Uncle Peter was more than willing. He liked the Oldakers.
"They're the only sane folks I've met among your friends," he had told his grandson. He had dined there frequently during the winter, and professed to be enamoured of the hostess. That fragile but sprightly bit of antiquity professed in turn to find Uncle Peter a very dangerous man among the ladies. They flirted outrageously at every opportunity, and Uncle Peter sent her more violets than many a popular débutante received that winter.
Percival, with his new air of Wall Street operator, was inclined to hesitate.
"You know I'm up early now, Uncle Peter, to get the day's run of the markets before I go downtown, and a man can't do much in the way of dinners when his mind is working all day. Perhaps Mauburn will go."
But Mauburn was taking Psyche and Mrs. Drelmer to the first night of a play, and Percival was finally persuaded by the old man to relax, for one evening, the austerity of his régime.
"But how your pa would love to see you so conscientious," he said, "and you with Wall Street, or a good part of it, right under your heel, just like that," and the old man ground his heel viciously into the carpet.
When Percival found Shepler with Mrs. Van Geist and Miss Milbrey among the Oldakers' guests, he rejoiced. Now he would talk to her without any of that old awkward self-consciousness. He was even audacious enough to insist that Mrs. Oldaker direct him to take Miss Milbrey out to dinner.
"I claim it as the price of coming, you know, when I was only an afterthought."
"You shall be paid, sir," his hostess declared, "if you consider it pay to sit beside an engaged girl whose mind is full of her trousseau. And here's this captivating young scapegrace relative of yours. What price does he demand for coming?" and she glanced up at Uncle Peter with arch liberality in her bright eyes.
That gentleman bowed low—a bow that had been the admiration of the smartest society in Marietta County, Ohio, fifty years and more ago.