“Hello! you people!” he said, amused; “I guess I've been asleep. Oh, is that you Millbank? Whose hat was that—yours, Lydia?”
He yawned, laughed, turning his heavy eyes from one to another, recognising a couple of young girls at the window. He didn't want to get up; but there is, in the society he now adorned, a stringency of etiquette known as “re-finement,” and which, to ignore, is to become unpopular.
So he got onto his massive legs and went over to shake hands with a gravity becoming the ceremony.
“How d'ye do, Miss Hutchinson? Thought you were at Asbury Park. How de do, Miss Del Garcia. Have you been out in Millbank's motor yet?”
“We broke down at McGowan's Pass,” said Miss Del Garcia, laughing the laugh that had made her so attractive in “A Word to the Wise.”
“Muddy gasoline,” nodded Millbank tersely—an iron-jawed, over-groomed man of forty, with a florid face shaved blue.
“We passed Mr. Plank's big touring-car,” observed Lydia Vyse, shifting Tinto to the couch and brushing the black and white hairs from her automobile coat. “How much does a car like that cost, Leroy?”
“About twenty-five thousand,” he said gloomily. Then, looking up, “Hold on, Millbank, don't be going! Why can't you all dine with us? Never mind your car; ours is all right, and we'll run out into the country for dinner. How about it, Miss Del Garcia?”
But both Miss Del Garcia and Miss Hutchinson had accepted another invitation, in which Millbank was also included.
They stood about, veils floating, leather decorated coats thrown back, lingering for awhile to talk the garage talk which fascinates people of their type; then Millbank looked at the clock, made his adieux to Lydia, nodded significantly to Mortimer, and followed the others down-stairs.