“Ah, technical, I see. Well, you are not printed in sixty-four-point black-face so far as they are concerned. They don’t find themselves able to sum you up. That fact is one of my recreations.”
“I’ll tell you why,” Tembarom explained with his clearly unprejudiced air. “There’s nothing much about me to sum up, anyhow. I’m too sort of plain sailing and ordinary. I’m not making for anywhere they’d think I’d want to go. I’m not hiding anything they’d be sure I’d want to hide.”
“By the Lord! you’re not!” exclaimed the duke.
“When I first came here, every one of them had a fool idea I’d want to pretend I’d never set eyes on a newsboy or a bootblack, and that I couldn’t find my way in New York when I got off Fifth Avenue. I used to see them thinking they’d got to look as if they believed it, if they wanted to keep next. When I just let out and showed I didn’t care a darn and hadn’t sense enough to know that it mattered, it nearly made them throw a fit. They had to turn round and fix their faces all over again and act like it was ‘interesting.’ That’s what Lady Mallowe calls it. She says it’s so ‘interesting!’ Now, Palliser—” he paused and grinned again.
“Yes, Palliser? Don’t let us neglect Palliser,” his host encouraged him.
“He’s in a worse mix-up than the rest because he’s got more to lose. If he could work this mammoth-mine song and dance with the right people, there’d be money enough in it to put him on Easy Street. That’s where he’s aiming for. The company’s just where it has to have a boost. It’s just got to. If it doesn’t, there’ll be a bust up that may end in fitting out a high-toned promoter or so in a striped yellow-and-black Jersey suit and set him to breaking rocks or playing with oakum. I’ll tell you, poor old Palliser gets the Willies sometimes after he’s read his mail. He turns the color of écru baby Irish. That’s a kind of lace I got a dressmaker to tell me about when I wrote up receptions and dances for the Sunday ‘Earth.’ Écru baby Irish—that’s Palliser’s color after he read his letters.”
“I dare say the fellow’s in a devil of a mess, if the truth were known,” the duke said.
“And here’s ‘T. T.,’ hand-made and hand-painted for the part of the kind of sucker he wants.” T. Tembarom’s manner was almost sympathetic in its appreciation. “I can tell you I’m having a real good time with Palliser. It looked like I’d just dropped from heaven when he first saw me. If he’d been the praying kind, I’d have been just the sort he’d have prayed for when he said his ‘Now-I-lay-me’s’ before he went to bed. There wasn’t a chance in a hundred that I wasn’t a fool that had his head swelled so that he’d swallow any darned thing if you handed it to him smooth enough. First time he called he asked me a lot of questions about New York business. That was pretty smart of him. He wanted to find out, sort of careless, how much I knew—or how little.”
The duke was leaning back luxuriously in his chair and gazing at him as he might have gazed at the work of an old master of which each line and shade was of absorbing interest.
“I can see him,” he said. “I see him.”