My reasoning had the soothing effect I had hoped for. His manner changed, losing its cinnamon bear quality and taking on a welcome all-pals-together-ness. It bore out what I have always said, that there’s nothing like suavity for pouring oil on the troubled w’s. When he spoke again, it was plain that he regarded me as a friend and an ally.
‘I suppose all this seems a bit odd to you, Bertie.’
‘Not at all, old man, not at all.’
‘But there is a simple explanation. I love Magnolia.’
‘I thought you loved Florence.’
‘So did I. But you know how apt one is to make mistakes.’
‘Of course.’
‘When you’re looking for the ideal girl, I mean.’
‘Quite.’
‘I dare say you’ve had the same experience yourself.’
‘From time to, time.’
‘Happens to everybody, I expect.’
‘I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘Where one goes wrong when looking for the ideal girl is in making one’s selection before walking the full length of the counter. You meet someone with a perfect profile, platinum-blonde hair and a willowy figure, and you think your search is over. “Bingo! ” you say to yourself. “This is the one. Accept no substitutes”. Little knowing that you are linking your lot with that of a female sergeant-major with strong views on the subject of discipline, and that if you’d only gone on a bit further you would have found the sweetest, kindest, gentlest girl that ever took down outgoing mail in shorthand, who would love you and cherish you and would never dream of giving you hell, no matter what the circumstances. I allude to Magnolia Glendennon.’
‘I thought you did.’
‘I can’t tell you how I feel about her, Bertie.’
‘Don’t try.’
‘Ever since we came down here I’ve had a lurking suspicion that she was the mate for me and that in signing on the dotted line with Florence I had made the boner of a lifetime. Just now my last doubts were dispelled.’
‘What happened just now?’
‘She rubbed the back of my neck. My interview with Florence, coming on top of that ghastly Chamber of Commerce lunch, had given me a splitting headache, and she rubbed the back of my neck. Then I knew. As those soft fingers touched my skin like dainty butterflies hovering over a flower -‘
‘Right ho.’
‘It was a revelation, Bertie. I knew that I had come to journey’s end. I said to myself “This is a good thing. Push it along”. I turned. I grasped her hand. I gazed into her eyes. She gazed into mine. I told her I loved her. She said so she did me. She fell into my arms. I grabbed her. We stood murmuring endearments, and for a while everything was fine. Couldn’t have been better. Then a thought struck me. There was a snag. You’ve probably spotted it.’
‘Florence?’
‘Exactly. Bossy though she is, plainspoken though she may be when anything displeases her, and I wish you could have heard her after that Chamber of Commerce lunch, I am still engaged to her. And while girls can break engagements till the cows come home, men can’t.’
I followed his train of thought. It was evident that he, like me, aimed at being a preux chevalier, and you simply can’t be preux or anything like it if you go about the place getting betrothed and then telling the party of the second part it’s all off. It seemed to me that the snag which had raised its ugly head was one of formidable — you might say king-size — dimensions, well calculated to make the current of whatever he proposed to do about it turn awry and lose the name of action. But when I put this to him with a sympathetic tremor in my voice, and I’m not sure I didn’t clasp his hand, he surprised me by chuckling like a leaky radiator.
‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘It would, I admit, appear to be a tricky situation, but I can handle it. I’m going to get Florence to break the engagement.’
He spoke with such a gay, confident ring in his voice, so like the old ancestor predicting what she was going to do to L. P. Runkle in the playing-on-a-stringed-instrument-line, that I was loth, if that’s the word I want, to say anything to depress him, but the question had to be asked.