of a Southern lady, the flower of modesty and the old aristocracy, doing such a thing as that?”
“Yes-s,” hissed Aunt Louise, her cackle subsiding, leaning intensely across the table and glaring at him, “and it suhved you wight! It suhved you wight! It suhved you wight! These things would nevah happen if you thought of any one’s convenience but yoah own. What wight did you have to put yoah baggage there? What wight?”
“Ah,” he replied, with a kind of precise snarl, profoundly contemptuous of her opinion, “you-don’t-know-what-you’re-talk-ing-about! What right? she says—Why all the right in the world,” he yelled. “Have you ever read the conditions enumerated upon the back of railway tickets concerning the transportation of baggage?”
“Suttinly not!” she retorted crisply. “One does not need to wead the backs of wailway tickets to learn how to behave like a civilized pusson!”
“Well, I will tell them to you,” said Uncle Bascom, licking his lips, and with a look of joy upon his face. And, at great length, with infinite gusto, lip-pursing, and legal pedantry of elocution, he would enumerate them all.
“And say, by the way, Eugene,” he would continue without a halt, “there is a very charming young lady who occasionally comes to my office (with her mother, of course) who is very anxious to meet you. She is a musician: she appears quite often in public. They live in Melrose, but they came, originally, I believe, from New Hampshire. Finest people in the world: no question about it,” his uncle said.
And suddenly alert, scenting adventure and seduction, the young man got the address from him immediately.
“Yes, my boy”—here Uncle Bascom fumbled through a mass of envelopes—“you may call her, without indiscretion, over the telephone at any time. I have spoken to her frequently about you: no doubt you’ll find much in common. Or, say!”—here a flash of inspiration aroused him to volcanic action—“I could call her now and let you talk to her.” And he plunged violently toward the telephone.
“No, no, no, no, no!” Eugene sprang after him and checked him. For he wanted to make his own appointment luxuriously in private, sealed darkly in a telephone booth, craftily to feel his way, speculating on the curve of the unseen hip by the sound of the voice; probing, with the most delicate innuendo, the depth and richness of the promise. He loathed all family intercession and interference: they placed, he felt, at the
