“He’s a beauty,” said Cressey’s left-hand neighbor.
Miss Esther Forbes had been quite openly staring, with her large, gray, and childlike eyes, at Banneker, eating his oysters in peaceful unconsciousness of being made a subject for discussion. Miss Forbes was a Greuze portrait come to life and adjusted to the extremes of fashion. Behind an expression of the sweetest candor and wistfulness, as behind a safe bulwark, she preserved an effrontery which balked at no defiance of conventions in public, though essentially she was quite sufficiently discreet for self-preservation. Also she had a keen little brain, a reckless but good-humored heart and a memory retentive of important trifles.
“In the West, Bertie?” she inquired of Cressey. “You were in that big wreck there, weren’t you?”
“Devil of a wreck,” said Cressey uneasily. You never could tell what Esther might know or might not say.
“Ask him over here,” directed that young lady blandly, “for coffee and liqueurs.”
“Oh, I say!” protested one of the men. “Nobody knows anything about him—”
“He’s a friend of mine,” put in Cressey, in a tone which ended that particular objection. “But I don’t think he’d come.”
Instantly there was a chorus of demand for him.
“All right, I’ll try,” yielded Cressey, rising.
“Put him next to me,” directed Miss Forbes.