O'Grady could not contain himself—nor did he try to. "This is business-dealing with business-men, is it?" he cried to Dill. "This is what comes of treating with solid citizens of means and method, is it? Where is my hat? I'll go round to that bank and just tell them what I——"
"O'Grady!" protested Dill. "Behave! or you'll have the fat in the fire for good and all."
"No, Daff," insisted Little O'Grady. "I got you into this, and now——"
"I don't understand it so," said Dill coldly.
"Oh yes, I did. And now I'll see you through. Where is my hat?"
While Daffingdon was trying to hold O'Grady in check, Virgilia was making moan to her aunt.
She sat down on Eudoxia's bed with a desperate flounce. "They don't want it! What, in heaven's name, do they want?" she asked angrily. "I think it is time for you, aunt, to make yourself felt. You are as much interested in the bank as any of them, and as much entitled to speak. Go down there as a stock-holder and find out what they are trying to do."
"I will if you wish," said her aunt. "In the meantime, why don't you go round and talk to Mr. Gibbons? He's an agreeable enough man, and the only one of the lot that knows anything about such things. Learn from him, if you can, what the trouble is."
Virgilia found Roscoe Orlando Gibbons in the midst of his plats and charts—he was pushing a new subdivision to the northward; but he gallantly dropped his work at the entrance of a lady.
Virgilia asked for his support; she appealed to him both as a man of business who should be willing to carry on things in a business way, and as a cultivated amateur whose influence should not fail in supporting a fine scheme contrived by reputable artists.