Again Plegg’s reply took the diagonal instead of the direct line.
“We are giving them all they are paying us for. Of course, they are not satisfied; no party of the first part in a contracting deal ever is. And now that Lushing has gone over to their side of the fence, we’ve had trouble on top of trouble. If you’ll take a word of advice from an older man and a subordinate, you’ll stay out of it. In fact, I think that is what Mr. Grillage expects you to do.”
At the moment, David did not attach any special importance to this remark of Plegg’s about Mr. Grillage’s attitude. But if he could have turned the leaves of the book of days backward to the night of his stay at the lakeside mansion of the lavishnesses, the explanation would have synchronized itself quite accurately with his retreat to his room in The Maples and the departure of the last of the bridge-playing dinner guests.
At the door-closing upon the final couple, Miss Virginia had sought her father in his den. By this time the private secretary had been dismissed and the king of the contractors was alone.
“Hello, Vinnie, girl!” he rumbled. “Come to tell the old daddy good-night?”
“Partly,” was the crisp rejoinder. “But mostly it’s about David. You have decided to send him to the Timanyoni, in spite of my little protest?”
Eben Grillage’s laugh resembled nothing so much as the rasping of circular saws, but he meant it to be good-natured. He could hold no other attitude toward the daughter whom David, in his talk with his father, had characterized as the apple of his eye.
“You women are too much for me, Vinnie. You like David, and you want to see him get ahead. But when I hunt out a good place for him, you suddenly take a notion that you don’t want him to have it. What’s the particular reason?”
It was at this point that the young woman had taken a chair at the opposite side of the broad working table where she sat facing her father.
“If I thought I could make you understand,” she said, half musingly. And then: “I do like David and I respect him. It seems such a needless pity to spoil him, don’t you think?”