“I met a cousin of yours,” she informed him, “at the week-end party I’ve just come from—Mr. Austin Thayer. I saw a lot of him, and we got quite chummy.”
“Austin’s a fine fellow,” agreed Mr. Thayer cordially, “but he and I disagree about so many things—we don’t hit it off at all.”
“No,” said Babbie serenely, crushing a slice of lemon relentlessly with her tiny wooden spoon—Japanese spoons, for the Japanese teas were the latest innovation at the Tally-ho. “Your cousin Austin thinks you are ‘a very foolish boy,’ to quote his own words. We discussed you at dinner last evening.”
Mr. Thayer flushed. “And did you defend me just a little?” he asked. “Because if you didn’t, considering what Austin has called me now and then, I don’t see how there could have been much discussion.”
“Well, if you make a point of it, it wasn’t a discussion,” Babbie told him coldly. “It was an—an exchange of experiences. He told me what he knew about your past life, and I told him the very little I know about your present activities.”
Mr. Thayer smiled a perfunctory smile. “It must have been a desperately dull dinner. My affairs are never the least bit exciting. Next time you meet Austin at anybody’s week-end, make him talk about himself.”
“Oh, he did that too,” Babbie explained, “sitting out dances the first evening. He’s had piles of fascinating experiences. If I were a man I think I should go in for the same sort of thing exactly. I love the way he pounces down on the Stock Exchange, straight out of a South African jungle, and after he’s made two or three millions calmly departs again to climb Mount McKinley, or motor through Tibet. And when his two millions are spent, he builds a town or sells a gold mine, and then buys a castle on the Hudson and a car and a motor-boat, and tries another kind of fun. He doesn’t bother with employees and fiddling little plans for making them ‘safer and happier,’” Babbie quoted maliciously.
“No, he doesn’t,” returned Mr. Thayer with asperity. “They mobbed him once in Chicago, because he’d cornered the wheat supply and the price of bread had nearly doubled.”
“Was that the time he made five millions in three months?” asked Babbie blandly.
That evening, while Babbie, in a ruffly pink negligee, sat cross-legged on Madeline’s couch, eating fudges and playing with the ploshkin, she explained to her two friends that the week-end party had “bored her to tears.”