’t believe I’ll tell you. There are things a man had better find out for himself; do you know it?"
"I sha’n’t find out anything for myself," I said, "because—because I’ve given up the fight."
She stared at me with eyes wide open in incredulous horror.
"You’ve given up the fight for a peach like that! Well, of all the poor boobs!" Leaning back in her chair she scanned my appearance. "I thought there was something wrong when I saw you got up like that. You can beat Walter Haines, the quick-change man, when it comes to clothes, believe _me_. What have you got on now?"
I explained that it had been my Sunday suit during the time I had been working at Creed & Creed’s.
"Then for Gawd’s sake go and take it off, before we start for the theater. I’ll wait for you here. You can go and come in a taxi. I’ve been looking at you all along, and thinking it must be the latest wrinkle from Boston. Boston _has_ funny ways, now hasn’t it? And so—"
It was here that I ventured on the exposition of my new scheme of life, getting no appreciation beyond the question as to my sanity quoted above. Later in the evening as, after the theater, I drove her back to Miss Flowerdew’s in a taxi, she summed up the situation thus:
"Look-a-here! I never did take stock in that bum story of your being a quitter on the battlefield; but now I sure will if you walk out and hand the show over to Dick Stroud. Why, he’s worth two of you! Look how he sticks! He’ll get _me_ one of these days, just by his sticking, if I’m not careful; and when it comes to a woman like that— Why, I’m ashamed to go round with such a guy. And say, the next time you ask me to dinner, you’ll not be got up like the bogie-man dressed for his wife’s funeral. You’ll look like you did the other day in Boston, or the first time I saw you, or it will be nix on little Lydia."
Drinkwater’s tone was similar and yet different. It was different in that while his premises as to "sticking" coincided with Lydia’s, his conclusions were not the same.
Perhaps he was not the same Drinkwater. More than two years having passed since I had seen him, I found in him more than two years of development. A crude boy when last we had met, association with a man like Averill, combined with his own instinct for growth, had made him something of a man of the world not the less sympathetic for his honest pug-face and his blindness. The fact that he asked me to dine with him at his university club was an indication of progress in itself.