XXX
MRS. CROMWELL’S SONS-IN-LAW
HE WAS far from convinced, however, that Mildred’s necessity was as tragic as she believed. If it was, he would prove to his wife that he was a man of more resources than she thought; but it still seemed to him that old John Tower could be in no danger from the simple wiles of Julietta. For Hobart had accepted the theory that Julietta was wily; he had finally gone that far unconditionally before the unhappy evening was over; and he even wondered why he had hitherto been so blind when he looked at Julietta. But as for steady old John Tower—“No,” he said to himself, as he drove into the city the next morning. “Absolutely impossible!” Yet in this emphasis there was that faint shade of doubt so often present when people buttress their convictions with “absolutely”; so he decided to buttress himself further by means of a diplomatic experimental talk with old John.
Arrived in the heart of the city at the great building that was his own, with all its thirty stories obedient to his five feet three inches, a Giant Jinn enslaved by a little master enchanter, he went, not to his own offices, but to old John’s. “I just dropped in for a morning cigar,” he explained.
His brother-in-law received him heartily.
“My dear Hobart, this is indeed a pleasure. Will you smoke one of my cigars or one of your own? I’m afraid yours are much the better.”
“No, they’re not,” Hobart laughed. “Mine are much the worse. Your taste is a lot better than mine about pretty nearly everything.” As he spoke he took a long cigar from the box that Tower was offering him, and lighted it. “You have better taste in cigars, better taste in furniture——” Here he seated himself in one of the set of seventeenth-century English chairs that helped to make the room the pleasant place it was. “You even have better taste on the golf links,” he concluded, chuckling as if reminiscently.
“How so? You play a better game. You don’t allude to my apparel for it, I imagine.”
“That, too,” Hobart said. “But I was thinking of something else.”
“Of what, my dear Hobart?”