"I suppose not. I'm not a marquis, nor the end man at a minstrel show. I'm only an American, like sixty million other Americans, and the language of Abraham Lincoln is good enough for me. But I suppose I, like the other sixty million, emit it through my nose!" "I should be sorry to contradict you," I said. Arthur folded his arms and gathered himself up until he appeared to taper from his stem like a florist's bouquet, and all the upper part of him was pink and trembling with emotion. Arthur may one day attain corpulence; he is already well rounded. "I need hardly say," he said majestically, "that when I did myself the honour of proposing, I was under the impression that I had a suitable larynx to offer you." "You see I didn't know," I murmured, and by accident I dropped my engagement ring, which rolled upon the carpet at his feet. He stooped and picked it up. "Shall I take this with me?" he asked, and I said "By all means." That was all. I gave ten minutes to reflection and to the possibility of Arthur's coming back and pleading, on his knees, to be allowed to restore that defective larynx. Then I went straight upstairs to the telephone and rang up the Central office. When they replied "_Hello_," I said, in the moderate and concentrated tone which we all use through telephones, "Can you give me New York?" Poppa was in New York, and in an emergency poppa and I always turn to one another. There was a delay, during which I listened attentively, with one eye closed--I believe it is the sign of an unbalanced intellect to shut one eye when you use the telephone, but I needn't go into that--and presently I got New York. In a few minutes more I was accommodated with the Fifth Avenue Hotel. "Mr. T.P. Wick, of Chicago," I demanded. "_Is his room number Sixty-two?_" That is the kind of mind which you usually find attached to the New York end of a trans-American telephone. But one does not bandy words across a thousand miles of country with a hotel clerk, so I merely responded: "Very probably." There was a pause, and then the still small voice came again. "_Mr. Wick is in bed at present. Anything important?_" I reflected that while I in Chicago was speaking to the hotel clerk at half-past nine o'clock, the hotel clerk in New York was speaking to me at eleven. This in itself was enough to make our conversation disjointed. "Yes," I responded, "it is important. Ask Mr. Wick to get out of bed." Sufficient time elapsed to enable poppa to put on his clothes and come down by the elevator, and then I heard: "_Mr. Wick is now speaking_." "Yes, poppa," I replied, "I guess you are. Your old American accent comes singing across in a way that no member of your family would ever mistake. But you needn't be stiff about it. Sorry to disturb you." Poppa and I were often personal in our intercourse. I had not the slightest hesitation in mentioning his American accent.