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To the high-well-born cat, Vere de Vere, Milt Daggett mused aloud, "Your ladyship, as Shakespeare says, the man that gets cold feet never wins the girl. And I'm scared, cat, clean scared." Milt Daggett had not been accurate in his implication that he had not noticed Claire at a garage in Schoenstrom. For one thing, he owned the garage.
"Oh, you wouldn't be interested. Just Schoenstrom!" "But just Schoenstrom might be extremely interesting." "But honest, you'd think I was edging in on you!" "I know what you are thinking. The time I suggested, way back there in Dakota, that you were sticking too close. You've never got over it. I've tried to make up for it, but I really don't blame you. I was horrid. I deserve being beaten.
He opened it with unhappy tenderness. He had been snatched from the world of beautiful words and serene dignity, of soaring mountains and companionship with Claire in the radiant morning, back to the mud and dust of Schoenstrom, from the opera to "city sports" in a lunch-room! He hated Bill McGolwey and his sneering assumption that Milt belonged in the filth with him.
Then she glanced questioningly at Milt, who choked: "Oh yes, yes, sure, glad see you, come in, get some tea, so glad see you, come in " "My friend Mr. McGolwey I knew him in Schoenstrom come on to Seattle for a while. Bill, these are some people I met along the road," Milt grumbled. "Glad to meet 'em. Have a chair. Have two chairs!
You're assuming that your Erik will make good. As a matter of fact, at my age he'll be running a one-man tailor shop in some burg about the size of Schoenstrom." "He will not!" "That's what he's headed for now all right, and he's twenty-five or -six and What's he done to make you think he'll ever be anything but a pants-presser?" "He has sensitiveness and talent " "Wait now!
Milt saluted her and sympathized: "You have a punk time, don't you, countess? Like to beat it to Minneapolis with me?" The countess said that she did indeed have an extraordinarily punk time, and she sang to Milt the hymn of the little gods of the warm hearth. Then Milt's evening dissipations were over. Schoenstrom has movies only once a week.
Where that young fellow in Youth's Encounter wanted to be a bishop and a soldier and everything Just like me, except Schoenstrom is different, from London, some ways! I always wanted to be a brakie, and then a yeggman. But I wasn't bright enough for either. I just became a garage man. And I Some day I'm going to stop using slang. But it'll take an operation!"
When these adventures were over, when he had had a shave and a shine, and washed his hands, and looked into a department-store window that contained ten billion yards of silk draped against polished satinwood, when he had felt unhappy over a movie theater large enough to contain ten times the population of Schoenstrom, and been cursed by a policeman for jaywalking, and had passed a hotel entirely full of diplomats and marble and caviare then he could no longer put off telephoning to Claire, and humbly, in a booth meant for an umbrella-stand, he got the Eugene Gilson house, and to a female who said "Yes?" in a tone which made it mean "No!" he ventured, "May I speak to Miss Boltwood?"
"I know you're the finest person I ever met. You're the kind I knew there must be people like you, because I knew the Joneses. They're the only friends I've got that have, oh, I suppose it's what they call culture." In a long monologue, uninterrupted by Claire, he told of his affection for the Schoenstrom "prof" and his wife.
"But how did Who is this extraordinary Milt Daggett?" "Him? Oh, nobody 'specially. He's just a fellow down here at Schoenstrom. But we all know him. Goes to all the dances, thirty miles around. Thing about him is: if he sees something wrong, he picks out some poor fellow like me, and says what he thinks." Claire drove on. She was aware that she was looking for Milt's bug. It was not in sight.
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