“Oh, anything to stop your crying!” Nan took the glass Kinney had been holding for her. “There! I hope you’re satisfied. It’s silly to make so much fuss about a mere cocktail. No, thanks; not another! There’s no point in taking the same dare twice!”
At the table the talk at once became animated. Nan had been away from them so long that she had half forgotten their range of interests. Burley’s expensive new machine, in which he had motored down from Chicago; “shows” they had seen; a business scheme—biggest thing afoot, Burley threw in parenthetically, with a promise to tell Kinney more about it later; George Pickard’s attentions to the soubrette in a musical comedy, and references to flirtations which the married men present had been engaging in—these things were flung upon the table to be pecked at and dismissed.
“You people are the only real sports in this dismal swamp of a town! I don’t know how you live here among so many dead ones!” said Burley.
Kinney declared that he intended to move to New York as soon as he got rid of his patent suits; he was tired of living in a one-horse town. This suggested a discussion of the merits of New York hotels—a subject which the Kinneys everywhere west of Manhattan Island find endlessly exciting.
When champagne was served, Burley rose with elaborate dignity and invited the other men to join in a toast to the ladies; they were the best girls in America; he defied anybody to gainsay him. He wished they might all travel about together all the time hitting only the high places; and he extended a general invitation to the company to meet him at Palm Beach the next winter for what he promised should be a grand time.
“He’d make it Japan if he’d only had a few more drinks,” his wife remarked to Nan.
By the time salad was served George Pickard thought it well to justify his reputation as a “cut-up.” His father, a successful lawyer, had left him a comfortable fortune which George was rapidly distributing. George had rebelled against the tame social life of the town in which he was born; he was bored by respectability, and found the freedom of the Kinneys’ establishment wholly to his liking. He went to the living-room for the victrola and wheeled it in, playing the newest tango, to a point just behind Nan’s chair.
“Got to have music; got the habit and can’t eat without music!”
This was accepted as a joke until Copeland protested that he couldn’t stand the noise and began struggling with Pickard, who bitterly resented his effort to push the machine out of the room. The music was hushed presently and Pickard resumed his seat with the understanding that he might play all he pleased after dinner.
“And we’ll have a dance—I haven’t danced a step in ages!” cried Nan, entering into the spirit of the occasion.