"There's a general belief that a group of the big fellows will stand behind the trust companies in return for certain concessions. I say," he continued, watching the ruby ring, which instinctively she tried to conceal from him, "I hope Elise isn't going to make a fool of herself about Majendie."
"Teddy, Teddy, you've forgotten the two over the plaque!" she said aloud--and, a little lower: "She won't; don't fear."
"I know her better," he said, without, however, betraying the slightest brotherly agitation. "She is apt to do something crazy if anything went wrong with Majendie. Bloodgood's a hard-skinned old brute, but if there was anything public he'd cut up ugly."
"I thought we never told secrets, Mrs. Kildair. Who else is coming? Am I representing the element of respectability again tonight?"
"The what?" She looked at him steadily until he turned away nervously, with the unease of an animal. "Don't be an ass with me, my dear Garraboy."
"By George," he said irritably, "if this were Europe I'd wager you were in the Secret Service, Mrs. Kildair."
"Thank you," she said, smiling appreciatively, and returned toward young Beecher, who was waiting by the piano with ill-concealed resentment.
The Stanley Cheevers entered--a short, chubby man with a bleached, vacant face tufted with mustache and imperial, devoid of eyebrows, with watery eyes that moved slowly with the motion of his gourd-like head; Mrs. Cheever, voluble, nervous, over-dressed, young with the youth of a child and pretty with the prettiness of a doll.
Beecher, who knew them, bowed with a sense of curiosity to Mrs. Cheever, who held him a little with a certain trick she had of opening wide her dark, Oriental eyes; and dropped, with a sense of physical discomfort, the hand that Cheever flabbily pressed into his.
"Decidedly, I am going to have a grand little time by myself," he said moodily. "Where the deuce does Rita pick up this bunch?"
The Enos Bloodgoods were still agitated as they entered. His lips had not quite banished the scowl, nor her eyes the scorn.
"Permit me, my dear," he said, taking off her wrap, and the words struck those who heard them with a sudden chill.
He was of the unrelenting type that never loses its temper, but causes others to lose theirs, immovable in his opinions, with a prowling walk, a studied antagonism in his manner, while in his bulgy eyes was an impudent stare which fastened itself like a leech on the person addressed, to draw out his weakness.