"I don't know," returned Smith, slowly. "But there's one thing we can do, and do at once. We can close the Sternberg, Bloom, and McCoy agency. We can decapitate that crew in forty-eight hours, and with your permission I'll go up there and do it myself."
"Go ahead," said the President.
That night Mr. Wintermuth enjoyed the first peaceful rest for almost three months. Smith, on the contrary, perhaps through his anxiety to put his Boston agency house in order, remained sleepless far into the small, still hours. Nevertheless he departed next day for Boston on the three o'clock express, arriving in Boston at eight, although he might as well have taken a later train, for it was certain that neither Sternberg, Bloom, nor McCoy would be apt to remain in their offices until that hour of night. Doubtless it was for this reason that he left the train at the Huntington Avenue station and turned west toward Deerfield Street.
Fifteen minutes later he was waiting in the reception hall of an apartment house, the construction of which he had once, in the Guardian office at New York, quite minutely described for the edification of a certain young lady visitor. In due course of time he was conveyed to the proper floor, and a moment later found himself shaking hands with the identical young lady.
"Mother, this is Mr. Richard Smith of New York, a friend of Uncle
Silas, of whom I told you."
Smith found himself bowing to a little gray lady whose manner was so gentle that he unconsciously lowered his voice in speaking to her. She was dressed all in gray, and her hair was gray, and the silvery lights that glistened in it moved through the folds of a tiny lace object which might, had it been developed, have proved to be a cap. To call so filmy and nebulous a thing a garment of any kind was perhaps absurd; but if this premise was once granted, it would have been correct to say that Mrs. Maitland clung to caps. Certainly no article could have better suited her, and in her single person she had done almost as much as all the rest of Boston to revivify a dying but delightful institution.
The little lady, for all her mildness of manner and appearance, proved to be as wide awake as any one of the three. She even found a way to discover, without Smith's being aware of it, whether he possessed the typical New Yorker's attitude toward her native city. Mrs. Maitland lived in the firm and fixed belief that all New Yorkers, dwelling as they did in a restless and artificial milieu of restaurants and theaters and dollars, had for Boston and Bostonians a kind of patronizing pity. The fact that she herself regarded New Yorkers in very much the same light had never occurred to her.
Smith, however, was not a typical New Yorker. He had too real and intense an interest in all created things to fear Mrs. Maitland's gently suspicious inquisition. In addition to this he was so genuinely interested in at least one of the Bostonians before him that he naturally and easily escaped the pitfalls into which another might have tumbled. So thoroughly, indeed, did he win approval and disarm suspicion that before very long he had his reward in being left, before the small but cheerful fire, with the daughter of the house.
This tactful withdrawal did not lessen the attraction of Mrs. Maitland in Smith's eyes, and it was with real admiration in his tone that he said to Helen:—
"I think your mother is charming."