“Why can’t you?” demanded Conover. “Why can’t you introduce me? An’ for that matter, I haven’t asked you to, yet. Wait till I do, before you say you can’t.”
“This club,” went on the other, “represents all that is best and most congenial in Granite’s social life. With a discordant element introduced into it, the club’s chief feature is gone. If there is a man who frequents the place whom we do not know and whom we do not wish to know—who cannot meet our—”
“I see we’ll have to waste more time over this than I thought,” grunted Caleb. “Let’s go back a little. Why don’t you want to know me? Hey?”
“Need we go into that? Surely—”
“As you have made it one of the reasons for wantin’ me fired, I guess we’d better. Why don’t you want to know me?”
“If you force me to say it, because you are not a gentleman.”
“No?” sneered Caleb, as a new and fainter murmur of deprecation ran along the table, “Maybe I’m not. I don’t get tanked up on cheap booze down in the bar after golf tournaments, like a lot of your ‘gentlemen’ here, an’ then wander up to dinner on the veranda an’ talk so loud that the women at the next table can’t hear themselves cackle. I don’t ask a party of men and women to dine with me here an’ then get a silly jag an’ sing ‘Mother, Pin a Rose on Me,’ every five minutes durin’ the meal till ev’rybody at the table gets scared for fear I’ll sing somethin’ worse,—like you did last Sunday night.”
Conover’s interlocutor sat down very hard and tried to look loftily indifferent. Caine’s undisguised laugh made the effort more difficult.
“No,” pursued Caleb, with impersonal calm, “I’m not a gentleman. I used to think maybe I’d like to be one. But I don’t, any more. I come down here for dinner sometimes, Sunday evenin’. As there’s no one exactly clamorin’ to entertain me, I’ve plenty of chance to use my eyes an’ ears. So I get a line on ‘gentlemen’ an’ on how they act when they’re in their own crowd. At the table next to me last Sunday, there was a little dinner party. ’Bout a dozen in all. You was givin’ it, I b’lieve, Mr. Featherstone. By the time dessert came everybody was a-tellin’ stories. Stories I wouldn’t tell in a barroom. Women, too. Gee! I never knew before that women—”
“Mr. Chairman!” cried Featherstone, jumping up. “I protest against this vile abuse. As a member of the Arareek—”