“I--I'm awf'ly sorry. I didn't mean it, you know,” said Yeere, apologetically.
“There'll be no holding you,” continued the old stager, grimly. “Climb down, Otis--climb down, and get all that beastly affectation knocked out of you with fever! Three thousand a month wouldn't support it.”
Yeere repeated the incident to Mrs. Hauksbee. He had come to look upon her as his Mother Confessor.
“And you apologized!” she said. “Oh, shame! I hate a man who apologizes. Never apologize for what your friend called 'side.' Never! It's a man's business to be insolent and overbearing until he meets with a stronger. Now, you bad boy, listen to me.”
Simply and straightforwardly, as the 'rickshaw loitered round Jakko, Mrs. Hauksbee preached to Otis Yeere the Great Gospel of Conceit, illustrating it with living pictures encountered during their Sunday afternoon stroll.
“Good gracious!” she ended, with the personal argument, “you'll apologize next for being my attache?”
“Never!” said Otis Yeere. “That's another thing altogether. I shall always be”--
“Safe for the present,” she said to herself.
“But I'm afraid I have grown conceited. Like Jeshurun, you know. When he waxed fat, then he kicked. It's the having no worry on one's mind and the Hill air, I suppose.”
“Hill air, indeed!” said Mrs. Hauksbee to herself. “He'd have been hiding in the Club till the last day of his leave, if I hadn't discovered him.” And aloud--“Why shouldn't you be? You have every right to.”
“Oh, hundreds of things. I'm not going to waste this lovely afternoon by explaining; but I know you have. What was that heap of manuscript you showed me about the grammar of the aboriginal--what's their names?”
“Gullals. A piece of nonsense. I've far too much work to do to bother over Gullals now. You should see my District. Come down with your husband some day and I'll show you round. Such a lovely place in the Rains! A sheet of water with the railway-embankment and the snakes sticking out, and, in the summer, green flies and green squash. The people would die of fear if you shook a dogwhip at 'em. But they know you're forbidden to do that, so they conspire to make your life a burden to you. My District's worked by some man at Darjiling, on the strength of u native pleader's false reports. Oh, it's a heavenly place!”