"Mention names," said Frederick, turning white. "I shall have no
difficulty, I fancy, in finding a second, and I hope the same code of
honour holds for gentlemen here as in Europe."
"Tush--tush!" The impresario lifted his fat hands in pacification, and it
seemed to Frederick as if the business man's round head, set low between
his shoulders, were trying to make signs to him, as if he were winking
his eyes furtively and were suppressing a broad smile, unexpectedly
upsetting his business zeal and gravity. "You make entirely too much of
it." He looked Frederick straight in the face in a peculiar way with a
significant expression in his large round eyes. Then he continued: "For
an engagement of twenty evenings in cities to be decided upon, I offer
you one hundred and fifty dollars more per evening than anybody else has
yet offered you, the engagement to begin inside of four days. If you are
agreed, we can go to the lawyer this minute."
Within less than half an hour Frederick and Ingigerd were standing in a
huge elevator, which was to take them to the fifth floor of a New York
City office building. Ingigerd was the only woman in the elevator, and it
pleased her that for her sake the nineteen gentlemen in the car held
their hats in their hands.
"If you have never before seen such a thing," Lilienfeld said to
Frederick, "the offices of a big American lawyer will astonish you. This
is a law firm, two partners, Brown and Samuelson; but Brown's a
nincompoop and Samuelson is the whole thing."
The offices of the famous New York lawyer, Samuelson, were partitioned
off with wood and ground glass from an immense hall, a writing factory,
in which there was a horde of assistants working typewriters. Samuelson
made the impression of a man of nearly forty. He was not very tall, had a
bad, pallid complexion, and wore a short, pointed beard. The clothes of
this man, whose share of the firm's income was estimated at three hundred
thousand dollars a year, though of the correct cut, were by no means new;
in fact, they were rather shabby, and his entire appearance suggested
that he was scarcely a model of American cleanliness. He spoke in a very
low, thick voice, as if suffering from a sore throat.
Within less than fifteen minutes, the contract between Lilienfeld and
Ingigerd had been concluded, a contract, which owing to the fact that
Ingigerd was a minor, was no more valid than the contract with Webster
and Forster. Samuelson showed that he was informed of all the details of
the case of Hahlstroem _vs._ Webster and Forster. When the question of
their demands arose, he merely smiled with an air of great disdain and
said:
"We will quietly lie low and let them make the advance."
When Ingigerd and Frederick were sitting alone together in a closed cab
on the way home, he put his arms about her passionately.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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