But her real grievance arose when, after Rippleton Holabird had agreed to give midnight supper on the roof of the Institute to one of her most intellectual dinner-parties, she telephoned to Gottlieb, merely asking, “Would it be too much trouble for you to go down and open your lab, so we can all enjoy just a tiny peep at it?” and he answered:
“It would! Good night!”
Capitola protested to her husband. He listened—at least he seemed to listen—and remarked:
“Cap, I don’t mind your playing the fool with the footmen. They’ve got to stand it. But if you get funny with Max, I’ll simply shut up the whole Institute, and then you won’t have anything to talk about at the Colony Club. And it certainly does beat the deuce that a man worth thirty million dollars—at least a fellow that’s got that much—can’t find a clean pair of pajamas. No, I won’t have a valet! Oh, please now, Capitola, please quit being high-minded and let me go to sleep, will you!”
But Capitola was uncontrollable, especially in the matter of the monthly dinners which she gave at the Institute.
III
The first of the McGurk Scientific Dinners which Martin and Leora witnessed was a particularly important and explanatory dinner, because the guest of honor was Major-General Sir Isaac Mallard, the London surgeon, who was in America with a British War Mission. He had already beautifully let himself be shown through the Institute; he had been Sir Isaac’d by Dr. Tubbs and every researcher except Terry Wickett; he remembered meeting Rippleton Holabird in London, or said he remembered; and he admired Gladys the Centrifuge.
The dinner began with one misfortune in that Terry Wickett, who hitherto could be depended upon to stay decently away, now appeared, volunteering to the wife of an ex-ambassador, “I simply couldn’t duck this spread, with dear Sir Isaac coming. Say, if I hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t hardly think my dress-suit was rented, would you! Have you noticed that Sir Isaac is getting so he doesn’t tear the carpet with his spurs any more? I wonder if he still kills all his mastoid patients?”
There was vast music, vaster food; there were uncomfortable scientists explaining to golden cooing ladies, in a few words, just what they were up to and what in the next twenty years they hoped to be up to; there were the cooing ladies themselves, observing in tones of pretty rebuke, “But I’m afraid you haven’t yet made it as clear as you might.” There were the cooing ladies’ husbands—college graduates, manipulators of oil stocks or of corporation law—who sat ready to give to anybody who desired it their opinion that while antitoxins might be racy, what we really needed was a good substitute for rubber.
There was Rippleton Holabird, being charming.