FROM THE LIFE
well. I persuaded him so well that he insisted only I could persuade her.
"She won't believe me," he confessed, pitifully. "I've had too many plans that never came to anything. But if you told her that I can act—that you've got this part for me—that we'll go and land it to-morrow morning—she'll believe you. Yes, she will. 'Phone her. 'Phone her. Come on and telephone her."
"I'll do it," I said, "if you'll promise to go home, and stay there, and keep quiet, and get ready to come to town with me to-morrow morning."
"All right. All right." He grabbed my arm. "Come on. You can 'phone her from the drug-store. Hurry up. We'll be too late. They lock up—"
At least he was no longer in hysterics; there was that much gained. And he had given up his idea of bursting in on her family and demanding her out of hand. But in some unconscious need of physical action to relieve his impatience he tried to start me running to the drug-store instead of taking my car. "Keep quiet, you idiot!" I said. "This has to be done carefully. Get in the back seat there and keep quiet. I have to think of what to say to her."
I might as well have tried to think in a Bellevue ambulance, with a patient on the way to the psychopathic ward. He had gone from a frenzy of despair to an insane height of voluble hope. Cer-
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