Mr. Peters’s eye calculated the distance between them. By taking her by surprise it might be possible to spring upon her, overthrow her, and apply the throttling tactics of which he had boasted to his waiting comrades. True, it had been only a boast; never yet had he dared to lay violent hands upon her; but with the thoughts of the delicious, cool bock or Culmbacher bracing his nerves, he was near to upsetting his own theories of the treatment due by a gentleman to a lady. But, with his loafer’s love for the more artistic and less strenuous way, he chose diplomacy first, the high card in the game—the assumed attitude of success already attained.
“You have a dollar,” he said, loftily, but significantly in the tone that goes with the lighting of a cigar—when the properties are at hand.
“I have,” said Mrs. Peters, producing the bill from her bosom and crackling it, teasingly.
“I am offered a position in a—in a tea store,” said Mr. Peters. “I am to begin work to-morrow. But it will be necessary for me to buy a pair of———”
“You are a liar,” said Mrs. Peters, reinterring the note. “No tea store, nor no A B C store, nor no junk shop would have you. I rubbed the skin off both me hands washin’ jumpers and overalls to make that dollar. Do you think it come out of them suds to buy the kind you put into you? Skiddoo! Get your mind off of money.”
[53]
