Naturally, there was nothing to do but to thank the purblind city detective, to press a bank-note into his hand, and to beg him to be on the lookout for this dangerous "double" of mine. But the incident served to show what the bonanza-fed publicity campaign was doing for us.
Gifford, grubbing in the various levels of the mine, had the most immunity; the newspaper reporters let him measurably alone. But neither Barrett nor I could dodge the spotlight. Every move we made was blazoned in type, and I lived in daily fear of the moment when some enterprising newspaper man would begin to make copy of the theater parties and road-house rides and midnight champagne suppers.
I knew that the blow had fallen one morning when Phineas Everton came unannounced into my private office and asked me to send the stenographer away. The débâcle had arrived, and I was no more ready to meet it than any other spendthrift of good repute caught red-handed would have been.
"I think you can guess pretty well what I have come to say, Bertrand," Everton said, after the door had closed behind the outgoing shorthand man. "I have been putting it off in the hope that your own sense of the fitness of things would come to the rescue. I may be old-fashioned and out of touch with the times and the manners of the new generation, but I can't forget that I am a father, or that common decency still has its demands."
Out of the depths of my humiliation there emerged, full-grown, a huge respect for this quiet-eyed ex-schoolmaster who, for the few of us who knew him, lived the life of a studious recluse among his technical mechanisms in the laboratory. He was a salaried man, and I was one of his three employers. That he was able to ignore completely the business relation was a mark of the man.
He waited for his reply but I had none to make. After a time he went on, without heat, but equally without regard for anything but the despicable fact.
"For quite a long time, if I am informed correctly, you have been associating in Denver with a set of people who, whatever else may be said about them, are not people with whom my daughter would care to associate. More than this, you have allowed your name to become coupled with that of a woman whose reputation, past and present, is not altogether of the best. Tell me if I am accusing you wrongfully."
"You are not," I admitted.
"I have been waiting and postponing this talk in the hope that you would realize that you are not doing Polly fair justice. Like most American fathers, I am not supposed to know how matters stand between you, and I deal only with the facts as they appear to an onlooker. The home has been open to you, and you have made such use of your welcome as to lead others to believe that you are Polly's lover."
"I am," I asserted.