“Waal, waal, you don’t say so, Si! Haow’s the shoe business in Hyannis, papa?”
“Hyannis, hell! I’ve been in business in New York City, New York, for more than forty years!”
“Oh!”
Father felt that he had made an impression. He stuck his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets—as he had not done these six gloomy weeks—threw out his chest, and tried to look like Thirty-fourth and Broadway, with a dash of Wall Street and a flavor of Fifth Avenue.
The chauffeur sighed, “Well, all I can say is that any guy that’s lived in New York that long and then comes to this God-forsaken neck of land is a nut.”
With an almost cosmic sorrow in his manner and an irritated twist in his suspenders, the chauffeur disappeared into the garage. Father forlornly felt that he wasn’t visibly getting nearer to the heart and patronage of Mrs. Vance Carter.
He stood alone on the cement terrace before the garage. The square grim back of the big house didn’t so much “look down on him” as beautifully ignore him. A maid in a cap peeped wonderingly at him from a window. A man in dun livery wheeled a vacuum cleaner out of an unexpected basement door. An under-gardener, appearing at the corner, dragging a cultivator, stared at him. Far off, somewhere, he heard a voice crying, “Fif’ love!” He could see a corner of a sunken garden with stiff borders of box. He had an uneasy feeling that a whole army of unexpected servants stood between him and Mrs. Vance Carter; that, at any moment, a fat, side-whiskered, expensive butler, like the butlers you see in the movies, would pop up and order him off the grounds.
The unsatisfactory chauffeur reappeared. In a panic Father urged, “Say, my name’s Appleby and I run the tea-room at Grimsby Head—you know, couple of miles this side of the Center. It would be pretty nice for our class of business if the Madam was to stop there some time, and I was just wondering, just kinda wondering, if some time when she felt thirsty you c—”
“She don’t never tell me when she’s thirsty. She just tells me when she’s mad.”
“Well, you know, some time you might be stopping to show her the view or something—you fix it up, and— Here, you get yourself some cigars.” He timidly held out a two-dollar bill. It seemed to bore the chauffeur a good deal, but he condescended to take it. Father tried to look knowing and friendly and sophisticated all at once. He added, “Any time you feel like a good cup o’ tea and the finest home-made doughnuts you ever ate, why, you just drop in yourself, and ’twon’t cost you a cent.”