This was a familiar gambit, and Philip gave his usual reply.
"Anything doing at present? Anything fresh?"
"I wonder," he said musingly, "if Romance could ever really find a lurking-place in that gearless, valveless little heart!"
"Afraid not," said Philip. "Romance gives old fossils like me the go-by."
"Don't talk rot of that kind, Phil," replied the boy quickly. "Any woman would be proud to marry you. Fool if she wasn't!" he added, with real sincerity.
Philip responded by waving his glass in his friend's direction.
"Mr. Rendle, your health and sentiment!" he remarked gravely. He drank; laid down the glass; and sat up.
"And now, my son Timothy," he remarked briskly, "get it off your chest! Own up! Who is she? When do the banns go up--eh?"
"Get what off my chest?" enquired Tim, with a great appearance of surprise.
"This great secret. Cough it up! Who is the lady?"
One of Philip's greatest virtues in the eyes of Timothy was that he never, under any circumstances, ended that particular question with "this time." But he was genuinely surprised at Philip's penetration.
"Great Scott! It must be written all over me if you can spot it, old Bartimæus!" he said, not altogether displeased. "Yes, you are right. It has happened at last."
"It comes to us all, sooner or later," remarked Philip tactfully.
"And I am going," announced Tim with great firmness, "to bring it off this very night."
"Quarter to ten," he said. "A bit late to begin a job of that magnitude to-night, isn't it? Are you going to apply personally, or by letter?"
"What's that?" enquired Timothy, emerging from a rapturous reverie.
"Letter?" exclaimed Tim with infinite scorn--"a letter? Write? Write a letter? My sainted aunt, _write_?" He gazed indignantly upon the automaton before him that called itself a man. "My dear old relic of the Stone Age--"
"In the Stone Age," observed the relic, "they couldn't write."
Timothy made reference to the Stone Age which was neither seemly nor relevant, and continued:--
"Do you expect me to sit down and write--write to _her_--upon such a subject as that? Write--with a three-and-nine-penny fountain pen, on Silurian notepaper at a shilling a packet? It's not _done_, dear old soul; it's simply not _done_!"