osedly, "You don't do it very well."

I did not look at him, I looked at the lamp, but there was that in the
air which convinced me that we had arrived at a crisis.

"I suppose not. I'm not a marquis, nor the end man at a minstrel show.
I'm only an American, like sixty million other Americans, and the
language of Abraham Lincoln is good enough for me. But I suppose I, like
the other sixty million, emit it through my nose!"

"I should be sorry to contradict you," I said.

Arthur folded his arms and gathered himself up until he appeared to
taper from his stem like a florist's bouquet, and all the upper part of
him was pink and trembling with emotion. Arthur may one day attain
corpulence; he is already well rounded.

"I need hardly say," he said majestically, "that when I did myself the
honour of proposing, I was under the impression that I had a suitable
larynx to offer you."

"You see I didn't know," I murmured, and by accident I dropped my
engagement ring, which rolled upon the carpet at his feet. He stooped
and picked it up.

"Shall I take this with me?" he asked, and I said "By all means."

That was all.

I gave ten minutes to reflection and to the possibility of Arthur's
coming back and pleading, on his knees, to be allowed to restore that
defective larynx. Then I went straight upstairs to the telephone and
rang up the Central office. When they replied "_Hello_," I said, in the
moderate and concentrated tone which we all use through telephones, "Can
you give me New York?"

Poppa was in New York, and in an emergency poppa and I always turn to
one another. There was a delay, during which I listened attentively,
with one eye closed--I believe it is the sign of an unbalanced intellect
to shut one eye when you use the telephone, but I needn't go into
that--and presently I got New York. In a few minutes more I was
accommodated with the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

"Mr. T.P. Wick, of Chicago," I demanded.

"_Is his room number Sixty-two?_"

That is the kind of mind which you usually find attached to the New York
end of a trans-American telephone. But one does not bandy words across a
thousand miles of country with a hotel clerk, so I merely responded:

"Very probably."

There was a pause, and then the still small voice came again.

"_Mr. Wick is in bed at present. Anything important?_"

I reflected that while I in Chicago was speaking to the hotel clerk at
half-past nine o'clock, the hotel clerk in New York was