To slap him on the
back at such moments, as Wren ventured to do on one occasion, Wren
belonging to the jovial school of thought which holds that nature gave
us hands in order to slap backs, was to bring forth a new and
unexpected Kirk, a Kirk who scowled and snarled and was hardly to be
appeased with apology. Stranger still, this new Kirk could be summoned
into existence by precisely the type of story at which, but a few weeks
back, he would have been the first to laugh.
Percy Shanklyn, whose conversation consisted of equal parts of
autobiography and of stories of the type alluded to, was the one to
discover this. His latest, which he had counted on to set the table in
a roar, produced from Kirk criticism so adverse and so crisply
delivered that he refrained from telling his latest but one and spent
the rest of the evening wondering, like his fellow visitors, what had
happened to Kirk and whether he was sickening for something.
Not one of them had the faintest suspicion that these symptoms
indicated that Kirk, for the first time in his easy-going life, was in
love. They had never contemplated such a prospect. It was not till his
conscientious and laborious courtship had been in progress for over two
weeks and was nearing the stage when he felt that the possibility of
revealing his state of mind to Ruth was not so remote as it had been,
that a chance visit of Percy Shanklyn to the studio during the
afternoon solved the mystery.
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