"What I've been lying here thinking of," he said, "is how queer it was
it happened just that way. If I hadn't stopped just that minute, and if
you hadn't gone by, and if Lord Mount Dunstan hadn't known you and said
who you were, Little Willie would have been in London by this time,
hustling to get a cheap bunk back to New York in."
"Because?" inquired Miss Vanderpoel.
G. Selden laughed and hesitated a moment. Then he made a clean breast of
it.
"Say, Miss Vanderpoel," he said, "I hope it won't make you mad if I
own up. Ladies like you don't know anything about chaps like me. On the
square and straight out, when I seen you and heard your name I couldn't
help remembering whose daughter you was. Reuben S. Vanderpoel spells a
big thing. Why, when I was in New York we fellows used to get together
and talk about what it'd mean to the chap who could get next to Reuben
S. Vanderpoel. We used to count up all the business he does, and all the
clerks he's got under him pounding away on typewriters, and how they'd
be bound to get worn out and need new ones. And we'd make calculations
how many a man could unload, if he could get next. It was a kind of
typewriting junior assistant fairy story, and we knew it couldn't happen
really.
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