de, I wouldn't worry
either. Mrs. Shaw says you look exactly like a British peer in
disguise." I had never seen a British peer, with or without his
disguise, and I admit I was interested.

"Why are the girls in this house," demanded Kinney, "always running to
your room to borrow matches? Because they admire your _clothes_? If
they're crazy about clothes, why don't they come to _me_ for matches?"

"You are always out at night," I said.

"You know that's not the answer," he protested. "Why do the typewriter
girls at the office always go to _you_ to sharpen their pencils and tell
them how to spell the hard words? Why do the girls in the lunch-rooms
serve you first? Because they're hypnotized by your clothes? Is _that_
it?"

"Do they?" I asked; "I hadn't noticed."

Kinney snorted and tossed up his arms. "He hadn't noticed!" he kept
repeating. "He hadn't noticed!" For his vacation Kinney bought a
second-hand suit-case. It was covered with labels of hotels in France
and Switzerland.

"Joe," I said, "if you carry that bag you will be a walking falsehood."

Kinney's name is Joseph Forbes Kinney; he dropped the Joseph because he
said it did not appear often enough in the _Social Register_, and could
be found only in the Old Testament, and he has asked me to call him
Forbes. Having first known him as "Joe," I occasionally forget.

"My name is _not_ Joe," he said sternly, "and I have as much right to
carry a second-hand bag as a new one. The bag says _it_ has been to
Europe. It does not say that _I_ have been there."

"But, you probably will," I pointed out, "and then some one who has
really visited those places--"

"Listen!" commanded Kinney. "If you want adventures you must be somebody
of importance. No one will go shares in an adventure with Joe Kinney, a
twenty-dollar-a-week clerk, the human adding machine, the hall-room boy.
But Forbes Kinney, Esq., with a bag from Europe, and a Harvard ribbon
round his hat--"

"Is that a Harvard ribbon round your hat?" I asked.

"It is!" declared Kinney; "and I have a Yale ribbon, and a Turf Club
ribbon, too. They come on hooks, and you hook 'em on to match your
clothes, or the company you keep. And, what's more," he continued, with
some heat, "I've borrowed a tennis racket and a golf bag full of sticks,
and you take care you don't give me away."

"I see," I returned, "that you are going to get us into a lot of
trouble."

"I was thinking," said Kinney, looking at me rather