Ellery looked around at his fellow passengers, contentedly munching
their peanuts and conversing in broad English flavored with Norse. They
were a good-natured assemblage, who choked and snorted and chuckled and
whinnied in their laughter. Norris' eyes were caught by one girl,
conspicuously because plainly dressed. As she turned her profile, he
glanced at Dick. Dick too was staring at her, and even while Ellery eyed
him, he raised his hat and bowed gravely, with a deferential air that
became him.
"So," exclaimed Norris under his breath, "that was why we tore like
madmen to catch this boat!"
"It would have been a pity to lose it," Dick responded innocently. "It
is a delicious bit of scenery from here to the fort. I wanted you to see
it."
"Pink and white scenery with yellow curls," jeered Ellery.
Dick made no reply and Ellery went on.
"She has a young man already. You can't go and take her away from him.
That wouldn't be playing fair."
"The man with her is an oaf. He has a loose mouth that wabbles when he
opens it to pick his teeth."
"So you think that though you may not snatch her bodily, you may make
her wish to be with you instead of with him, and that the wish will lie
fallow in her heart. Dick, you are a student of human nature," Ellery
said, half amused, half irritated.
"I dare say he is a gentleman at heart. Oafs always are."
"What you really do," Ellery continued, "is to make her uncomfortable
and conscious of his clothes and his sprawl. She flushed when she saw
you, and she has been sitting stiffly ever since."
"Oh, drop it, Norris."
Ellery shrugged his shoulders.
"I don't know what you want to do it for," he said. "You're a queer
combination, Dick, of the whole-souled reformer and the abject goose."
"Nothing inconsistent about being a philanthropist and a philogynist. By
Jove! She's pretty in her malaise, pink, and pecking like a little
wren at her oaf. Ellery, it's a brute of a shame that such as she should
be cast before him--she, a fine lacy creature who shows her breeding
through it all."
"How much are you in earnest?"
"There you go again!" Dick turned on his friend with a kind of
exasperation. "You belong to that period of social development when they
ask a man's intentions if he looks twice at the girl he dances with. I
don't have to be in earnest, thank Heaven! But when I get a chance to
look at anything so lovely as that girl, I mean to do it, just as I look
at a flower or a picture. I don't mean to lose all the delicious froth
of life. Do you happen to know her first name?"