"Be ready with the papers for the papers."
Perceiving a puzzled look on the lawyer's face, H. R. explained: "Draw the legal papers up so they will be news. And remember that I am the society. You are merely a lawyer lucky enough to be its lawyer. If you don't know what the reporters like to print, bring the injunctions and typewritten argument to me this afternoon. Go away now. I'm going to Valiquet's."
"Not to—"
"Not to anything you may think."
Max Onthemaker walked away, and even as he walked he began to fear that the newspapers would not let him have more than twenty-eight columns. It behooved him to be brief. What with the immemorial wrongs of the poor, and the inalienable rights of American citizens, and the abuse of wealth, and the arrogance of unconvicted millionaires, and the supine subservience of the police and the politicians to Big Business, how could he use less than three pages? How?
But he must do it. He asked himself what steps he would take to prevent the sandwich-men, or anybody, from advertising him, and he could find no objection. But he had imagination. He indignantly put himself in the place of Valiquet's and hired M. Onthemaker, Esq., to stop the beasts. And then he proceeded to make the able counsel of the S. A. S. A. punch the great jewelers' case full of holes—such holes as would let out the law in the way the reporters would like. This would make said holes the kind that no judge, thinking of re-election and the recall, would dare to plug up. When your client is poor and doesn't use dynamite, sympathy is the best law with juries. And when it came to picking out jurors, Max had inherited a vision for dollars which enabled him to tell the contents of a juror's inside pocket to the penny, and therefore the exact hatred of riches of each of the twelve peers.
VI
H. R. sent word to Fleming, via Caspar Weinpusslacher, that he desired to meet about fifty members of the society at the Colossal Restaurant that evening at seven sharp. He then went to Valiquet's. The firm's name was not visible on the façade; only a beautiful bronze clock. Everybody was expected to know that this was Valiquet's, and everybody did, particularly those who could not afford to buy jewels. It had engendered throughout the entire country that familiar form of American snobbery which consists not only of having the best that money can buy, but of telling everybody that the watch or the necklace or the solitaire or the stick-pin came from Valiquet's.
He entered the most beautiful store in the world as though his feet had carried him thither automatically, from force of habit. He looked approvingly, as for the millionth time, at the wide teak boards of the floor and the ornate but beautiful solid-silver ceiling and the cool variegated purple-gray marble columns. He paused by the pearl-counter and stared at the one-hundred-thousand-dollar strings with what you might call an amiable tolerance; it wasn't their fault, poor things!