Skippy Bedelle Part 47

"Done, who is it?"

"Some one here."

"Nope. You've lost."

"Who then?"

"Some one who knows Dolly Travers," said Vivi with a mocking smile.

"Oh!"

"Brute," said Vivi in the greatest admiration.

"Really I--"

"Now don't be modest--I hate modest men. It makes it twice as bad. She's very attractive, isn't she?"

"Very," said Skippy, feeling every inch a man.

"But she's rather young--for you, isn't she?" said Vivi artfully.

"They put gla.s.ses on cows in Russia," said Miss Cantillon importantly.

She had a reputation as a brilliant conversationalist to uphold.

This a.s.sertion woke up the table.

"Cows?"

"Gla.s.ses?"

"f.a.n.n.y dear, how excruciating!"

Even the soph.o.m.ore was surprised into expressing his incredulity.

"Colored gla.s.ses on account of the glare of the snow," said Miss Cantillon.

"f.a.n.n.y!"

"Fact, in Siberia. I read it in the papers."

"Cows can't live in the snow."

"But Siberia isn't all snow."

"Most of it is."

"Isn't it wonderful the things she knows?" said Vivi admiringly. "Do you like brainy women?"

"That depends," said Skippy while he stopped to consider. "I don't know any."

"Oh what a dreadful cynical remark!" said Vivi with another admiring look. "Heavens, I shall be frightened to death what I say to you. I'm sure you're awfully clever yourself. Perhaps I'll have a chance. Clever men hate clever women, don't they?"

"There is certainly something about my particular style of beauty that's bowled her over," thought Skippy to himself.

"Oh I don't know," he said, fatuously unconscious of the virtues he conceded to himself. "Dolly Travers was quite clever, you know."

"Brute!" said Miss Balou for the second time.

"Oh come now--"

"Do you know what I think about you?"

"What do you think?"

"I think you'd be lots of excitement at a house party," said Miss Vivi, shaking her head. "Just for a few days. I think you'd give a girl the grandest sort of a rush, but as for believing a word you said--never!"

"What do you mean?" said Skippy, immensely puffed up.

"It shows in your eyes," said Vivi with a look of having at last deciphered the mystery. "Besides, girls have spoiled you. You have had things too easily. No wonder you're conceited."

Miss Cantillon was discoursing brilliantly on a crow that had been struck by lightning in Oklahoma and had fallen into a wheat field and set fire to the grain, which had precipitated a conflagration which had necessitated calling out the fire departments of two counties.

"You're offended now," said Vivi in a contrite whisper.

"Some one's given you an awfully bad opinion of me," said Skippy stiffly, frowning to show the displeasure he did not feel.

"Well it's true, isn't it?"

"It is not!"

"How about Jennie Tupper?"

"Oh that!" said Skippy burying the memory with a wave of his hand.

"You see you _are_ a brute! Well I don't mind. I like your hands."

Skippy took a precautionary glance at the ends of his baseball fingers and then allowed them to come to rest on the tablecloth.

"Now you're trying to jolly me," he said astutely.

"No. I always notice hands the first thing. They tell so much about your character. I saw yours at once."

"You can read hands?" said Skippy, who knew this much of the etiquette of the game.

"Yes, but not now," said Vivi in a promissory tone.

Skippy's att.i.tude towards social functions underwent a change of front.

He began to feel confidently, vaingloriously at ease. He joined in the general conversation determined to rout the brilliant Miss Cantillon, who knew so many things. Now the rule for such preeminence is simple and some acquire it by cunning and others by instinct. Deny the obvious.

Reputations have fattened on nothing else. When inevitably the moment arrived to discuss Maude Adams, and her latest play, Skippy announced that he did not like Maude Adams.