It irritated Miss Peters to have Rupert de Ruyter monopolize the talk. His rather rasping voice sawed her nerves, and she detested the way he thrust forward his square chin. She listened while he chattered along, not boasting exactly, yet managing to convey the impression that he knew more than any one else. Now and again he did bring forth a picturesque fact, for which he had the kodak eye of a reporter. He had the happy-go-lucky facility of the newspaper man, and he rattled away with more than one absurd misapprehension of the reality, until he reminded her of a singer with a fine voice but unable to avoid false notes.
"I don't pretend to know New York inside-out and upsidedown," he was saying; "but it is a most fascinating study, this polyglot city of ours, and the more you push your investigations the more likely you are to make surprising discoveries. You know we have an Italian quarter here?"
This was addressed, perhaps, to the British guest, but it was Mrs. Jimmy Suydam who answered it.
"Of course we do," she said; "haven't we all read that thrilling story you wrote about it?—the story with the startling title—A Vision of Black Despair."
The author flushed with pride that so handsome a woman and so exclusive a leader of Society should thus praise one of his writings.
Mr. Jimmy Suydam leaned over to Mrs. Canton, at whose left he was sitting, and said, "I don't see how my wife does it, do you? She keeps up with everything, you know—reads all the books—and all that."
"I didn't mean to remind you of that little thing of mine," continued De Ruyter, with a self-satisfied air that made little Miss Peters feel as though she would like to stick a pin in him. "That's neither here nor there, though I spent two days down in the Italian quarter getting up the local color for it. But what you didn't know, any of you, I am certain, is that part of the soil of this city was imported from Italy."
"Really, now," commented the British guest, "that is very interesting, indeed. It would be from a religious motive, I suppose—just as some of the mediæval cemeteries had earth brought from the Holy Land?"
"That would be a more romantic reason, no doubt," the story-teller explained. "But the real one is very prosaic, I fear. The Italian soil here in New York was brought over as ballast by the ships that were going to take back our bread-stuffs. There is lot after lot upon the Harlem that has been filled in with this ballast—stones mostly, but some of it is earth."
"Genoa the superb providing a foundation for imperial New York," said the young Irishman, with a little flourish—and Miss Peters guessed that De Ruyter made a mental note of the figure for future elaboration. "And has New York a volcano under the city like Naples, now?—like every great town in Europe for the matter of that. Have you a seething mass of want and misery and discontent, such as boiled over in Paris under the Commune? That's what I'm wanting to find out."