hand he stood a moment, surveying himself. His hair lay flatly, shinily, like a skull-cap of glossy black with a straight white seam in the center. His dark eyes looked back at him with sober brooding. That oblique upward slant of his mouth, that was a smile usually, was something very like a sneer just now. He was thinking of himself not as the extremely sightly young gentleman the mirror reflected, but the unforgivable jackass who was about to be bored to the point of frenzy for two days through nobody's fault but his own."
"Humph!" he snorted.
"What's that?" queried Bones from across the room.
"It's three rousing jeers for myself. I'm the biggest—" He broke off. "Wish the damn prom was over," he finished moodily.
Bones turned a shocked face tufted with shaving lather toward this heretic. "Why?"
"I've told you why, twenty times. Because I don't like the woman I've got coming."
"Then for the luvvagawd why did you ask her?"
"I liked her once," Jock said simply. As he said it he thought, "There! There's the whole trouble with me where women are concerned, in four words—'I liked her once!' Every darn time it evolves into that. I must be fickle as hell." Then came another idea. "Wonder if I'll ever say about Yvonne, 'I liked her once'?" This seemed to him impossibly absurd, and he grinned into the mirror. "Never," he assured himself. "I'll always love Yvonne. She's the one I've been looking for all my life."
Bones was talking on. "You and Dopey Lane ought to get together. Have you heard the sob-stuff about his girl?"
"No. What's the matter with her?"
