“It doesn’t matter,” she went on hastily. “I thought you ought to know.”
“I shall see Mr. Loring,” he said, his brows tangling.
“Is it necessary—at once?”
“I think so. There mustn’t be any false positions. I hope I can make him understand. Obviously I can’t visit the house of a man who doesn’t want me there.”
Jane couldn’t reply at once. And when she did her face was as serious as his own.
“Won’t you leave that to me, Phil?” she said gently.
[XVII]
“THE POT AND KETTLE”
The “Pot and Kettle” was up in the hills near Tuxedo, within motoring distance of the city and near enough to a station to be convenient to those who were forced to depend upon the railroad. It was a gabled farmhouse of an early period converted by the young men of Colonel Broadhurst’s generation into its latter-day uses as a club for dilettante cooks, where the elect might come in small parties on snowy winter nights, or balmy summer ones, and concoct with their own hands the glasses and dishes most to their liking. Its membership was limited and its fellows clannish. Most of the younger members of the Club had been proposed on the day of their birth, and accession at the age of twenty-one to its rights and privileges had always been the signal for a celebration with an intent both gastronomic and bibulous. On club nights every one contributed his share to the evening’s entertainment, and the right to mix cocktails, make the salad dressing, or grill the bird was transmitted by solemn act in writing from those of the older generation to those of the new, who could not be dispossessed of their respective offices without a proper delegation of authority or the unanimous vote of those present.