“Certainly a worthy ambition, Bruce. It’s a good thing I’m here on the ground to give you the true dope on the people who count in this teeming village. The old order changeth, yielding place to new, and there’s danger of getting pinched between the old hard-boiled bunch and the birds of gayer plumage who flew in when no one was looking and insist on twittering sweetly on our tallest trees. Let me be your social booster; no one better fitted. I’m the only scion of one of our earliest and noblest families. My grandfather’s bank busted in seventy-three with a loud bang and I had an uncle who was indicted for embezzling public funds. He hid in Patagonia and died there in sinful splendor at a ripe old age. Talk about the aristocracy—I’m it! I derive a certain prestige among what you might call the paralytic group from the fact that my ancestors were mixed up in all the financial calamities that ever befell this town. But it’s the crowd that are the spenders—build the lordly palaces and treat the Eighteenth Amendment with the contempt it so richly deserves—that you want to train with. Your profession is cursed with specialization and I’d warn you against public work. Too much politics there for one of your fastidious nature. Our best man in domestic architecture is Freeman—he’s a Tech man, about seven years ahead of our class. He has a weakness for sun parlors with antique Italian fountains that are made for him special by a pottery right here in town. You’re sure to like Freeman; he’s a whist fiend, but otherwise he’s a decent chap. His wife and Maybelle are chums and we play around together a good deal.”
While listening to Henderson’s rambling talk Bruce had been turning over the pages of a memorandum book. He asked about several architects whose names he had noted. Henderson described them succinctly, praising or deriding them for reasons which struck Bruce as not necessarily final as to their merits.
“I don’t expect to land a job the first day,” said Bruce. “I may have to go through the list before I find what I want.”
“Oh, Freeman will take you on,” replied Henderson easily. “But he never does anything important without consulting his wife—one of his eccentricities. My own system is to go ahead and tell Maybelle afterward, being careful, of course, to conceal my mistakes.”
“You haven’t changed a bit,” laughed Bruce. “I wish I could view the world as chipperly as you do.”
“My dear Bruce”—with his forefinger Henderson swept Storrs’s breakfast check to his own side of the table with a single gesture—“never try to view the whole world at one glance; it’s too damned big. All I see at present on this suffering, sinning planet is a Plantagenet runabout with Maybelle and me rolling through fields of asphodel. Everything else is superfluous. My fellow creatures simply don’t exist except as prospects for the Plantagenet.”
“Oh, rot! You’re the most unselfish biped I ever knew!”
“Superficially, yes; but it’s all on the surface. Let’s go out and plant our feet firmly upon the city.”
He led the way to his car and drove to the Plantagenet salesroom and garage. A young woman whom he introduced as Miss Ordway apparently ran the whole establishment. Henderson said that she did. He sat down at his desk and signed, without reading, a pile of letters which she had written the day before, talking to her meantime, not of business, but of a novel he had given her to read. Her attempts to interest him in the fact that one of the salesmen wanted his assistance in rounding up a certain difficult customer were provocative only of scornful comments, but when she handed him a memorandum of an appointment with the prospect at ten o’clock the next morning, he meekly thrust the paper into his pocket and said all right; he’d see what he could do. Miss Ordway was already busy with other matters; she seemed to make due allowance for her employer’s peculiarities.
“This girl’s mighty firm with me,” he said in a tone perfectly audible to Miss Ordway. “A cruel tyrant; but she really does get some work out of me.”