“Was that the night that fellow Hudgins from Texas dined there?” asked Crane, who had not taken Constance’s sound advice to cultivate reticence.
“Yes, and I never saw a better dinner-man than Hudgins, nor was ever at a more agreeable dinner.”
“Bosh! Hudgins?”
“Yes, Hudgins. The fellow has a quiet manner, a soft voice, and the most delightful and archaic reverence for ‘the ladies,’ as he calls them. It is like what history tells us of General Sam Houston. Hudgins was a screaming success at the dinner.”
Seeing that the account of Hudgins’s triumph gave Crane acute discomfort, Thomdyke, lighting a fresh cigar, kept on remorselessly:
“Miss Maitland wanted to ask some really representative man to meet Sir Mark le Poer, a very agreeable and considerable Englishman, one of the permanent under-secretaries in the British Foreign Office—it seems he is a great friend of hers. He had been gorgeously entertained by all the retired trades-people who are in the smart set here, but complained that he hadn’t met any Americans—they would ask all the diplomats to meet him, fellows that bored him to death in Europe and still more so here. It seems that Miss Maitland had heard that the long, thin, soft-voiced Texan was delightful at dinner—so she asked me to bring him to call, and the dinner invitation followed. Besides Sir Mark and Hudgins and myself, there was Cathcart—a navy man—good old New England family, four generations in the navy, travelled man of the world, and flower of civilisation. But Hudgins was easily the star of the occasion. There were three other women present besides Miss Maitland, all of them charming women, who know the world and command it; and the way they, as well as the Englishman and the naval officer, fell in love with Hudgins and his soft Texas accent, and his stupendous Texas yarns, and his way of looking at things—well, it was a show.”
“Oh, come, Thorndyke—Hudgins!”
“Yes, Hudgins, I tell you. When the time came for the ladies to leave the table none of them wanted to go, and they said so. Then Hudgins rose and said in that inimitable manner of his, which catches the women every time, ‘If Miss Maitland would kindly permit it, I’d rather a million times go into the parlour with her and the other ladies than stay out here with these fellows. I can get the society of men and a cigar any day, but it isn’t often that I can bask in the presence of ladies like these present.’ And the presumptuous dog actually walked off and left us in the lurch—and you can depend upon it, the women liked him better than any of us.”
“If women are won by compliments like that, any man can win their favour,” said Crane, crossly.
“My dear fellow, women know vastly more than we do. It wasn’t Hudgins’s compliments in words that won the women—it was his giving up his cigar and the extra glass of champagne and the society of men that fetched ’em—it was the sincerity of the thing. When we went into the drawing-room Hudgins was sitting on the piano-stool telling them some sentimental story about his mother down in Texas when he started out in life, with nothing but the clothes on his back and a six-shooter in his pocket. The women were nearly in tears. As for the rest of us, including Sir Mark le Poer, we simply weren’t in it with Hudgins. We stayed until nearly midnight; then the men adjourned to the club, where Hudgins kept us until three o’clock in the morning telling us more yarns about Texas. Sir Mark would hardly let him out of sight, and Hudgins has engaged to spend August with him in Scotland at a splendid place he has near Inverness. That’s the way a man with great natural gifts of entertaining and being entertained can get on, if he has a chance.”