The probabilities of this situation were easily comprehended by a legal mind which spurned a criminal practice, and Butley Smith had to take his satisfaction in biding his time, reserving, however, the privilege of biting his lip, to which extent he lived up to the unities. Meantime the situation in Fitchly did not improve.
Just how bad the situation was growing, just how fitfully the pot was boiling, how it was even fanned by his own disregard of it, was utterly aside from the observation of Furniss. He never knew, for example, and probably would not have cared if he did, that there had been a proposition to expel him from the Fitchly Country Club. But, then, as was pointed out by Carter of the firm of Carter, Pills & Carter, who did take an occasional criminal case, if an action were instituted against Furniss, it must necessarily involve the guileless Helen, and, whatever might be the popular verdict, just how much she could be called an accomplice would be a decision extremely delicate for the trained legal mind. It was certain that Furniss’s face had borne no scratches when the lights went on again.
So Butley boiled and chafed under his natural injunction against punching Furniss, and bit his lip, and bided his time, until ultimately it began to react on Helen, whose original emotions had been as simple as those of the criminal. He boiled and chafed and bided his time until the desperate Helen resolved on a terrible step—no less than an actual move to the walls of Ilium. She wrote a note, and invited Furniss to meet her in the private dining-room of the Fitchly Inn.
He went. We will not flatter Furniss. Any note in a feminine handwriting would have brought him just the same, and his mood was not of the most elevated. His dim, uncertain stirrings of the dramatic on the morning of the thirty-first had gone permanently back to sleep, and on this particular day he had reasons to be distinctly savage, for he had just lost a forty-thousand-dollar order for the off-set drill, and he had no active inclinations toward mushrooms. Still, business was business, and one had to buy luncheon for two, anyway.
So Helen met him, and Helen pleaded. Aside from the boiling of Butley, her feminine sense of the just had told her that wrong must be righted and happy endings must prevail. She had not the rude melodrama of her consort, which saw a trouncing as the only fit remedy for non-patrons of husbandry; but she had, nevertheless, an Emersonian theory of compensation, which perceived that the apparent impunity of the outrager was contrary to the ultimate laws of existence. So Helen pleaded, and Paris got mad. He didn’t like Butley, anyway. He would apologize to Helen, but he wouldn’t to Menelaus. He couldn’t see that the affair was international, anyway. It seemed to him distinctly Parisian. But Helen wore a tailored gown with a fringe of lace at her neck, so Paris surrendered, and the entente cordiale was restored. He promised to apologize at the Quoits Club that very day, and that evening, at a prearranged dinner, the nations would banquet in harmony. Seven stalwart oxen would be killed, a libation poured to the gods, and for seven hours—
But just then the waiter brought the bill.
The bill, with tips, was twenty-four dollars and sixty cents, and with a sudden recollection of the forty-thousand-dollar order, Furniss reverted to type. With the usual inconsistency of a man who can lose large sums with apparent indifference, he raved and fumed at the loss of a penny. He raved and fumed all the afternoon at his office, and it was not until well after five that he made an unaccustomed appearance at the Quoits Club, still raging and fuming, with the only horror that a man of his type can ever know—the horror of losing money.
Butley Smith was already at the Quoits Club, as Helen well knew he would be; but Furniss was an unaccustomed presence. He usually preferred the Racquets, where the stakes were worth playing, and his advent in this, the stronghold of strictly civil practice, made a commotion. The commotion, moreover, soon attracted the attention of Butley, who was straying through the tables looking for a partner.
Now, Butley Smith was rated a magnificent card-player, which meant that he played auction like a stop-watch, and poker like a two-year-old child. The exact opposite was true, by reputation, of Furniss, and at sight of him in the stronghold of his own followers, who demanded his redemption, Butley had a sudden golden inspiration. He ceased biting his lip, and his time was bid. He would beard the lion in his den, and beard him he did.