As a rule Jimmy and I do the correspondence between us--Jimmy contributing the technique and I the punctuation; but for the three days of the show his cousin Sheila volunteered to preside at a dainty little table and make jottings of our orders. Sheila is always ornamental, and as we had the stand draped to tone with her hair, and she wore a dress which harmonized like soft music with the pale heliotrope of the Tanglefoot's body-work, our display was a magnet from the word "Go."
And then on the morning of the opening day Jimmy went down with his Lake Doiran malaria and left me to it!
I am as brave as most people, but this calamity unmanned me. "Sheila," I said to a pair of pitying grey eyes, as the crowd, having heard the show declared open, massed about our stand--"Sheila, the situation is desperate. These people will ask me about the cars. They will expect me to answer them intelligently, and it's no use in the world talking horse to them--I can see that from their sordid looks. I shall disappear. You can say I have gone out on a trial run, which won't be a lie, only an understatement. And you can just hand them out the little books and let them paw the varnish. Silence will be better than anything I could say. Probably it is better than what any conscientious man could say about the Tanglefoot."
"I'll carry on, Nobby," said Sheila. "You go and buy buns for Miss Hurdlewing, and be happy. Fly! here's a purchaser."
Sheila's whisper dispersed me into the crowd and I strolled away, while she bestowed a smile and a specification pamphlet on the first of the crowd to step on to our stand.
I found it impossible to keep away for long. Sheila looked so well against the heliotrope Tanglefoot limousine that I had to go back to look at her.
The stand was surrounded by a throng, hushed and breathless with interest. Sheila was talking volubly. Hardened motorists listened with their mouths open; zealots, feverish to expend their excess profits on motoring because it was a novelty and expensive, stood spell-bound; a rival agent drank in her words with tears in his eyes--tears for his old innocence--and his cheek flushed with a sudden and splendid determination to amalgamate with our firm.