His tone was one of amiable discontentment, but there was a look of
positive annoyance upon his handsome face, and he turned presently to
regard his companion with an enquiry which might have been darkly
furtive had not the luminous publicity in which he moved rendered the
smallest of his mental processes so brilliantly overt. It was
immediately plain to Adams that the jerky sentences were shot out at
random in order that Perry's slow mind might gain a larger space in
which to grope for the word he really wanted. There was something
evidently behind it all, and until the situation should disclose itself
they walked on in an embarrassed and waiting silence. In his top hat and
his mink-lined overcoat Perry presented an ample dignity which his
companion found almost overpowering in its male magnificence. That
hesitation should manifest itself amid such a pageantry of personality
reminded Adams of the beggars in the old nursery rhyme who had come to
town sporting velvet gowns. Everything about Perry Bridewell was built
on so opulent a scale that in thinking of him one found oneself using
almost unconsciously a Romanesque and florid diction.

"There is something you'd like to say to me," suggested Adams presently.
"I'm in no hurry, of course, but isn't this as good a time as any
other?"

"By Jove, that's just what I was thinking," returned Perry, with a burst
of confidence, "but it isn't really anything, you know--that is, I mean,
it isn't anything that--that's real business."

A pretty woman passed suddenly under the electric light, and even in his
embarrassment, which was great, he followed her with the animated glance
which he instinctively devoted to vanishing feminine beauty.