He read slowly, with unruffled countenance. Then with a noncommittal air, he threw the letter carelessly across the table to the Sailor, who had to retrieve it from the slop basin which fortunately was empty.
"Read it," said Ginger, his face a mask, his tone ice cold, without a trace of emotion.
"Read it, yer fool," said Ginger. The pitiless autocrat was now striking through the tone of detachment.
Hopelessly confused, the Sailor turned the letter the right side up. But he didn't attempt to read. He knew it was no use. There was not a line he could understand, yet he was forced to hold it before his eyes.
"What do you think o' that, young feller, my lad?"
Stern triumph was striking now through Ginger's almost terrible detachment. "What do you think on it, eh?"
The Sailor was not able to think anything of it at the moment.
"None so dusty--what?" Ginger fairly glowed with a sense of victory.
He gave back the letter to Ginger with nervous guilt, neither knowing why it was none so dusty nor what it was that it fixed.
"Yer silly perisher. Don't yer see what it means?"
There was the light of contempt in the truculent eyes of Ginger. The Sailor simply could not meet them.
"Blymy"--the scorn of Ginger was withering--"if you hadn't been nine times round the world afore the mast, I should say you was just a guy--I should straight. Don't you understand what Dinkie Dawson says?"
The Sailor's stammer might be taken for, "Yep."
"Very well, then," said Ginger, so savagely that he had to read the _Evening Mercury_ in order to calm himself.
The Sailor began to wish he was dead. And then suddenly Ginger laid down the paper.
"This touch is goin' to cost you money, young Mister Man," he said, magniloquently.
"You'll have to lay out thirty bob on a new suit of clothes to start with."
"Of course, you can get a suit for less, but myself I'm all for quality."
"If you'll take my advice, young feller, you'll go to Dago and Rogers and get one o' them blue suitings as they shows in the winder, neat but not gaudy, cut in the West End style. I'm thinkin' o' gettin' one meself; you simply can't help lookin' a gentleman in one o' them, with a spotted tie and a double turnover collar."
"Yep," said the Sailor, to whom all this was as intelligible as a play of Sophocles.