"Do you? Straight?" Mr. Riggs violently set his cup down on a table—Mrs. Riggs would later tell him that he'd put it down in the wrong place, but never mind. He leaned over Milt and snarled, "Offer me a cigarette. I don't know if they smoke here, and I dassn't be the first to try. Say, boy, Alaska—— I wish I was there now! Say, it beats all hell how good tea can taste in a tin cup, and how wishy-washy it is in china. Boy, I don't know anything about you, but you look all right, and when you get ready to go to Alaska, you come to me, and I'll see if I can't give you a chance to go up there. But don't ever come back!"
When the crowd began bubblingly to move toward the door, Milt prepared to move—and bubble—with them. Though Claire's note had sounded as though she was really a little lonely, at the tea she had said nothing to him except, "So glad you came. Do you know Dolly Ransome? Dolly, this is my nice Mr. Daggett. Take him and make him happy."
Dolly hadn't made him in the least happy. She had talked about tennis; she had with some detail described her remarkable luck in beating one Sally Saunders three sets. Now Milt was learning tennis. He was at the present period giving two hours a week to tennis, two to dancing, two to bridge. But he preferred cleaning oil-wells to any of these toilsome accomplishments, and it must sadly be admitted that all the while he was making his face bright at Dolly, he was wondering what would happen if he interrupted Dolly's gurgling, galloping, giggling multitudinousness by shouting, "Oh, shut up!"
When it seemed safe to go, and he tried to look as though he too were oozing out to a Crane-Simplex, Claire slipped beside him, soft as a shadow, and whispered, "Please don't go. I want to talk to you. Please!" There was fluttering wistfulness in her voice, though instantly it was gone as she hastened to the door and was to be heard asserting that she did indeed love Seattle.
Milt looked out into the hall. He studied a console with a curious black and white vase containing a single peacock feather, and a gold mirror shimmering against a gray wall.
"Lovely stuff. I like that mirror. Like a slew in the evening. But it isn't worth being a slave for. I'm not going to be a Mr. Riggs. Poor devil, he's more of a servant than any of these maids. Certainly am sorry for that poor fish. He'll have a chance to take his coat off and sit down and smoke—when he's dead!"
The guests were gone; the Gilsons upstairs. Claire came running, seized Milt's sleeve, coaxed him to the davenport in the drawing-room—then sighed, and rubbed her forehead, and looked so tired that he could say nothing but, "Hope you haven't been overdoing."
"No, just—just talking too much."
He got himself to say, "Miss Ransome—the one that's nuts about tennis—she's darn nice."
"Is she?"