Once safe, he felt much better. Except that Jeff did put on white kid gloves, Milt couldn't see that they two looked so different. And neither of the two men in the next box wore gloves. Milt made sure of that comfort; he reveled in it; he looked at Claire, and in her loyal smile found ease.
He snarled, "She trusts you. Forget you're a dub. Try to be human. Hang it, I'm no greener at the opera than old horsehair sofa there would be at a garage."
There was something—— What was it he was trying to remember? Oh yes. When he'd worked in the Schoenstrom flour-mill, as engineer, at eighteen, the owner had tried to torment him (to "get his goat," Milt put it), and Milt had found that the one thing that would save him was to smile as though he knew more than he was telling. It did not, he remembered, make any difference whether or not the smile was real. If he merely looked the miller up and down, and smiled cynically, he was let alone.
Why not——
Saxton was bending toward him, asking in honeyed respectfulness:
"Don't you think that the new school in music—audible pointillage, one might call it—mistakes cacophony for power?"
Milt smiled, paternally.
Saxton waited for something more. He dug the nail of his right middle finger into his thumb, looked thoughtful, and attacked again:
"Which do you like better: the new Italian music, or the orthodox German?"
Milt smiled like two uncles watching a clever baby, and patronized Saxton with, "They both have their points."