“There isn’t! I tell you I know the whole crowd of them. I’ve been brought up with this moneyed pack all my life, haven’t I? Pork packers and wheat grabbers and pedlers of gas and electric light and dry goods. Grandfather’s the only one of the crowd that I respect. He has stayed the same. They can’t fool him. He knows he just happened to go into wholesale beef and pork when wholesale beef and pork was a new game in Chicago. Now look at him!”
“Still, you will admit there’s something in knowing when,” he argued.
Paula stood up. “If you don’t know I’ll tell you. Now is when. I’ve got Grandfather and Dad and Theodore to work with. You can go on being an architect if you want to. It’s a fine enough profession. But unless you’re a genius where’ll it get you! Go in with them, and Dirk, in five years——”
“What!” They were both standing, facing each other, she tense, eager; he relaxed but stimulated.
“Try it and see what, will you? Will you, Dirk?”
“I don’t know, Paula. I should say my mother wouldn’t think much of it.”
“What does she know! Oh, I don’t mean that she isn’t a fine, wonderful person. She is. I love her. But success! She thinks success is another acre of asparagus or cabbage; or a new stove in the kitchen now that they’ve brought gas out as far as High Prairie.”
He had a feeling that she possessed him; that her hot eager hands held him though they stood apart and eyed each other almost hostilely.
As he undressed that night in his rose and satin room he thought, “Now what’s her game? What’s she up to? Be careful, Dirk, old boy.” On coming into the room he had gone immediately to the long mirror and had looked at himself carefully, searchingly, not knowing that Paula, in her room, had done the same. He ran a hand over his close-shaved chin, looked at the fit of his dinner coat. He wished he had had it made at Peter Peel’s, the English tailor on Michigan Boulevard. But Peel was so damned expensive. Perhaps next time . . .
As he lay in the soft bed with the satin coverlet over him he thought, “Now what’s her lit-tle game!”