"I'll do it," he said with firm accent.
"I know you'll win—you never fail!" she cried, "You'll not lose a moment?"
"No. I'll 'phone him at once."
Bivens called Stuart and made an appointment to meet him at the Algonquin Club for dinner two days later.
"Why two days' delay?" Nan asked petulantly.
"It will require that time to prepare the papers. Don't worry. I'll put the thing through now."
When Stuart sat down with Bivens in one of the magnificent private dining rooms of his millionaire club two days later, he was struck with the perfection of the financier's dress, and the easy elegance of his manners.
"Nan has surely done wonders with some pretty crude material!" he mused.
As the meal progressed the lawyer's imagination continued to picture the process of training through which she had put Bivens to develop from the poor white Southerner, the polished little man of the gilded world he now saw. No flight of his fancy could imagine the real humour of it all. He recalled Nan's diary with grim amusement.
While Bivens had really been wax in her skillful hands since the day of her marriage, the one task she found hard was her desperate and determined effort to make him a well-groomed man. She was finally compelled to write out instructions for his daily conduct and enforce them with all sorts of threats and blandishments. She pasted this programme in Bivens's hat, at last, and he was in mortal terror lest some one should lift the inside band and read them. They were minute and painfully insistent on the excessive use of soap and water. They required that he wash and scrub two and three times daily. Not only did they prescribe tooth brushes and mouth washes, with all sorts of pastes and powders, but that he should follow it with an invention of the devil for torturing the gums known as "dental floss." To get even with the man who invented the thing Bivens bought him out and stopped its manufacture—only to find the scoundrel had invented a new one and had it on the market three weeks later.