"What are you going to do?" she asked in concern.
"Go where the good steaks grow," he answered emphatically. "We're going to pack up and move to the best hotel in town and eat ourselves blue in the face, and to-morrow J. Rufus is going to go back on the job. I haven't the money in my pocket to pay for it, and we haven't another thing we can soak, but if I run up a hotel bill I'll have to get out and dig to pay it, and that's what I need. I'm lazy."
It was a positive elation to him to dash up in a cab to a palatial hotel, to walk into its gilded and marble corridors with a deferential porter carrying his luggage, to loom up before a suave clerk in his impressive immensity and sign his name with a flourish, to demand the best accommodations they had in the house and to be shown into apartments that bathed him once more in a garish atmosphere where everything tasted and felt and smelled of money. It was like the prodigal son coming home again, and instantly his spirits arose with a bound. He began as of old to live like a lord, and though the long sought idea did not come to him for almost two weeks, he held to the untroubled tenor of his way with all his old arrogance, blessed with a cheerful belief that some lucky solution of his difficulties would be found.
One thing alone bothered him toward the last, and that was the rapid disappearance of such little ready money as he needed for tips when he was in the hotel, and for drinks and cigars when he found himself away from it. He was sensitive about ordering inferior goods in good places, and when away from his source of credit supplies, took to turning in at obscure cigar stores, preferring to buy the best they had rather than to taking a second grade in a better place. It was in one of these obscure little establishments that the elusive inspiration at last came to him.
"The government is rotten!" the stoop-shouldered cigar maker had complained just a moment before, rasping the air of his dingy little store with a high-pitched voice that was almost a whine. "It fosters consolidations. Big profits for rich men and bankruptcy for poor men, that's what we have come to!"
The stoop-shouldered cigar maker had no chin worth mentioning, and grew a thin, down-pointed mustache which accentuated that lack. He wore a green eye-shade and an apron of bed ticking, and he held in his hand a split mold, gripping the two parts together while he feebly and hopelessly groped for an inspiration in the mending line. The flabby man in the greasy vest, who was playing solitaire with a pack of cards so grimy that it took an experienced eye to tell whether the backs or the faces were up, did not raise his head, nor did the apathetic young man with the chronic dent in his time-yellowed Derby, who, sitting motionless with his crossed arms resting on his knees, had been making a business of watching the solitaire game in silence.
"That's right," agreed the flabby man, laying the trey of diamonds carefully upon the four of clubs and peeping to see what the next card would have been; "all the laws are against the poor man, and we're ground right down."
A pimple-faced youngster, clearly below the legal age, came in and bought two cigarettes for a cent, and the cigar maker waited upon him in sour-visaged nonchalance; neither the solitaire expert nor his interested watcher raised his eyes; a young man with a flashy tie and a soiled collar bought three stogies for a nickel and still apathy reigned; then Wallingford's huge bulk darkened the open doorway and everybody woke up.
Wallingford was so large that he seemed to crowd the little shop and absorb all its light, and he approached the cigar case doubtingly, surveying its contents with the eye of a connoisseur. A brand or two that he knew quite well he passed over, for the boxes were nearly empty and no doubt had been reeking for a long time in that sponge-moistened assortment of flavors, but finally he settled upon a newly opened box from which but two cigars had been sold, and tapped his finger on the glass above it. The cigar maker reached in for that box with alacrity, for they were two-for-a-quarter goods, and as he brought them forth he gave to the buyer the appreciative scrutiny due one of so impressive appearance. He did not know that under his inspection the big man winced. In the fine scarf there should have glowed a huge diamond; the scarf itself had two or three frayed threads; the binding of the hat brim was somewhat worn; the cuffs were a little ragged. Wallingford felt that all the world saw this unwonted condition, but still he smiled richly; and the cigar dealer saw only richness. Probably the imposing customer would have left the store in the same silence in which he had made his purchase, but, as he stopped to fastidiously cut the tip from one of his cigars, an undersized but pompous young collector bustled in and threw down a bill.
"Hundred Blue Rings," he announced curtly.