There were some miles of this light-hearted foolishness; brief miles, to be sure, since the big limousine was both powerful and speedy. At the end of the miles the car turned in past the gate lodge of a lakeside estate, an establishment princely in extent, landscaping and architecture; and the gap which a disparity of worldly possessions digs between hope and fruition suddenly yawned wide for David Vallory.
“Why the sphynxian silence?” inquired the princess of the magnificences, gibing amiably at David’s lapse into speechlessness.
“Too much money,” he returned half playfully, waving an arm to include the display of the Grillage fortune. “I was just wondering what it means to you, individually.”
“I have often wondered, myself,” was the half musing rejoinder. “Sometimes I think it means a lot. It grips one that way, now and again. But there are other times when I’m simply obliged to run away from it, just to convince myself that I’m not one of the lay figures in the stage-setting. Can you understand that?”
Her answer gave David another of the ecstatic little thrills. It was not the first time that she had let him see that the quick-witted, clear-sighted girl-child of his boyish adulation had been only overlaid, and not spoiled, by the lavishnesses.
“I think I understand it perfectly,” he assured her. “Money, in and of itself, is nothing. It is only a means to an end.”
The limousine was stopping under the carriage entrance of the great house and they had but a moment more of the comradely isolation. It was the young woman who seized and made use of it.
“I hope you will always remember that, David—and let it be clean money,” she said soberly; and then, with a quick return to the playful mood: “Here we are, just in time for dinner. I shall introduce you to the houseful as my cradle-brother—may I?—and after dinner you may go your way with father and get yourself properly ‘fired.’”
Drawing pretty heavily upon the simplicities, David won through the social preliminaries without calling any marked attention to himself. Miss Virginia’s “houseful” made an even dozen at the rather resplendent dinner-table, and the naïvely inquisitive young wife of an elderly stock-broker, who was David’s elbow companion, and who kept him busy answering childish questions about his profession, saved him from particularizing too curiously as to the others, though he was observant enough to note that none of the many competitors he had had at Palm Beach was among them. At the table dispersal he found himself at once in the clutches of the master of the house.
“Come on into my den and we’ll break away from all this hullaballoo,” growled the king of the man-drivers; and when the coveted privacy was secured: “Pull up a chair and smoke. You’ll find cigars in that sponge-box, or pipes and tobacco on the mantel. How did you leave the bridge?”