Mr. Atkins pounced on Fran, and if he did not also exactly pounce on Sam, he tolerated him. He took in Fran’s shining hair, her freshness, her slim quickness. He brought her a cup of punch, bowing like Louis XIV. He won Sam by telling him of meeting Dr. Carl Benz, the father of the motor car, at Mannheim, back in 1885, and of seeing his first horseless carriage—it was, said Atkins, a wire-wheeled tricycle with a chain drive like a bicycle, a handle for steering, and under the seat a mass of machinery as wild-looking as a gutted alarm clock.
“Like to’ve seen it!” murmured Sam. “Happen to know what the horsepower was?”
Mr. Endicott Everett Atkins looked at him benevolently, his glossy baldness rose-hued in the red-shaded lamps. “It was three and a quarter,” he said.
(It was not for sixty hours that, lying awake in the early morning, Sam realized that Atkins hadn’t had the smallest notion what the horsepower of the Benz really was.)
With men, Mr. Endicott Everett Atkins rarely let down, but with slim and glistening women he came near to being human. He indicated to Fran that this was only a merry slumming prank of his to come to the studio of Mr. Lycurgus Watts—normally he moved only in the loftiest circles, among the loveliest ladies, the wittiest and bravest men, the rarest first editions, and he longed to introduce her to all of them.
She loved it.
He told her the delightful anecdote which he had heard from André Sorchon, who had it from E. V. Lucas, who had it from Henry James, who had it direct from Swinburne. He told her that her husband (Mr. Samuel Dodsworth) was extraordinarily like the late Duc de Malmaison, but that she was ever and ever so much nicer than the Duchesse. He told her that her ash-blond hair was astonishingly like that of Madame Zelie du Strom, the Swedish tragedienne who, Mr. Atkins agreed with himself, was greater than Bernhardt, Duse, and Modjeska put together—
Sam sat back, as so often he had sat back at directors’ meetings, content to let others do the talking if he could do the plotting, and tried to make out the purposes of Mr. Endicott Everett Atkins.
“This fellow knows a lot. Well, at least he’s read a lot. Well, if he hasn’t read so much, he remembers all he has read. Here he’s making love to Fran—telling her what a wonder she is—and she’s lapping it up. Bless her! Let her have her fling—if the fling ain’t any more dangerous than old Atkins! Wonder if I’ll be as dry a bladder as he is in fifteen years? If I am, I’m going to retire to a log cabin and grow corn!”
“I really can’t tell you,” Mr. Endicott Everett Atkins was moaning at Fran, “how very, very much I admire your wisdom in coming to Europe in a really leisured pilgrimage. And I wonder if you realize you’re doing a patriotic American duty—showing Europe that we have poised and exquisite creatures like yourself, if you’ll permit the familiarity from an aged bookworm, as well as these Yankee tourist women—oh, these dreadful bouncing females, with their shrill voices, their ignorance of all gentle usages—and the way they frequent horrible American bars and dance in dreadful places—”
“Why shouldn’t the ‘Yankee tourist women’ go and dance in Montmartre, if they enjoy it?” Sam meditated. “Does Atkins think the pretty buyer from Detroit comes here to please him? The American highbrow abroad is just like the Puritan back home—the Puritan says that if you drink anything at all, he’ll disapprove of you, and the expatriate here says that if you drink anything but Château Haut Something-or-other at just the right temperature, he’ll disapprove of you and—
“I will get back for my class reunion this June! Thirtieth reunion! Am I that old?
“Think of seeing Tub again and Poodle Smith and Bill Dyers and—Now what the devil was the name of that big fellow with the red hair that played center? Florey—Floreau—Flaherty? Corking fellow!
“And Atkins goes on. I’d better listen and get what wisdom I can, because I think our ‘really leisured pilgrimage to Europe’ is drawing to a close!”
“—though I’m afraid, Mrs. Dodsworth, that you’ll find our house too dreadfully bookish. Beautiful people like you are superior to books. You ought never to read anything—you ought only to live. You ought to exist imperishably on some Grecian isle amid the wine-dark sea, dancing in the sunshine. But if your husband and you will delight us by coming to lunch next Sunday, at least I may be able to show you one or two intaglios—”
At lunch at the Atkinses’, on Sunday, Sam met his first Princess, Madame Maravigliarsi. Not that he knew at first that she was a Princess; in fact he supposed her to be a nice, rather shabby little Poor Relation. But Atkins revealed her princessity in a dramatic aside, and Sam was as impressed as any other proper democratic American.
And she was, Fran carefully ascertained, quite a good, high-ranking Princess, and only one-quarter American.
Sam sat next to her, at lunch in the tall cool room with its Venetian glass and the serene bust of Plato; and while he made a respectable show of not being humble, the boy who had read Ivanhoe and Shakespeare and The Idylls of the King was gloating, “I’m sitting next to a Princess!”
The Princess prattled of what she had said to Mussolini and what His Eminence the Secretary to the Pope had said to her, and for ten minutes Sam desired to know the renowned of the world. He remembered—what was it?—something that Fran had
