The Observations of HenryJerome, Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka)
General
The Observations of Henry
Jerome, Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka)
England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
"Oh," I says, "what sort?" for I'd seen a good many of that lot during
six months I'd spent at a house in Fleet Street, and their get-up hadn't
sumptuousness about it, so to speak. "Kipper's" rig-out must have totted
up to a tidy little sum. He had a diamond pin in his tie that must have
cost somebody fifty quid, if not him.
"Well," he answers, "I don't wind out the confidential advice to old
Beaky, and that sort of thing. I do the tips, yer know. 'Cap'n Kit,'
that's my name."
"What, the Captain Kit?" I says. O' course I'd heard of him.
"Be'old!" he says.
"Oh, it's easy enough," he goes on. "Some of 'em's bound to come out
right, and when one does, you take it from me, our paper mentions the
fact. And when it is a wrong 'un--well, a man can't always be shouting
about himself, can 'e?"
He ordered a cup of coffee. He said he was waiting for someone, and we
got to chatting about old times.
"How's Carrots?" I asked.
"Miss Caroline Trevelyan," he answered, "is doing well."
"Oh," I says, "you've found out her fam'ly name, then?"
"We've found out one or two things about that lidy," he replies. "D'yer
remember 'er dancing?"
"I have seen her flinging her petticoats about outside the shop, when the
copper wasn't by, if that's what you mean," I says.
"That's what I mean," he answers. "That's all the rage now,
'skirt-dancing' they calls it. She's a-coming out at the Oxford
to-morrow. It's 'er I'm waiting for. She's a-coming on, I tell you she
is," he says.
"Shouldn't wonder," says I; "that was her disposition."
"And there's another thing we've found out about 'er," he says. He leant
over the table, and whispered it, as if he was afraid that anybody else
might hear: "she's got a voice."
"Yes," I says, "some women have."
"Ah," he says, "but 'er voice is the sort of voice yer want to listen
to."
"Oh," I says, "that's its speciality, is it?"
"That's it, sonny," he replies.
She came in a little later. I'd a' known her anywhere for her eyes, and
her red hair, in spite of her being that clean you might have eaten your
dinner out of her hand. And as for her clothes! Well, I've mixed a good
deal with the toffs in my time, and I've seen duchesses dressed more
showily and maybe more expensively, but her clothes seemed to be just a
framework to show her up. She was a beauty, you can take it from me; and
it's not to be wondered that the La-De-Das were round her when they did
see her, like flies round an open jam tart.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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