Of course Blackie got his “bit” out of the spoils and hurried away to pursue certain fortune-making plans of his own, while young Wallingford, stopping in New York, prepared as elaborately to spend one. It was some trouble at first to find the most expensive things in New York, but at last he located them in the race-track and in Beauty Phillips, the latter being the moderately talented but gorgeous “hit” of The Pink Canary; and the thoroughbreds and Beauty made a splendid combination, so perfect in their operations that one beautiful day Wallingford awoke to the fact that the time had almost arrived to go to work. At the moment he made this decision, the Beauty, as richly colored and as expressionless as a wax model, was sitting at his side in the grand-stand, with her eyes closed, jabbing a hole at random in the card of the fifth race.
“Bologna!” exclaimed Wallingford, noting where the fateful pin-hole had appeared. “It’s a nice comic-supplement name; but I’ll go down to the ring and burn another hundred or so on him.”
The band broke into a lively air, and the newest sensation of Broadway, all in exquisite violet from nodding plume to silken hose, looked out over the sunlit course in calm rumination. Her companion, older but not too old, less handsome but not too ill-favored, less richly dressed but not too plainly, nudged her.
“There goes your Money and Moonshine song again, dearie,” she observed.
Still calmly, as calmly as a digestive cow in pleasant shade, the star of The Pink Canary replied:
“Don’t you see I’m trying not to hear it, mother?”
The eyes of “Mrs. Phillips” narrowed a trifle, and sundry tiny but sharp lines, revealing much but concealing more, flashed upon her brow and were gone. J. Rufus glanced in perplexity at her as he had done a score of times, wondering at her self-repression, at her unrevealed depths of wisdom, at her clever acting of a most difficult rôle; for Beauty Phillips, being a wise young lady and having no convenient mother of her own, had hired one, and by this device was enabled to remain as placidly Platonic as a plate of ice-cream. Well, it was worth rich gifts merely to be seen in proprietorship of her at the supper places.
Wallingford rose without enthusiasm.
“Bologna won’t win!” he announced with resigned conviction.