lookin’, but if you’d come out in print and say he was handsome, a good lawyer’d have you at his mercy. His dimensions, what they was of them, all run perpendicular. He didn’t have no latitude. If his collar slipped over his shoulders he could step out of it. If they hadn’t been payin’ him all them millions for pitcher plays, he could of got a job in a wire wheel. They wouldn’t of been no difference in his photograph if you took it with a X-ray or a camera. But he had hair and two eyes and a mouth and all the rest of it, and his clo’es was certainly class. Why wouldn’t they be? He could pick out cloth that was thirty bucks a yard and get a suit and overcoat for fifteen bucks. A umbrella cover would of made him a year’s pyjamas.
Well, I seen the Missus sneak from the kitchen to her room to don the shoe leather, so I got right down to business.
“The girls tells me you’re fond o’ good music,” I says.
“I love it,” says Bishop.
“Do you ever take in the op’ra?” I ast him.
“I eat it up,” he says.
“Have you been this year?” I says.
“Pretty near every night,” says Bishop.
“I should think you’d be sick of it,” says I.
“Oh, no,” he says, “no more’n I get tired o’ food.”
“A man could easy get tired o’ the same kind o’ food,” I says.
“But the op’ras is all different,” says Bishop.
“Different languages, maybe,” I says. “But they’re all music and singin’.”