My Glass, Sirr.' He Continued An Interrupted Whistling
Of 'I Owe Ten Dollars To O'Grady' (Which He Very Probably Did), And His
Countenance Departed Not From Its Serenity.
If there is anything that
one loves an American for it is the way he stands certain kinds of
punishment.
An Englishman and a heavy loser was being chaffed by a
Scotchman whose account at the Japan end of the line had been a trifle
overdrawn. True, he would lose in England, but the thought of the few
dollars saved here cheered him.
More men entered, sat down by tables, stood in groups, or remained
apart by themselves, thinking with knit brows. One must think quickly
when one's bills are falling due. The murmur of voices thickened, and
there was no rumbling in the skittle alley to interrupt it. Everybody
knows everybody else at the Overseas Club, and everybody sympathises. A
man passed stiffly and some one of a group turned to ask lightly, 'Hit,
old man?' 'Like hell,' he said, and went on biting his unlit cigar.
Another man was telling, slowly and somewhat bitterly, how he had
expected one of his children to join him out here, and how the passage
had been paid with a draft on the O.B.C. But now ... There, ladies and
gentlemen, is where it hurts, this little suspension out here. It
destroys plans, pretty ones hoped for and prayed over, maybe for years;
it knocks pleasant domestic arrangements galleywest over and above all
the mere ruin that it causes.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 62 of 264
Words from 16725 to 16983
of 71314
