"You didn't mind, though,--of course you didn't. You liked it. Wasn't it
noble! Wasn't it charming! So glad that _we_ had nothing but
Apollinaris and birch beer! Still, it would have been a pleasure to hear
him refuse."

The receiving-teller gave her her vouchers. She put them in her handbag and
somehow got round a perambulator, and the two went out on the street.

"And how did your 'show' go?" she continued. "That's about as much as we
can call the drama in these days."

"That, possibly, didn't go quite so well. I took him to a 'comedy,'--as
they nowadays call their mixture of farce and funniment. 'Comedy'!--I wish
Meredith could have seen it! Well, he laughed a little, here and there,--
obligingly, I might say. But there was no 'chew' in the thing for him,--
nothing to fill his intellectual maw. He's a serious youngster, after all,
--exuberant as he seems. I felt him appraising me as a gay old
irresponsible...."

"'Old'--you are not to use that word. Come, don't say that he--that he
venerated you!"

"Oh, not at all. During the six hours we were together--train, club,
theatre, and train again--he never once called me 'sir'; he never once
employed our clumsy, repellent Anglo-Saxon mode of address, 'mister'; in
fact, he never employed any mode of address at all. He got round it quite
cleverly,--on system, as I soon began to perceive; and not for a moment did
he forget that the system was in operation. He used, straight through, a
sort of generalized manner--I might have been anywhere between twenty and