“I have been cut off from all phases of womanhood save the ‘Calamity Jane’ type, or some one’s runaway wife, for long years. I shall hurry slowly. You know the Arabic proverb: ‘Hurry is the devil’s.’ Now, by October the first, I will have had my summer fling. I will perhaps join you then, if you can make the showing that I would like. But, just now, I am going in for the ‘roses and raptures.’”
“You are not a marrying man, Hod?” cried Hathorn, in a sudden alarm.
“Heavens, no!” laughed the Western man. “Omar Khayyam’s
vision of the ‘Flower Garden’ pales before the ‘embarras de richesse’ of the New York ‘Beauty Show.’ I am as yet a free lance, and also, an old campaigner. I will solemnly promise not to marry till I see you again. But I’ll stand up with you and see you spliced.”
The compact was sealed over ’tother bottle, and then Hathorn departed in high hopes. “He will drift easily into our circle,” mused the sly broker, who, watching only his own loosening hold on Elaine Willoughby, jumped to the conclusion that Vreeland really controlled a vast fortune.
His friend had “called the turn” correctly.
“Bluff goes, it seems, even in cold-hearted New York,” gaily concluded Vreeland, as he sauntered back alone to the Waldorf. “This strangely hastened wedding will bring me at once into the best circles. Mr. Fred Hathorn’s groomsman is a social somebody. The Lakemere divinity will soon do the rest, and by the time you return, my sly friend, I will be ready to kick the ladder down on your side.” He roared with a secret glee over his own “inability to disturb his invested funds.”
With a vulpine watchfulness, he noted all Mr. Jimmy Potter’s weak points. “I must get up my poker practice,” he smilingly said, as he laid his comely head down to rest.
“‘Mr. Potter of New York’ shall reinforce that slender seven thousand dollars, or else I’m a duffer. He will never squeal, at least, not to his partner. And so I’ll go in as a wedge between this ass and this fine woman who has unconsciously loved him. Yes, it’s a good opening for a young man! A mean and easy betrayal!”
The preoccupations of the splendid wedding of Miss Alida VanSittart gave Vreeland, now “the observed of all observers,” an ample opportunity to begin that “silent slavery” of a respectful devotion upon which he had decided as his safest rôle at Lakemere.