He makes
me tired. He was telling me the other day that while girls might be
captivated by flippant, superficial, prancing dudes for a while, in the
end solid worth would win, and then he went on to say that the youth of
modern times cultivated his feet to the exclusion of his head, and that
while he had, of course, learned to dance, he had not devoted all his
time to it, and regarded it, after all, as a very minor sort of an
attraction as far as women are concerned. 'I don't rely on my dancing,
Burnham,' he said. 'It's the head, and the heart, my boy, that
triumphs.' And when I asked him where he learned all this he answered,
'from personal experience.'"
I immediately let go of Burnham. "Go and half-lick him, Harry," said I.
"And when you've done with him pass him over to me, and I'll finish him.
The supercilious ass."
That was the way Wilkins affected us.
The other men took their dose in different ways. Jenks began to drink a
little more; Lester drank a little less. Hicks didn't care much about it
one way or the other, and Wilson swore that if Wilkins came to call on
his sister again he'd kick him out of the house.
Six weeks rolled by thus, and finally Easter Sunday came. No mitigation
of the Wilkins visitation had entered into our lives. As the days wore
on the girls became more devoted to him than ever, and he became
correspondingly unbearable. The condescension with which he would treat
his fellow-men was something hardly to be tolerated, and the worst of it
was there didn't seem to be any way of bringing the girls to terms.
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