Dryfoos left it to Fulkerson to invite the guests, and he found ready acceptance of his politeness from Kendricks, who rightly regarded the dinner as a part of the Every Other Week business, and was too sweet and kindhearted, anyway, not to seem very glad to come. March was a matter of course; but in Colonel Woodburn, Fulkerson encountered a reluctance which embarrassed him the more because he was conscious of having, for motives of his own, rather strained a point in suggesting the colonel to Dryfoos as a fit subject for invitation. There had been only one of the colonel’s articles printed as yet, and though it had made a sensation in its way, and started the talk about that number, still it did not fairly constitute him a member of the staff, or even entitle him to recognition as a regular contributor. Fulkerson felt so sure of pleasing him with Dryfoos’s message that he delivered it in full family council at the widow’s. His daughter received it with all the enthusiasm that Fulkerson had hoped for, but the colonel said, stiffly, “I have not the pleasure of knowing Mr. Dryfoos.” Miss Woodburn appeared ready to fall upon him at this, but controlled herself, as if aware that filial authority had its limits, and pressed her lips together without saying anything.
“Yes, I know,” Fulkerson admitted. “But it isn’t a usual case. Mr. Dryfoos don’t go in much for the conventionalities; I reckon he don’t know much about ’em, come to boil it down; and he hoped”—here Fulkerson felt the necessity of inventing a little—“that you would excuse any want of ceremony; it’s to be such an informal affair, anyway; we’re all going in business dress, and there ain’t going to be any ladies. He’d have come himself to ask you, but he’s a kind of a bashful old fellow. It’s all right, Colonel Woodburn.”
“I take it that it is, sir,” said the colonel, courteously, but with unabated state, “coming from you. But in these matters we have no right to burden our friends with our decisions.”
“Of course, of course,” said Fulkerson, feeling that he had been delicately told to mind his own business.
“I understand,” the colonel went on, “the relation that Mr. Dryfoos bears to the periodical in which you have done me the honor to print my papah, but this is a question of passing the bounds of a purely business connection, and of eating the salt of a man whom you do not definitely know to be a gentleman.”
“Mah goodness!” his daughter broke in. “If you bah your own salt with his money—”
“It is supposed that I earn his money before I buy my salt with it,” returned her father, severely. “And in these times, when money is got in heaps, through the natural decay of our nefarious commercialism, it behooves a gentleman to be scrupulous that the hospitality offered him is not the profusion of a thief with his booty. I don’t say that Mr. Dryfoos’s good-fortune is not honest. I simply say that I know nothing about it, and that I should prefer to know something before I sat down at his board.”
“You’re all right, colonel,” said Fulkerson, “and so is Mr. Dryfoos. I give you my word that there are no flies on his personal integrity, if that’s what you mean. He’s hard, and he’d push an advantage, but I don’t believe he would take an unfair one. He’s speculated and made money every time, but I never heard of his wrecking a railroad or belonging to any swindling company or any grinding monopoly. He does chance it in stocks, but he’s always played on the square, if you call stocks gambling.”
“May I think this over till morning?” asked the colonel.
“Oh, certainly, certainly,” said Fulkerson, eagerly. “I don’t know as there’s any hurry.”
Miss Woodburn found a chance to murmur to him before he went: “He’ll come. And Ah’m so much oblahged, Mr. Fulkerson. Ah jost know it’s all you’ doing, and it will give papa a chance to toak to some new people, and get away from us evahlastin’ women for once.”
“I don’t see why anyone should want to do that,” said Fulkerson, with grateful gallantry. “But I’ll be dogged,” he said to March when he told him about this odd experience, “if I ever expected to find Colonel Woodburn on old Lindau’s ground. He did come round handsomely this morning at breakfast and apologized for taking time to think the invitation over before he accepted. ‘You understand,’ he says, ‘that if it had been to the table of some friend not so prosperous as Mr. Dryfoos—your friend Mr. March, for instance—it would have been sufficient to know that he was your friend. But in these days it is a duty that a gentleman owes himself to consider whether he wishes to know a rich man or not. The chances of making money disreputably are so great that the chances are against a man who has made money if he’s made a great deal of it.’ ”
March listened with a face of ironical insinuation. “That was very good; and he seems to have had a good deal of confidence in your patience and in your sense of his importance to the occasion—”
“No, no,” Fulkerson protested, “there’s none of that kind of thing about the colonel. I told him to take time to think it over; he’s the simplest-hearted old fellow in the world.”
“I should say so. After all, he didn’t give any reason he had for accepting. But perhaps the young lady had the reason.”
“Pshaw, March!” said Fulkerson.
VI
So far as the Dryfoos family was concerned, the dinner might as well have been given at Frescobaldi’s rooms. None of the ladies appeared. Mrs. Dryfoos was glad to escape to her own chamber, where she sat before an autumnal fire, shaking her head and talking to herself at times, with the foreboding of evil which old
