Mr. Hughes threw down three aces; the fat man exposed a full house. “You’re twenty thousand down, Mr. Ooze.”
“Twenty thousand what?” asked Mrs. Sheerug contemptuously.
“Pounds,” Mr. Hughes acknowledged sheepishly. “Twenty thousand pounds, that’s wot I’ve lost--and it isn’t lunch time. ’urried into the world--that’s wot I was--that’s ’ow my bad luck started. You couldn’t h’expect nothing of a man ’oo was born in a ’ansom-cab.”
“You babies!” Mrs. Sheerug shifted her spectacles higher up her nose. “You know you never pay. It doesn’t matter whether you play for millions or farthings. Why don’t you work?”
When they had left, she made Teddy comfortable in a big armchair. Before she went about her household duties, she bent down and whispered: “No one shall ever know that you pretended. I’m--I’m even glad of it. Oh, we women, how we like to be loved by you useless men!”
In the conducting of a first love-affair one inevitably bungles. When the young gentleman in love happens to be older than the lady, his lack of finesse may be forgiven by her still greater inexperience. When the young gentleman is considerably less than half his fiancée’s years and, moreover, she is an expert in courtship by reason of many suitors, the case calls for the utmost delicacy.
Teddy was keenly sensitive to the precariousness of his situation. He was aware that, if he confessed himself, there wasn’t a living soul would take him seriously. Even Dearie and Jimmie Boy, to whom he told almost everything, would laugh at him. It made him feel very lonely; it was bard to think that you had to be laughed at just because you were young. Of course ordinary boys, who were going to be greengrocers or policemen when they grew up, didn’t fall in love; but boys who already felt the shadow of future greatness brooding over them might. In fact, such boys were just the sort of boys to pine away and die if their love went unrequited--the sort of fine-natured boys who, whether love came to them at nine or twenty, could love only once.
Here he was secretly engaged to Vashti and threatened by many unknown rivals. He didn’t know her surname and he didn’t know her address. He had to find her; when he found her he wasn’t sure what he ought to do with her. But find her he must. Four days had passed since she had accepted his hand. If he were not to lose her, he must certainly get into communication with her. How? To make the most discreet inquiries of so magic a person as Mrs. Sheerug would be to tell her everything. If she knew everything, she might not want him in her house, for she believed that he had feigned illness solely out of fondness for herself. The only other person to whom he could turn was Mr. Sheerug, with whom already he shared one guilty secret; but from this house of lightning arrivals and departures Mr. Sheerug had vanished--vanished as completely as if he had mounted on a broomstick and been whisked off into thin air. Teddy did not discover this till lunch.