"Friends?" snorted Eddie. "Holy Mackerel! He scares the life out of me. I know him in a business way, that's all. He came down here three weeks ago and borrowed some books for Bansemer. I had to go up and get 'em yesterday. I was smoking a cigarette. When I asked the old guy for the books he said I'd go to hell if I smoked. I thought I'd be funny, so I said back to him: "I'll smoke if I go to hell, so what's the diff?" It went all right with him, too. He laughed--you ought to see him laugh!--and told me to sit down while he looked up the books. I was there half an hour and he talked all the time. By jing! He makes your blood run cold. He up and said there was no such place as hell. "Why not?" says I. "Because," says he, "God, with all His infinite power, could not conceive of a space huge enough to hold all the hypocrites and sinners." Then he grinned and said he had set aside in his will the sum of a hundred dollars to build a church for the honest man. "That will be a pretty small church," says I. "It will be a small congregation, my son," says he. "What few real honest men we have will hesitate to attend for fear of being ostracised by society." "Gee whiz, Mr. Droom, that's pretty hard on society," says I, laughing. "Oh, for that matter, I have already delivered my eulogy on society," says he. "But it ain't dead," says I. "Oh, yes; it's so rotten it must surely be dead," says he in the nastiest way I ever heard. He's a fearful old man, Mr. Rigby. He made a mean remark about that Mrs. David Cable." "What did he say?" quickly demanded Bobby. "He said he'd been reading in the papers about how she was breaking into society. "She's joined the Episcopal church," says he, sarcastic-like. "Well, there's nothing wrong in that,' says I. 'I know, but she attends,' says he, just as if she shouldn't. 'She wouldn't attend if the women in that church wore Salvation Army clothes and played tambourines, let me tell you. None of 'em would. I knew her in New York years ago. She wasn't fashionable then. Now she's so swell that she'll soon be asking Cable to build a mansion at Rose Lawn Cemetery, because all of the fashionables go there.' Pretty raw, eh, Mr. Rigby?" "Oh, he's an old blatherskite, Eddie. They talk that way when they get old and grouchy. So he knew Mrs. Cable in New York, eh? What else did he say about her?" "Nothing much. Oh, yes, he did say--in that nasty way of his--that he saw her on the street the other day chatting with one of the richest swells in Chicago. He didn't say who he was except that he was the man who once made his wife sit up all night in the day coach while he slept in the only berth to be had on the train. Do you know who that could be?" "I'm afraid Droom was romancing," said Bobby, with a smile.