“Excuse me, Gertrude,” she said, and opening the envelope read the following words from Richard:—
“My dear Mrs. Percy-Bartlett,—The miracle has been performed. Mr. John Fenton will accompany me to your musicale on Tuesday evening. Your invitation will reach him if addressed to the Press Club.”
The reader smiled, and handed the epistle to Gertrude Van Vleck.
“And who is John Fenton?” asked Gertrude, after perusing the note.
“Oh, John Fenton,” said Mrs. Percy-Bartlett gayly, “John Fenton is an experiment.”
CHAPTER VIII.
“Meeting strangers at a musicale is not always a pleasant experience. If you are musical, the people bore you; if you are sociable, the music bores you.”
So John Fenton had said to Richard Stoughton, when the latter had made his first effort to perform a miracle and obtain the former’s acceptance in advance of Mrs. Percy-Bartlett’s invitation.
“But you owe me this reparation, Fenton,” Richard had urged. “When you gave me those books on the single-tax theory to read, did I hold off and say that if I was indifferent the books would bore me, or, if I became a convert, I would bore my friends? No; I made no excuses, but read the books. Now I claim my reward. You have failed, after a fair trial, to make me an advocate of the immediate establishment of the millennium. Let me now have an equal chance of persuading you that the best thing to do is to take the world as we find it, and enjoy the good the gods provide.”