"Than out of Germany?"
"They'd ask very awkward questions of Ernst in Germany; he can evade them here. But there's a day of reckoning waiting for Mr. Ernst in the fatherland. No one knows better than he that he's safer with us, looked after by two capital fellows, till after the war. Then off to South America with a fat bank-account. And, by Jove! he'll have earned it! The cheek of the devil! Except for one enterprise!" and Mr. Taylor chuckled as he relit his cigar.
"We'd been wondering," he went on, "Macray and I, why the beggar had grown so content never to go out. No more music, no theater, no smart restaurants, and so far as we could see, no reason on earth why, with one or other of the men who stick to him day and night, he shouldn't revisit his old haunts. Not he!" Again that pleased chuckle. "Not so long as Greta von Schwarzenberg is circulating about New York!"
"Why, he and she are, or they were, thick as thieves."
Taylor nodded.
"And it would be undeniably useful to us to have that relation continue. It's where our friend draws the line. 'All very well to laugh,' he says to me, 'you don't know the woman. I do. Nein, danke.' So he sits and smokes and plays cards, drinks and overeats himself, and is losing his figure. I can take you round any evening, and you'll see for yourself."
"I've come to say good-by." Napier stood before Nan Ellis in the great public parlor of her hotel. More and more his most private experiences of American life had seemed conditioned by the vast restlessness of these places. He noticed that Nan, like many of her compatriots, was able to achieve an obliviousness to such surroundings that amounted to a kind of privacy.
Instead of relinquishing his hand, she had clutched it tighter: "You are not going back to England?"
"What's the use of my staying here?"