" There was a protesting chorus of
remonstrance. "Oh, I don't like it any better than you do," said
Sloane, "but I'll get away, early and join you before the play's over.
No one in the Travellers' Club, you see, has ever travelled farther
from New York than London or the Riviera, and so when a member starts
for Abyssinia they give him a dinner, and he has to take himself very
seriously indeed, and cry with Seldon, 'I, who am about to die, salute
you!' If that man there was any use," he added, interrupting himself
and pointing with his glass at Stuart, "he'd pack up his things
to-night and come with me."
"Oh, don't urge him," remonstrated Weimer, who had travelled all over
the world in imagination, with the aid of globes and maps, but never
had got any farther from home than Montreal. "We can't spare Stuart.
He has to stop here and invent a preliminary marriage state, so that
if he finds he doesn't like a girl, he can leave her before it is too
late."
"You sail at seven, I believe, and from Hoboken, don't you?" asked
Stuart, undisturbed. "If you'll start at eleven from the New York
side, I think I'll go with you, but I hate getting up early; and then
you see--I know what dangers lurk in Abyssinia, but who could tell
what might not happen to him in Hoboken?"
When Stuart returned to his room, he found a large package set upright
in an armchair and enveloped by many wrappings; but the handwriting on
the outside told him at once from whom it came and what it might be,
and he pounced upon it eagerly and tore it from its covers.
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