I didn't take much stock in all this. It is the way a poor actor likes
to talk about one who rises above him.
About Quarles and Miss Hamerton; Milbourne said that just as she was
going to marry him she found out that he had a wife already. Without
exactly saying so, he let on that it was he, Milbourne, who had put her
wise to the young man. That's the way they go on. She had hysterics,
he said, and broke up the show. As proof of his story, he said that
Quarles had disappeared and nobody knew where he was, not even his old
servant.
As I talk more with Milbourne I see that he isn't so simple as he likes
to make out. He has a way of sandwiching in little questions in his
dull talk, that amounts to pretty effective cross-examining in the end.
He didn't get anything on me though. My story hasn't any holes in it
yet. I have an idea that I've had considerably more experience acting
than he has.
Sometimes he lets slip a clever remark that don't fit in with his
character of a bonehead at all. For instance, we were talking about
the Chatfield case that all the papers are full of now, and Milbourne
says:
"Put a police helmet on any man, and right away his brain seems to take
the shape of it. Cops think as much alike as insects. Let a crook
once get on to their way of thinking, and he can play with them like a
ball on a rubber string."
He let this out by accident. Afterwards he looked at me sharp to see
if I had taken anything amiss. I never let on.
I have been in this house a week now, and Milbourne and I are supposed
to be quite intimate friends. Last night on my way up stairs I saw a
light under his door, so I knocked. His door is always locked. He
wasn't any too glad to see me, but he couldn't very well keep me out,
because he hadn't started to undress yet. He was having a little
supper: a bottle of a syrupy kind of wine and biscuits with some
blackish stuff he said was caviare. I didn't take any. I marked the
labels, and to-day I went into a swell store and inquired the prices.
The wine was Imperial Tokay. It is $2.50 the small bottle. The
caviare was $1.50 for a little pot. I give this for what it's worth.
Seems funny if a man has a taste for such swell eats he should put up
at a joint like Mrs. Atwood's.