Arriving in the breakfast room at half past seven, Graham found himself just in time to say good-by to the Gazette man and the Idaho buyer, who, finishing, were just ready to catch the ranch machine that connected at Eldorado with the morning train for San Francisco. He sat alone, being perfectly invited by a perfect Chinese servant to order as he pleased, and found himself served with his first desire—an ice-cold, sherried grapefruit, which, the table-boy proudly informed him, was “grown on the ranch.” Declining variously suggested breakfast foods, mushes, and porridges, Graham had just ordered his soft-boiled eggs and bacon, when Bert Wainwright drifted in with a casualness that Graham recognized as histrionic, when, five minutes later, in boudoir cap and delectable negligee, Ernestine Desten drifted in and expressed surprise at finding such a multitude of early risers.
Later, as the three of them were rising from table, they greeted Lute Desten and Rita Wainwright arriving. Over the billiard table with Bert, Graham learned that Dick Forrest never appeared for breakfast, that he worked in bed from terribly wee small hours, had coffee at six, and only on unusual occasions appeared to his guests before the twelve-thirty lunch. As for Paula Forrest, Bert explained, she was a poor sleeper, a late riser, lived behind a door without a knob in a spacious wing with a rare and secret patio that even he had seen but once, and only on infrequent occasion was she known to appear before twelve-thirty, and often not then.
“You see, she’s healthy and strong and all that,” he explained, “but she was born with insomnia. She never could sleep. She couldn’t sleep as a little baby even. But it’s never hurt her any, because she’s got a will, and won’t let it get on her nerves. She’s just about as tense as they make them, yet, instead of going wild when she can’t sleep, she just wills to relax, and she does relax. She calls them her `white nights,’ when she gets them. Maybe she’ll fall asleep at daybreak, or at nine or ten in the morning; and then she’ll sleep the rest of the clock around and get down to dinner as chipper as you please.”
“It’s constitutional, I fancy,” Graham suggested.
Bert nodded.
“It would be a handicap to nine hundred and ninety-nine women out of a thousand. But not to her. She puts up with it, and if she can’t sleep one time—she should worry—she just sleeps some other time and makes it up.”
More and other things Bert Wainwright told of his hostess, and Graham was not slow in gathering that the young man, despite the privileges of long acquaintance, stood a good deal in awe of her.
“I never saw anybody whose goat she couldn’t get if she went after it,” he confided. “Man or woman or servant, age, sex, and previous condition of servitude—it’s all one when she gets on the high and mighty. And I don’t see how she does it. Maybe it’s just a kind of light that comes into her eyes, or some kind of an expression on her lips, or, I don’t know what—anyway, she puts it across and nobody makes any mistake about it.”
“She has a ... a way with her,” Graham volunteered.
“That’s it!” Bert’s face beamed. “It’s a way she has. She just puts it over. Kind of gives you a chilly feeling, you don’t know why. Maybe she’s learned to be so quiet about it because of the control she’s learned by passing sleepless nights without squealing out or getting sour. The chances are she didn’t bat an eye all last night— excitement, you know, the crowd, swimming Mountain Lad and such things. Now ordinary things that’d keep most women awake, like danger, or storm at sea, and such things, Dick says don’t faze her. She can sleep like a baby, he says, when the town she’s in is being bombarded or when the ship she’s in is trying to claw off a lee shore. She’s a wonder, and no mistake. You ought to play billiards with her—the English game. She’ll go some.”