"Yes."
"Good. Then you will spend the remainder of the evening with me, now that I have found you."
The blare of the orchestra drowned further talk until we emerged from the opera house, leaving the cigarette girl, Carmen, and her Spanish lovers to their fate.
A huge dark green automobile with some sort of a foreign monogram on the door, and a small Japanese boy enveloped in a great fur coat at the wheel, drew silently up at the curb. Nicholas pushed through the aisles of waiting carriages and the crowd of spectators that lined the street and sidewalk on that famous opening night.
"To the Bellevue?" I asked noting the direction.
"I would rather take you home. We can have more quiet in your back office, Dale. I want to hear you talk. The sound of your voice is the best music I have heard since I returned to old Philadelphia."
"Have you seen mother?"
"Yes; I got in just after you had gone to the opera. She told me where to find you."
When we arrived home the Jap boy put the car in a neighbouring garage and I got out my Scotch and seltzer in the back office. Nick fled upstairs and brought down a mandarin's coat of many colours which he had picked up in Japan for me. It was indeed a beauty and I was proud of it as I strutted around viewing myself in the mirrors. Nick made himself comfortable in my old smoking jacket, and threw himself into a chair, his glance wandering about the room.
"Just to think of it," he said; "all these years have gone by and everything here is unchanged. Not a piece of furniture, not an ornament has been moved. In the midst of it you sit, the very personification of immovability, working away, doing the same thing yesterday, to-day and for ever. While I have looked upon a new scene with every changing hour, have seen cities rise and fall, have watched men die by the hundreds. Doesn't the wanderlust ever grip you, Dale; don't you ever want to get out and see something of the world?"