You never saw anybody so electrified as Jones.  For a good minute he couldn’t even speak.  It was like bringing a horseback reprieve to the hero on the stage.  He repeated “Stuffenhammer, Stuffenhammer,” In tones that Henry Irving might have envied, while I gently undid the noose around his neck.  I led him under a tree and told him to buck up.  He did so—­slowly and surely—­and then began to ask me agitated questions about proposing.  He deferred to me as though I had spent my whole life Bluebearding through the social system.  He wanted to be coached how to do it, you know.  I told him to rip out the words—­any old words—­and then kiss her.

“Don’t let there be any embarrassing pause,” I said.  “A girl hates pauses.”

“It seems a great liberty,” he returned.  “It doesn’t strike me as r-r-respectful.”

“You try it,” I said.  “It’s the only way.”

“I’ll be glad when it’s over,” he remarked dreamily.

“Whatever you do, keep clear of set speeches;” I went on.  “Blurt it out, no matter how badly—­but with all the fire and ginger in you.”

He gazed at me like a dead calf.

“Here goes,” he said, and started on a trembling walk toward the house.

I don’t know whether he was afraid, or didn’t get the chance, or what it was; but at any rate the afternoon wore on without the least sign of his coming to time.  I kept tab on him as well as I could—­checkers with Miss Drayton—­half an hour writing letters —­a long talk with the major—­and finally his getting lost altogether in the shrubbery with an old lady.  Freddy said the suspense was killing her, and was terribly despondent and miserable.  I couldn’t interest her in the Seventy-second Street house at all.  She asked what was the good of working and worrying, and figuring and making lists—­when in all probability it would be another girl that would live there.  She had an awfully mean opinion of my constancy, and was intolerably philosophical and Oh-I-wouldn’t-blame-you-the-least-little—­bit -if-you-did-go-off-and-marry-somebody-else!  She took a pathetic pleasure in loving me, losing me, and then weeping over the dear dead memory.  She said nobody ever got what they wanted, anyway; and might she come, when she was old and ugly and faded and weary, to take care of my children and be a sort of dear old aunty in the Seventy-second Street house.  I said certainly not, and we had a fight right away.

As we were dressing for dinner that night I took Jones to task, and tried to stiffen him up.  I guess I must have mismanaged it somehow, for he said he’d thank me to keep my paws out of his affairs, and then went into the bath-room, where he shaved and growled for ten whole minutes.  I itched to throw a bootjack at him, but compromised on doing a little growling myself.  Afterward we got into our clothes in silence, and as he went out first he slammed the door.