KIPPS
Sid hesitated.
"He's got a frightful cough," he said.
"He won't care to talk to me," weighed Kipps.
"That's all right; he won't mind. He's fond of talking. He'd talk to anyone," said Sid, reassuringly, and added a perplexing bit of Londonised Latin. "He doesn't pute anything, non alienum. You know."
"I know," said Kipps intelligently, over his umbrella knob, though of course that was altogether untrue.
§ 3
Kipps found Sid's shop a practical-looking establishment, stocked with the most remarkable collection of bicycles and pieces of bicycle that he had ever beheld. "My hiring stock," said Sid, with a wave to this ironmongery, "and there's the best machine at a democratic price in London, The Red Flag, built by me. See?"
He indicated a graceful grey-brown framework in the window. "And there's my stock of accessories—store prices.
"Go in for motors a bit," added Sid.
"Mutton?" said Kipps, not hearing him distinctly.
"Motors, I said. . . . 'Owever, Mutton Department 'ere," and he opened a door that had a curtain-guarded window in its upper panel, to reveal a little room with red walls and green furniture, with a white-clothed table and the generous promise of a meal. "Fanny!" he shouted. "Here's Art Kipps."
A bright-eyed young woman of five or six and
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