“Oh, you’ve discovered that, have you?”
“Yes. This man here”—it was necessary to draw close and to whisper again—“he’s Mr. Simeon Peters, from Idaho. He shouted across the table to me at dinner yesterday to pass the butter. He was just plunging his own knife into it as everybody at our table does.”
“As everybody at every table does,” Cheviot corrected.
“Well, but wait. You don’t know how elegant we are down at our end. Mr. Sim Peters hesitated, and you could see a misgiving dawning behind his spectacles. He drew back just before he reached the butter-dish, and carefully and very thoroughly he licked his knife the whole length of the blade. Yes! Then he felt quite happy about plunging it in the public butter.” She was able to laugh now at what had driven her from the table in that dark yesterday. Louis laughed, too; he even carried his genial good-will the excessive length of joining in the conversation of those same financiers.
“Did you succeed in getting your plant on board?” he asked the nearest of the trio.
“Yes. But we had to pay another fellow to take off half his stuff to make room for ours,” said financier number two.
“What process have you got?”
“Oh, the McKeown,” said number three.
“And it’s the greatest ever?”
“That’s right,” said all three together.