"Oh, cute idea for an advertisement: 'Mock Turtle served by Mock Marquis.'"
A titter went round the room among those who had enough English to understand the joke, and there was even a faint, suppressed sound of laughter at Mrs. Milton's table.
Loveland turned white. He had an impulse to hurl the broken dishes, now collected on the tray, straight at Cohen's oiled black head; and a week ago he would have done so without stopping to reflect. But he had lived longer in six days since landing in New York than in as many years before; and he was learning a lesson which no one had even tried to teach him in the past; mastery of himself.
He knew that if he took violent revenge upon the insolent young Jew, his late shipmates and their friends would delight in the exhibition. They would think that they were getting their money's worth out of the show, and Loveland determined not to play mountebank for their entertainment.
Pale, but perfectly composed in appearance, he did not even look towards Cohen, and seemed to take no more notice of the young man's impertinence than of the barking of some mongrel dog, too feeble to be kicked.
Ardently Loveland longed to get out of the room and to stay out, but though he could have escaped by carrying the broken dishes into the kitchen, he would not deign to turn his back on the enemy. He gave the tray to Blinkey and obeyed a gesture of Alexander's which sent him to take a new order from the Italians.
"I don't believe he'll come to wait on us," whispered Mrs. Milton to Tony Kidd. "If he doesn't, it will have been hardly worth the fag of coming all this way downtown. His handing us our things would have been the best fun of all."
"I think you'll get your fun," mumbled Tony. But he was not enjoying himself.
"Of course the man's a fraud, and deserves all he's got," the journalist thought. "But I'm hanged if I like seeing him take his medicine. He's a good plucked one, anyhow."
Never glancing at the eight faces, which watched his every movement with sixteen brilliant eyes, Loveland passed their table and went to tell the cook that the Italian party would have a rum omelet in place of the lost ice-cream. Cohen's fried oysters were ready, the Pole having just served them, and now the second course of the dinner—begun already with Blue Points—was waiting for the "swells." It was soup, and Loveland had either to carry it in, and serve it himself, or else to show that the torture of the lash was beyond his endurance.