Morice stirred uneasily. “They got a Danish tanker somewhere off Nantucket,” he continued impotently.
August Turnbull refused to be drawn into further speech; he inhaled his cigar with a replete bodily contentment. The oppression of dinner was subsiding. His private opinion of the war was that it would end without a military decision—he regarded the German system as unsmashable—and then, with France deleted and England swamped in internal politics, he saw an alliance of common sense between Germany and the United States. The present hysteria, the sentimentality he condemned, could not continue to stand before the pressure of mercantile necessity. After all, the entire country was not made up of fools.
Morice and his wife wandered off to the boardwalk, and he, August, must have fallen asleep, for he suddenly sat up with a sensation of strangeness and dizzy vision.
He rose and shook it off. It was still light, and he could see Bernard at his automobile, parked before the latter's cottage.
The younger man caught sight of August at the same moment and called: “We are going to a cafe with the Rathes; will you come?”
He was still slightly confused, his head full, and the ride, the gayety of the crowd, he thought, would do him good.
“Be over for you,” the other added; and later he was crowded into a rear seat between Louise, his daughter, and Caroline Rathe.
Louise was wearing the necklace of platinum and diamonds Bernard Foster had given her last Christmas. It was, August admitted to himself, a splendid present, and must have cost eighteen or twenty thousand dollars. The Government had made platinum almost prohibitive. In things of this kind—the adornment of his wife, of, really, himself, the extension of his pride—Bernard was extremely generous. It was in the small affairs such as gasoline that he was prudent.
Both Caroline Rathe and Louise were handsome women handsomely dressed; he was seated in a nest of soft tulle and ruffled embroidery, of pliant swaying bodies. Their satin-shod feet had high sharp insteps in films of black lace and their fingers glittered with prismatic stones. Bernard was in front with the chauffeur, and Frederick Rathe occupied a small seat at the knees of the three others. He had not made his money, as had August and Bernard, but inherited it with a huge brewery. Frederick was younger than the other men too; but his manner was, if anything, curter. He said things about the present war that made even August Turnbull uneasy.
He was an unusual youth, not devoted to sports and convivial pleasures—as any one might infer, viewing his heavy frame and wealth—but something of a reader. He quoted fragments from philosophical books about the will-to-power and the Uebermensch that stuck like burrs in August Turnbull's memory, furnishing him with labels, backing, for many of his personally evolved convictions and experience.