Page:The Popular Magazine v72 n1 (1924-04-20).djvu/86

 out of romance is my salad suit-—the clothes I wear for the mayonnaise. I'll fix this bim so he'll look at matrimony the same as double pneumonia; I will for a positive fact!”

With his color close to normal again, Lamont collected cane and tipper.

“Then I'll rely on you. Before I go, tell me this. Is there anything else you would like to know?”

“Yes—your weight!” Scandrel yelped. “Listen. For two hundred and fifty cash I'll take the sill off that bay window you're carrying around. I'll iron out a couple of those unnecessary chins and I'll have you romping around like a two year old crying to go.”

Before Channing Lamont was allowed to get away he had promised to come up in the late summer for a couple of weeks!

“It's a gift,” I said when we were alone. “Anybody else would have been pinched for slander—making remarks like that.”

Ottie chuckled.

“Give me credit, Joe. If I could make a date with the King of Italy, it's dollar bills to doughnuts, I could talk him out of his crown!”

A day or two later Tarkington van Riker wrote for reservations for himself and valet. Ottie dashed off an answer that Tin Ear O'Brien beat out on the typewriter, hurled it into an envelope and, stepping on the gas, rushed down to Wellington's ludicrous post office where business was falling off on account of the price of stamps. The missive registered, we took a new road and started back to Five Acres. Halfway between the village and the farm we were given a dash of comic opera.

Turning from one road into another the motor shied at the sight of a girl in a sunbonnet who, with a hoe in one graceful hand, was busy in a garden that appeared to grow everything with the possible exception of bananas. One look was enough for Scandrel who immediately threw on all of the four-wheel brakes that were working and nudged me.

“One of the cabbage queens, Joe. Ain't that sunbonnet becoming? I'll park here until she turns around if it takes from now until Sunday-night supper. I want to see what kind of a face she's wearing with that handsome blond hair of hers.”

“You're a nut for the years!” I snapped. “This girl is probably the same one McFinn was speaking about the other day. Drive on and don't annoy her. Vegetables are high priced enough as it is.”

“Get out and walk if you don't want to sit here and wait! What wren ever got annoyed by any one looking at her? I like her sunbonnet and I like her sunburn. I like a”

The girl turned and Ottie stopped speaking as quickly as if some one had stolen his watch.

There was a reason, for if either of us expected to see a great big blond mamma who was a panic in the line of looks, neither of us was doomed to disappointment.

The Maude Muller on the other side of the garden fence was comely, blue-eyed, crimson-lipped and the owner of a complexion that she might have picked from one of the peach trees in the rear of the place. And to make the bargain fair all around she had a smile that made the celebrated sunshine look like an inch of blown-out candle.

She was beauty plus!

“We—I beg your pardon,” Ottie mumbled. “Er—have you got a match to spare?”

Mistress Looker rested dimpled arms on the fence and smiled over it.

“No, I'm sorry but I haven't. I left my cigarettes, holder and match box up at the house. Tell me—how does my garden look from your side of the road?”

Ottie buttoned his jacket, grinning like a foundling at the sight of a nursery full of toys.

“Baby, I'll tell the neighbors you certainly grow a delightful lettuce. We all eat vegetables, so we ought to get acquainted. The names over here are Scandrel and O'Grady. Stay just where you are for a minute and give us the low-down on the beans and parsley.”

She did.

Still featuring the delightful smile she informed us that her name was Amabel Biggs, that she was interesting nineteen, ran down to Manhattan every so often, hadn't missed the Ziegfeld “Follies” since she had quit the little red school on the hill for good, and only lived at Wellington because New York was so full of hicks.

Scandrel took all of this with the greatest of interest and immediately gave her a helping of his own autobiography. Any one listening in on the conversation would have gone away with the idea that he was as well known as Forty-second Street, as popular