Then, remembering that he was supposed to be suffering silently in his room, he hunched up to a sitting posture and regarded his environment with a subdued grin.
Everything seems easy when it seems funny.

After all, the matter was simple--absurdly simple.

A word to Quarrier, and crack! the match was off! Girl mad as a hornet, but staggered, has no explanation to offer; man frozen stiff with rage, mute as an iceberg.

Then, zip! Enter Beverly Plank--the girl's rescuer at a pinch--her preserver, the saviour of her "face," the big, highly coloured, leaden-eyed deus ex machina.

Would she take fifty cents on the dollar?
Would she?
to buy herself a new "face"?
And put it all over Quarrier?
And live happy ever after?
Would she?
Oh, not at all! And Mortimer rolled over in another paroxysm; which wasn't good for him, and frightened him enough to lie still awhile and think how best he might cut down on his wine and spirits.
The main thing, after all, was to promise Plank his opportunity, but not tell him how he was to obtain it; for Mortimer had an uneasy idea that there was something of the Puritan deep planted under the stolid young man's hide, and that he might make some absurd and irrelevant objection to the perfectly proper methods employed by his newly self-constituted guide and mentor.