Meredith Nicholson

“ She went on.
“You really amuse me exceedingly. Mr. Pickering is decidedly more than a match for you, Mr. Glenarm, —even in humor.”
She left me so quickly, so softly, that I stood staring like a fool at the spot where she had been, and then I went gloomily back to Glenarm House, angry, ashamed and crestfallen.
While we were waiting for dinner I made a clean breast of my acquaintance with her to Larry, omitting nothing,—rejoicing even to paint my own conduct as black as possible.
“You may remember her,” I concluded, “she was the girl we saw at Sherry’s that night we dined there. ”

“ I didn’t mean for you to invoke your infamous gods against the girl!”
“Don’t be violent, lad. Violence is reprehensible,” he admonished with maddening sweetness and patience. “What I was trying to inculcate was rather the fact, borne in upon me through years of acquaintance, that you are,—to he bold, my lad, to be bold,—a good deal of a damned fool.”
The trilling of his r’s was like the whirring rise of a flock of quails.
“Dinner is served,” announced Bates, and Larry led the way, mockingly chanting an Irish love-song. ”

“ I heard the sound of a piano, somewhere in the building, and I consigned the inventor of pianos to hideous torment as scales were pursued endlessly up and down the keys. Two girls passing through the hall made a pretext of looking for a book and came in and exclaimed over their inability to find it with much suppressed giggling. ”