Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 8.djvu/324

 Sid hesitated.

"He's got a frightful cough," he said.

"He won't care to talk to me," weighed Kipps.

"That's all right; he won't mind. He's fond of talking. He'd talk to anyone," said Sid, reassuringly, and added a perplexing bit of Londonised Latin. "He doesn't pute anything, non alienum. You know."

"I know," said Kipps intelligently, over his umbrella knob, though of course that was altogether untrue.

Kipps found Sid's shop a practical-looking establishment, stocked with the most remarkable collection of bicycles and pieces of bicycle that he had ever beheld. "My hiring stock," said Sid, with a wave to this ironmongery, "and there's the best machine at a democratic price in London, The Red Flag, built by me. See?"

He indicated a graceful grey-brown framework in the window. "And there's my stock of accessories—store prices.

"Go in for motors a bit," added Sid.

"Mutton?" said Kipps, not hearing him distinctly.

"Motors, I said 'Owever, Mutton Department 'ere," and he opened a door that had a curtain-guarded window in its upper panel, to reveal a little room with red walls and green furniture, with a white-clothed table and the generous promise of a meal. "Fanny!" he shouted. "Here's Art Kipps."

A bright-eyed young woman of five or six and