At that moment Thornton Jennings appeared. Miss Parker promptly introduced him to Erard. The younger man towered commandingly over Erard’s head, while they shook hands without words, as if measuring one another, and recognizing the valour that each possessed. At last Jennings spoke, with a comprehensive, winning smile on his face.
“I am glad to have had this chance. I read your articles in the Beaux Arts, and I have your new book. I have heard of you through a lot of people over there. And there is another link between us,” he added less spontaneously, “your brother has told me such a lot about your plans, and your father—”
But Erard received these cordialities with a stony impassivity. He was not in a mood to be reminded of his antecedents. Miss Parker had been right in saying that all his sensations in Chicago would not be pleasant ones.
At last the crowded rooms began to thin out. Supper disposed of, conversation did not have sufficient excitements to hold one after midnight with a prospective drive of perhaps six or eight miles. Erard stood in the hall, one of the last to say good-night.
“They are so nice,” he remarked to his hostess, “especially the ladies; they seem like such good mothers, so homely and unpretentious. I want to sit right down with them, and talk over Mary and Jack, and the new bay-window, and the clergyman riding a bicycle.”
“You had better not assume too much,” his hostess laughed. “You will find that they can talk over the last salon, the new book on Rembrandt, even your own articles. Don’t think you have measured their horizon quite so easily.”
“Well, I hope they won’t open up often by asking me which is the ‘sacred’ and which the ‘profane’ love in Titian’s picture, as one young woman did to-night,” Erard replied sulkily. “I had rather talk babies.”
“Have a cigar or something, Erard?” Wilbur asked, weary of this prolonged tête-à-tête, and willing to patronize the young man of talent who had no great house, no good champagne, no successful feasts to give. Said young man of talent could come and admire the other kind of talent that owned houses, horses, and champagne, and now and then, if he were discreet in his views, he might be called upon for dinner to enliven a party of lethargic good folk.
Erard looked at Wilbur coolly, as if weighing the chances of being bored against the comforts of a cigar and a glass of hot whiskey.
“No, thanks,” he concluded indifferently. “I think I shall walk back some thousand blocks to the hotel. I must be off to arrive before breakfast.”