"I know her better," he said, without, however, betraying the slightest brotherly agitation. "She is apt to do something crazy if anything went wrong with Majendie. Bloodgood's a hard-skinned old brute, but if there was anything public he'd cut up ugly."
"I hear he's in the market."
"Yes—on the short side, too—in deep."
"And you?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"I thought we never told secrets, Mrs. Kildair. Who else is coming? Am I representing the element of respectability again tonight?"
"The what?" She looked at him steadily until he turned away nervously, with the unease of an animal. "Don't be an ass with me, my dear Garraboy."
"By George," he said irritably, "if this were Europe I'd wager you were in the Secret Service, Mrs. Kildair."
"Thank you," she said, smiling appreciatively, and returned toward young Beecher, who was waiting by the piano with ill-concealed resentment.
The Stanley Cheevers entered—a short, chubby man with a bleached, vacant face tufted with mustache and imperial, devoid of eyebrows, with watery eyes that moved slowly with the motion of his gourd-like head; Mrs. Cheever, voluble, nervous, over-dressed, young with the youth of a child and pretty with the prettiness of a doll.