"Klinger!" Elkan exclaimed. "Well, you could say to Klinger for me, Mr. Polatkin, that if he don't like the way I am acting around there, understand me, he should just got the nerve to tell it me to my face yet."
Polatkin flapped the air with his right hand.
"Never mind Klinger, Elkan," he said. "You got to consider you shouldn't make a fool of yourself before Scharley and all them people. How do you expect you should get such a merchant as Scharley he should accept from you entertainment like a Chinese Lantern Dinner, if you are acting that way?"
"Chinese Lantern Dinner be damned!" Elkan retorted. "When we got the right goods at the right price, Mr. Polatkin, why should we got to give a merchant dinners yet to convince him of it?"
"Dinners is nothing, Elkan," Polatkin interrupted with a wave of his hand. "You got to give him dyspepsha even, the way business is nowadays."
"Aber I was talking to the room clerk last night," Elkan went on, "and he tells me so sure as you are standing there, Mr. Polatkin, a Chinese Lantern Dinner would stand us in twenty dollars a head."
"Twenty dollars a head!" Polatkin exclaimed and indulged himself in a low whistle.
"So even if I would be staying at the Salisbury, understand me," Elkan said, "I ain't going to throw away our money out of the window exactly."
"Aber how are you going to get the feller down here, if you wouldn't entertain him or something?"