Page:Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son.djvu/351

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LETTERS TO HIS SON

see her until she got right up to him and rapped him on the arm with her fan.

"Dear Jack," she says, all smiles and sugar; "dear Jack, I've just heard. Edith has told me, though I'd suspected something for a long, long time, you rogue," and she fetched him another kittenish clip with the fan.

Jack looked about the way I once saw old Miss Curley, the president of the Good Templars back in our town in Missouri, look at a party when she half-swallowed a spoonful of her ice cream before she discovered that it was flavored with liquor.

But he stammered something and hurried Miss Churchill away, though not before a fellow who was going by had wrung his hand and said, "Congratulations, old chap. Just heard the news."

Jack's only idea seemed to travel, and to travel far and fast, and he dragged his partner along to the other end of the room, while

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