“You know that’s not the answer,” he protested.  “Why do the typewriter girls at the office always go to you to sharpen their pencils and tell them how to spell the hard words?  Why do the girls in the lunch-rooms serve you first?  Because they’re hypnotized by your clothes?  Is that it?”

“Do they?” I asked; “I hadn’t noticed.”

Kinney snorted and tossed up his arms.  “He hadn’t noticed!” he kept repeating.  “He hadn’t noticed!” For his vacation Kinney bought a second-hand suit-case.  It was covered with labels of hotels in France and Switzerland.

“Joe,” I said, “if you carry that bag you will be a walking falsehood.”

Kinney’s name is Joseph Forbes Kinney; he dropped the Joseph because he said it did not appear often enough in the Social Register, and could be found only in the Old Testament, and he has asked me to call him Forbes.  Having first known him as “Joe,” I occasionally forget.

“My name is not Joe,” he said sternly, “and I have as much right to carry a second-hand bag as a new one.  The bag says it has been to Europe.  It does not say that I have been there.”

“But, you probably will,” I pointed out, “and then some one who has really visited those places—­”

“Listen!” commanded Kinney.  “If you want adventures you must be somebody of importance.  No one will go shares in an adventure with Joe Kinney, a twenty-dollar-a-week clerk, the human adding machine, the hall-room boy.  But Forbes Kinney, Esq., with a bag from Europe, and a Harvard ribbon round his hat—­”

“Is that a Harvard ribbon round your hat?” I asked.

“It is!” declared Kinney; “and I have a Yale ribbon, and a Turf Club ribbon, too.  They come on hooks, and you hook ’em on to match your clothes, or the company you keep.  And, what’s more,” he continued, with some heat, “I’ve borrowed a tennis racket and a golf bag full of sticks, and you take care you don’t give me away.”

“I see,” I returned, “that you are going to get us into a lot of trouble.”

“I was thinking,” said Kinney, looking at me rather doubtfully, “it might help a lot if for the first week you acted as my secretary, and during the second week I was your secretary.”

Sometimes, when Mr. Joyce goes on a business trip, he takes me with him as his private stenographer, and the change from office work is very pleasant; but I could not see why I should spend one week of my holiday writing letters for Kinney.

“You wouldn’t write any letters,” he explained.  “But if I could tell people you were my private secretary, it would naturally give me a certain importance.”

“If it will make you any happier,” I said, “you can tell people I am a British peer in disguise.”

“There is no use in being nasty about it,” protested Kinney.  “I am only trying to show you a way that would lead to adventure.”

“It surely would!” I assented.  “It would lead us to jail.”