CHAPTER   VJI
there were three tourists at the bar at Freddy^5
and Freddy was serving them. One was a ver
tall, thin, wide-shouldered man, in shorts, wearing
thick-lensed spectacles, tanned, with small closely
trimmed sandy moustache. The woman with hin
had her blonde curly hair cut short like a man's, i
bad complexion, and the face and build of a lad)
wrestler. She wore shorts, too.
'Oh, nerts to you/ she was saying to the third
tourist, who had a rather swollen reddish face, a
rusty-coloured moustache, a white cloth hat with a
green celluloid visor, and a trick of talking with a
rather extraordinary movement of his lips as though
he were eating something too hot for comfort.
'How charming,' said the green-visored man.
Td never heard the expression actually used in
conversation. I thought it was an obsolete phrase,
something one saw in print in —er —the funny
papers but never heard/
*Nerts, nerts, double nerts to you,' said the lady
wrestler in a sudden access of charm, giving him
the benefit of her pimpled profile,
^cHow beautiful,' said the green-visored man.
'You put it so prettily. Isn't it from Brooklyn
originally?'
'You mustn't mind her. She's my wife,' the tall
tourist said. 'Have you two met?'
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