"Where did you get him from?"
"From Morristown. He was at the Whippeny Club out there before he came to us."
"The Whippeny Club!" I cried, for the name struck like a bullet on the metal of memory.
"Don't you think," the voice over the wire was saying, "that you'd better come up for dinner to-night and inspect the paragon at close range? And you might talk to us a little, between whiles."
"I'd love to," was my very prompt reply.
"Then do," said Beatrice Van Tuyl. "A little after seven."
And a little after seven I duly rang the Van Tuyls' door-bell and was duly admitted to that orderly and well-appointed Seventy-third Street house, so like a thousand other orderly and well-appointed New York houses hidden behind their unchanging masks of brown and gray.
Yet I could not help feeling the vulnerability of that apparently well-guarded home. For all its walls of stone and brick, for all the steel grills that covered its windows and the heavy scroll work that protected its glass door, it remained a place munificently ripe for plunder. Its solidity, I felt, was only a mockery. It made me think of a fortress that had been secretly mined. Its occupants seemed basking in a false security. The very instruments which went to insure that security were actually a menace. The very machinery of service which made possible its cloistral tranquillity held the factor for its disruption.
As I surrendered my hat and coat and ascended to that second floor where I had known so many sedately happy hours, I for once found myself disquieted by its flower-laden atmosphere. I began to be oppressed by a new and disturbing sense of responsibility. It would be no light matter, I began to see, to explode a bomb of dissension in that principality of almost arrogant aloofness. It would be no joke to confound that smoothly flowing routine with which urban wealth so jealously surrounds itself.
I suddenly remembered there was nothing in which I could be positive, nothing on which I could with certainty rely. And my inward disquiet was increased, if anything, by the calm and blithely contented glance Beatrice Van Tuyl leveled at me.