His look still engaged her as she floated forward to greet the tall, pleasant-faced, alert young man with tumbled yellow hair who now entered. Not until he heard his own name did he relinquish her to acknowledge the word of introduction.
A moment later the father of Mrs. Laithe strolled in and Ewing was again introduced, this time to a stoutish man with a placid, pink face, scanty hair going from yellow to white—arranged over his brow with scrupulous economy—and a closely cut mustache of the same ambiguous hue. He was a man who gracefully confessed fifty years to all but the better informed. Ewing felt himself under the scrutiny of a pair of very light gray eyes as Bartell took his hand, tentatively at first, then with a grip of entire cordiality. One may suspect that this gentleman had looked forward with mild apprehension to a dinner meeting with the latest protégé of his impulsive daughter. The youth's demeanor, however, so quickly caused his barbaric past to be forgotten that, by the time they were at table, his host had said to him, prefacing one of his best anecdotes, "Of course you know that corner table on the Café de la Paix terrace...."
Ewing floated dreamily on the stream of talk; laughing, chatty talk, spiced with suggestive strange names; blithe gossip of random happenings. He was content to feel its flow beneath him and rather resented the efforts to involve him in it, preferring to listen and to look. But he was courteously groped for by the others and compelled to response as the dinner progressed.
Piersoll mentioned his drawings pleasantly and engaged him for dinner at a club the following evening. "I'll call for you at the Stuyvesant about six," he said, when Ewing had accepted. "I must have a look at your stuff. Don't dress; we dine in our working clothes at the Monastery."
The father of Mrs. Laithe warned Ewing to beware of worry in his new surroundings.
"Let life carry you, my boy. That's my physiology in a nutshell. Don't try to lug the world about. The people who tell you that life in New York is a strain haven't learned rational living. Worry kills, but I never worry, and I find town idyllic. Clarence was born to worry: result, dyspepsia and nervous breakdown. My daughter worries. She goes into side streets looking for trouble, and when she finds it she keeps it. That's wrong. Life is whatever we see it to be. Eleanor sees too much of the black side, poverty, starvation, hard luck—all kinds of deviltry, and it reacts on her. I look only on the cheerful side, and that reacts on me. A good dinner, a glass of burgundy—there's an answer to all that socialistic pessimism."
"Suppose one hasn't the answer at hand?" his daughter broke in.
"Keep smiling, my dear," retorted her father with Spartan grimness. "Skipping a dinner or two can't overturn real philosophy. Down on the Chesapeake last fall, duck shooting one day, we lost the luncheon hamper overboard, and hadn't so much as a biscuit from four in the morning till after nine at night, shooting from a chilly, wet blind all day. There was a test! But I give you my word I never worried. I took it as so much discipline. My dear, if I had fretted over tenement houses the way you have, I should be a broken man. Thank the gods that be, I've had the wit to let my agent do all that!"
His daughter received this with a shrug of despair. "But confess, daddy—you have a worry."
"'Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!'" quoted Piersoll, divining her mark.