"Better wait till she says 'yes'," Mrs. Farrell had advised, as she
prepared to 'hang up', "before you start counting your chickens. She may
not care to take a chance on you. I know how I'd feel about it, if it
was me. However, I'll do my best for you."
Jimmy, who was quite ready to admit any time that he was "no hand with
girls," shoved his hat to one side, thrust his hands into his pockets,
and spat aside as, waiting outside the Harrison gate, he saw Daisy
approach along the gravel walk.
If he had come for her in the jitney, as usual, to take her for a
companionable hour's ride up and down his round, as a "free" and welcome
passenger, he would have felt at ease; for he had become used to that.
But this waiting, with no friendly engine pounding away in front of him
and no familiar steering-wheel to lean his hands upon, was enough out of
the ordinary to have embarrassed Jimmy anyway, even without the mental
consciousness of his deep-laid matrimonial plot, and the feeling he
could not shake off that somehow Daisy might sense it prematurely and
flee.
"'Lo, stranger," said Daisy, softly, taking the words out of Jimmy's
mouth, as it were. She was a little shy, too; but Jimmy Knight was too
busy with his own perturbation to notice that.
"H'lo yourself," he responded, with something like gruffness, "and see
how you like it." As they dropped into step side by side, he added,
with an inspired flash, "Lookin' kind of skookum to-night, us, Friend
Nixon."
"I might if I had a suit on," Daisy said, in her forthright way, "but
suits cost money."
"Never mind," Jimmy, in spite of the playful breeze abroad, strove to
pull his new straw hat down more firmly on its elastic cushion of
virile, curly hair, "you may have one, soon."
Daisy, who had not meant this at all, cast a quick side-glance at her
companion.
"I wouldn't take a suit from you, if that's what you mean," she said,
abruptly, flushing a little.
"There, now," Jimmy blushed an honest, vivid red, "I've went and made a
break, first crack at the bat. Say, you do the talkin' from here on.
I'll just listen. If I don't say nothin', I can't make nobody mad, can
I?"
Jimmy Knight's married sister lived in a three-room suite, in an
apartment block not far from the Commercial Hotel--that structure from
whose windows Daisy had had her first view of the city's rooftops. As
she followed her companion up the three flights of stairs, her mind
reverted to that girl-wife she had seen from the hotel-window, hanging
out a washing for three, and pinning the tinier garments in the centre
of the clothesline.
"Come right in, people," invited Mrs. Tom Farrell, opening the door of
Suite 30, as Jimmy, smiling humorously aside at Daisy, knocked like a
bailiff; "You're as big an ike as ever, Jim. If you've waked young Tommy
up, you'll go in and put him to sleep again. Mind that!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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