"Oh yes. There are people who give dinners, and who are not cognoscible. But people who have never yet given a dinner, how is society to a.s.similate them?"
"It digests a great many people," suggested the young man.
"Yes; but they have always brought some sort of sauce piquante with them. Now, as I understand you, these friends of yours have no such sauce."
"Oh, I don"t know about that!" cried the son.
"Oh, rude, native flavours, I dare say. But that isn"t what I mean.
Well, then, they must spend. There is no other way for them to win their way to general regard. We must have the Colonel elected to the Ten O"clock Club, and he must put himself down in the list of those willing to entertain. Any one can manage a large supper. Yes, I see a gleam of hope for him in that direction."
In the morning Bromfield Corey asked his son whether he should find Lapham at his place as early as eleven.
"I think you might find him even earlier. I"ve never been there before him. I doubt if the porter is there much sooner."
"Well, suppose I go with you, then?"
"Why, if you like, sir," said the son, with some deprecation.
"Oh, the question is, will HE like?"
"I think he will, sir;" and the father could see that his son was very much pleased.
Lapham was rending an impatient course through the morning"s news when they appeared at the door of his inner room. He looked up from the newspaper spread on the desk before him, and then he stood up, making an indifferent feint of not knowing that he knew Bromfield Corey by sight.
"Good morning, Colonel Lapham," said the son, and Lapham waited for him to say further, "I wish to introduce my father." Then he answered, "Good morning," and added rather sternly for the elder Corey, "How do you do, sir? Will you take a chair?" and he pushed him one.
They shook hands and sat down, and Lapham said to his subordinate, "Have a seat;" but young Corey remained standing, watching them in their observance of each other with an amus.e.m.e.nt which was a little uneasy. Lapham made his visitor speak first by waiting for him to do so.
"I"m glad to make your acquaintance, Colonel Lapham, and I ought to have come sooner to do so. My father in your place would have expected it of a man in my place at once, I believe. But I can"t feel myself altogether a stranger as it is. I hope Mrs. Lapham is well? And your daughter?"
"Thank you," said Lapham, "they"re quite well."
"They were very kind to my wife----"
"Oh, that was nothing!" cried Lapham. "There"s nothing Mrs. Lapham likes better than a chance of that sort. Mrs. Corey and the young ladies well?"
"Very well, when I heard from them. They"re out of town."
"Yes, so I understood," said Lapham, with a nod toward the son. "I believe Mr. Corey, here, told Mrs. Lapham." He leaned back in his chair, stiffly resolute to show that he was not incommoded by the exchange of these civilities.
"Yes," said Bromfield Corey. "Tom has had the pleasure which I hope for of seeing you all. I hope you"re able to make him useful to you here?" Corey looked round Lapham"s room vaguely, and then out at the clerks in their railed enclosure, where his eye finally rested on an extremely pretty girl, who was operating a type-writer.
"Well, sir," replied Lapham, softening for the first time with this approach to business, "I guess it will be our own fault if we don"t. By the way, Corey," he added, to the younger man, as he gathered up some letters from his desk, "here"s something in your line. Spanish or French, I guess."
"I"ll run them over," said Corey, taking them to his desk.
His father made an offer to rise.
"Don"t go," said Lapham, gesturing him down again. "I just wanted to get him away a minute. I don"t care to say it to his face,--I don"t like the principle,--but since you ask me about it, I"d just as lief say that I"ve never had any young man take hold here equal to your son.
I don"t know as you care."
"You make me very happy," said Bromfield Corey. "Very happy indeed.
I"ve always had the idea that there was something in my son, if he could only find the way to work it out. And he seems to have gone into your business for the love of it."
"He went to work in the right way, sir! He told me about it. He looked into it. And that paint is a thing that will bear looking into."
"Oh yes. You might think he had invented it, if you heard him celebrating it."
"Is that so?" demanded Lapham, pleased through and through. "Well, there ain"t any other way. You"ve got to believe in a thing before you can put any heart in it. Why, I had a partner in this thing once, along back just after the war, and he used to be always wanting to tinker with something else. "Why," says I, "you"ve got the best thing in G.o.d"s universe now. Why ain"t you satisfied?" I had to get rid of him at last. I stuck to my paint, and that fellow"s drifted round pretty much all over the whole country, whittling his capital down all the while, till here the other day I had to lend him some money to start him new. No, sir, you"ve got to believe in a thing. And I believe in your son. And I don"t mind telling you that, so far as he"s gone, he"s a success."
"That"s very kind of you."
"No kindness about it. As I was saying the other day to a friend of mine, I"ve had many a fellow right out of the street that had to work hard all his life, and didn"t begin to take hold like this son of yours."
Lapham expanded with profound self-satisfaction. As he probably conceived it, he had succeeded in praising, in a perfectly casual way, the supreme excellence of his paint, and his own sagacity and benevolence; and here he was sitting face to face with Bromfield Corey, praising his son to him, and receiving his grateful acknowledgments as if he were the father of some office-boy whom Lapham had given a place half but of charity.
"Yes, sir, when your son proposed to take hold here, I didn"t have much faith in his ideas, that"s the truth. But I had faith in him, and I saw that he meant business from the start. I could see it was born in him. Any one could."
"I"m afraid he didn"t inherit it directly from me," said Bromfield Corey; "but it"s in the blood, on both sides." "Well, sir, we can"t help those things," said Lapham compa.s.sionately. "Some of us have got it, and some of us haven"t. The idea is to make the most of what we HAVE got."
"Oh yes; that is the idea. By all means."
"And you can"t ever tell what"s in you till you try. Why, when I started this thing, I didn"t more than half understand my own strength.
I wouldn"t have said, looking back, that I could have stood the wear and tear of what I"ve been through. But I developed as I went along.
It"s just like exercising your muscles in a gymnasium. You can lift twice or three times as much after you"ve been in training a month as you could before. And I can see that it"s going to be just so with your son. His going through college won"t hurt him,--he"ll soon slough all that off,--and his bringing up won"t; don"t be anxious about it. I noticed in the army that some of the fellows that had the most go-ahead were fellows that hadn"t ever had much more to do than girls before the war broke out. Your son will get along."
"Thank you," said Bromfield Corey, and smiled--whether because his spirit was safe in the humility he sometimes boasted, or because it was triply armed in pride against anything the Colonel"s kindness could do.
"He"ll get along. He"s a good business man, and he"s a fine fellow.
MUST you go?" asked Lapham, as Bromfield Corey now rose more resolutely. "Well, glad to see you. It was natural you should want to come and see what he was about, and I"m glad you did. I should have felt just so about it. Here is some of our stuff," he said, pointing out the various packages in his office, including the Persis Brand.
"Ah, that"s very nice, very nice indeed," said his visitor. "That colour through the jar--very rich--delicious. Is Persis Brand a name?"
Lapham blushed.
"Well, Persis is. I don"t know as you saw an interview that fellow published in the Events a while back?"
"What is the Events?"
"Well, it"s that new paper Witherby"s started."
"No," said Bromfield Corey, "I haven"t seen it. I read The Daily," he explained; by which he meant The Daily Advertiser, the only daily there is in the old-fashioned Bostonian sense.
"He put a lot of stuff in my mouth that I never said," resumed Lapham; "but that"s neither here nor there, so long as you haven"t seen it.
Here"s the department your son"s in," and he showed him the foreign labels. Then he took him out into the warehouse to see the large packages. At the head of the stairs, where his guest stopped to nod to his son and say "Good-bye, Tom," Lapham insisted upon going down to the lower door with him "Well, call again," he said in hospitable dismissal. "I shall always be glad to see you. There ain"t a great deal doing at this season." Bromfield Corey thanked him, and let his hand remain perforce in Lapham"s lingering grasp. "If you ever like to ride after a good horse----" the Colonel began.
"Oh, no, no, no; thank you! The better the horse, the more I should be scared. Tom has told me of your driving!"