“Look here,” said Hubert uncertainly. “Yesterday we saw Hill Street. We both found it a most elegant, agreeable apartment, more than suitable to our requirements and cheap at the price. To-day we inspected ten of the most bestial lodgments that ever cumbered the earth. When I ventured to compare them with Hill Street I was reviled as a slow belly.”
“That,” said Hubert, “was what you inferred. To-night—thanks entirely to your tireless enterprise, which I readily confess I did my best to embarrass—we totter slap into H.M.’s Dolls’ House—life-size. . . . Well, we both go wild about Harry. We rise up and call one another blessed. For an hour we stagger deliriously about our future home, repeatedly disclosing to each other its perfectly manifest excellence and fatuously declaring our relish by word and deed. The idea of comparing it with its predecessors never occurred to me. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone, because—it is incomparable.”
“So did you. Now—one brief hour after we’ve left it, you begin to boggle at what you call the wisdom of pickin’ the godsend up.”
He flung up his hands with a despairing gesture and subsided heavily upon the club-kerb.
“I’m afraid the gent’s fickle,” said Julia, “as well as selfish.” Challenger set his teeth. “On Friday Hill Street has it. On Saturday South Street’s the peach. I wonder what’ll win it on Monday.”
“Monday?” cried Hubert. “You don’t mean to suggest——”
“If you seek sorrow on Monday, you seek it alone.”
“I’m not being absurd,” raved Hubert. “The whole thing’s monstrous. One of us is insane.”
“I agree,” said Miss Willow. “But for me, you’d ’ve taken Hill Street. Now I’ve shown you something better you’re all over that. On Monday——”
“Not at all. We’ve got to make up our minds between the three. If we had those doors gilded—— Where are you going?”
“I’m going to some place where I can burst,” said Hubert wildly. “I don’t want to do it here. I’ve no quarrel with your parents.”
“I soon shall have,” said Challenger, wiping his brow. “It’s eighty-eight in the shade, I’ve walked about sixteen miles over bare boards, and now I’m expected to sit still and watch you tear everything up out of sheer, wanton, blasphemous caprice. It’s enough to induce a blood-clot.”