CHAPTER XII
LOLA'S FLIGHT
Dick Fenway’s apartment was a popular place for after-theatre parties, or any other description of informal evening merry-making. It was well within the “lobster belt,” less than five minutes taxi-ride from “anywhere.”
It was, or rather was announced as “strictly a bachelor apartment,” but to a casual observer its “strictness” was largely a matter of the imagination. Mrs. Harlan once remarked that the thing she liked about a classy bachelor apartment was “that they were the only places in New York where they knew how to treat a lady.”
Dick, who had been making a day of it, was entertaining a party, of which, as usual, Mrs. Harlan was the central figure. They had gone in a body to the opening of a new musical comedy, but after the curtain fell on the first act, she had announced it as “the same old thing, only a bit rottener,” and they had adjourned to Dick’s rooms to wind up the evening with a game of roulette, to be followed by a little supper. Mrs. Harlan had the bank and, being some three hundred dollars ahead of the game, was in the best of humor. Dick, as usual, had been losing heavily, but did not seem to be greatly cast down by his ill-fortune; as he expressed it, his “old man was too fat, and it did him good to work.”
Aside from Dick and Mrs. Harlan, the party consisted of Jim Winnett, a broker; Sam Norton, a popular comedian, just at present out of an engagement; Ted Hawley, one of those mysterious gentlemen, of which this section of New York is so full, who manage to live in great comfort on an income of nothing a year, and, by no greater exertion, so far as anyone has been able to discover, than it takes to array themselves in well-tailored garments, and cultivate the pleasant art of hand-shaking. Accompanying these gentlemen were a carefully selected quartette of young ladies, whose physical charms made up for any possible lack of social culture.
Brooks, a man servant of perfect manners and unimpeachable respectability, moved about quietly, supplying cigars for the gentlemen, cigarettes for the ladies, and liquid refreshment for both, with a skill born of long experience, and if he had any personal opinion at all of his master’s guests, it was hidden behind a face of such absolute lack of expression that it is to be greatly doubted whether they looked upon him as a human being, or a bit of rather unusually perfect mechanism, invented for their express convenience.
In most circles of this sort, a close observer will notice that there is usually some one man, who seems to be elected by unanimous vote, to pay all the bills, and in this case Mrs. Harlan was not at all surprised to discover that when Dick grew tired of throwing away his father’s money, and retired rather sulkily to a distant window seat, the game languished, and after a moment’s puny struggle, died of inanition.
“You’re a fine bunch of pikers,” the lady observed, with that nice choice of the vernacular which constituted one of her chief social charms. “There isn’t sporting blood enough in the whole crowd of you to drown a medium-sized flea.”
