"I'm sorry," said Dinky-Dunk, looking so crestfallen that for a moment I in turn felt almost sorry for him.
"Isn't it rather late for that?" I reminded him.
"Yes, I suppose it is," he admitted, with a disturbing new note of humility. Then he looked up at me, almost defiantly. "But you need my help."
It was masterful man, once more asserting himself. It was a trivial misstep, but a fatal one. It betrayed, at a flash, his entire misjudgment of me, of my feelings, of what I was and what I intended to be.
"I'm afraid I've rather outlived that period of Bashi-Bazookism," I coolly and quietly explained to my lord and master. "You may have the good luck to be confronting me when I seem to be floored. I've been hailed out, it's true. But that has happened to other people, and they seem to have survived. And there are worse calamities, I find, than the loss of a crop."
"Are you referring to anything that I have done?" asked Dinky-Dunk, with a slightly belligerent look in his eye.
"If the shoe fits, put it on," I observed.
"But there are certain things I want to explain," he tried to argue, with the look of a man confronted by an overdraft on his patience.
"Somebody has said that a friend," I reminded him, "is a person to whom one need never explain. And any necessity for explanation, you see, removes us even from the realm of friendship."
"But, hang it all, I'm your husband," protested my obtuse and somewhat indignant interlocutor.
"We all have our misfortunes," I found the heart, or rather the absence of heart, to remark.
"I'm afraid this isn't a very good beginning," said Dinky-Dunk, his dignity more ruffled than ever.
"It's not a beginning at all," I reminded him. "It's more like an ending."
That kept him silent for quite a long while.
"I suppose you despise me," he finally remarked.
"It's scarcely so active an emotion," I tried to punish him by retorting.
"But I at least insist on explaining what took me to the Coast," he contended.
"That is scarcely necessary," I told him.
"I imagine the whole country-side does," I observed.
He made a movement of mixed anger and protest.
"I went to Vancouver because the government had agreed to take over my Vancouver Island water-front for their new shipbuilding yards. If you've forgotten just what that means, I'd like to remind you that there's----"