"Father!" cried Corny. "Keep perfectly cool! Remain just where you are!"
Uncle Chipperton stopped as if he had run against a fence. His favorite advice went straight home to him.
"Very good, my child," said he, turning to Corny. "That's just what I'll do."
And he said no more about it.
Now, everybody began to talk about all sorts of things, so as to seem as if they hadn't noticed this little rumpus, and we agreed that we must all see each other again the next day. Father said he should remain in the city for a few days, now that we were all here, and Uncle Chipperton did not intend to go to his country-place until the weather was warmer. We were speaking of several things that would be pleasant to do together, when Uncle Chipperton broke in with a proposition:
"I'll tell you what I am going to do. I am going to give a dinner to this party. I can't invite you to my house, but I shall engage a parlor in a restaurant, where I have given dinners before (we always come to New York when I want to give dinners—it's so much easier for us to come to the city than for a lot of people to come out to our place), and there I shall give you a dinner, to-morrow evening. Nobody need say anything against this. I've settled it, and I can't be moved."
As he couldn't be moved, no one tried to move him.
"I tell you what it is," said Rectus privately to me. "If Uncle Chipperton is going to give a dinner, according to his own ideas of things in general, it will be a curious kind of a meal."
It often happened that Rectus was as nearly right as most people.