Chapter IX.

Confidences.

Poor Viki was feeling rather depressed. It was exactly a week since Tournament but she had not heard from Warm Kneed, though under the circumstances she felt she should have done. Little did she suspect that he was in hospital being treated for D.T.'s. She felt flat and enervated. She needed Dr. Williams Pink Pills. At this moment her girlfriend Margaret Georgetaker rushed up exuding oomph. "Take a swig of this, it'll pep you up no end," she urged, and offered Viki her flask of Clement's Tonic. Immediately Viki's vision, which had become blurred from emotion at the thought of Warm Kneed's inexplicable neglect, cleared and she realised she was in the Cafetaria eating a pie, an error which in her sober moments she would never have been guilty of (or of which she would never have been guilty). Her attention was immediately arrested by a person wolfing soup at the next table.

With the rugged grandeur of his weathered features (storms had beaten on them and not in vain) and his shock of unkempt hair he looked like a subspecies of Cro-Magnon man. You felt he spent some of his time drawing buffaloes on walls. "That's John McBleary," said Margaret. "He's producing Extrav."

"Is that why he looks so tired?" asked Viki, forgetting her own sorrow in the contemplation of another

"Partly," said Margaret, "partly because for a year now he's had a weight on his mind."

"What weight?" asked Viki. (Yes, you're quite right, she is dumb.)

"Ask John. I'd say 7 stone plus."

"Is that why they sing that Johnny song?" asked Viki, and burst into tears at the thought of the many names that could be substituted from her point of view, but alas they were all G.W.T.W. She must sublimate her emotions. She would act in Extrav.!