From Belknap-Jackson I learned by telephone (during these days, being sensitive, he stopped in almost quite continuously) that Mrs. Effie had profusely explained to his wife about the dinner. “Of course, my dear, I couldn’t have the presumption to ask you and your husband to sit at table with the creature, even if he did think it all right to drive her about town on a shopping trip. But I thought we ought to do something to make the dear Earl’s visit one to be remembered--he’s _so_ appreciative! I’m sure you understand just how things are----” In reciting this speech to me Belknap-Jackson essayed to simulate the tone and excessive manner of a woman gushing falsely. The fellow was quite bitter about it. “I sometimes think I’ll give up,” he concluded. “God only knows what things are coming to!” It began to seem even to me that they were coming a bit thick. But I knew that his lordship was a determined man. He was of the bulldog breed that has made old England what it is. I mean to say, I knew he would put the woman in her place. CHAPTER NINETEEN Echoes of the Monday night dinner reached me the following day. The affair had passed off pleasantly enough, the members of the Bohemian set conducting themselves quite as persons who mattered, with the exception of the Klondike woman herself, who, I gathered, had descended to a mood of most indecorous liveliness considering who the guest of honour was. She had not only played and sung those noisy native folksongs of hers, but she had, it seemed, conducted herself with a certain facetious familiarity toward his lordship. “Every now and then,” said Cousin Egbert, my principal informant, “she’d whirl in and josh the Cap all over the place about them funny whiskers he wears. She told him out and out he’d just got to lose them.” “Shocking rudeness!” I exclaimed. “Oh, sure, sure!” he agreed, yet without indignation. “And the Cap just hated her for it--you could tell that by the way he looked at her. Oh, he hates her something terrible. He just can’t bear the sight of her.” “Naturally enough,” I observed, though there had been an undercurrent to his speech that I thought almost quite a little odd. His accents were queerly placed. Had I not known him too well I should have thought him trying to be deep. I recalled his other phrases, that Mrs. Effie was seeing which way a cat would leap, and that the Klondike person would hand the ladies of the North Side set a lemon squash. I put them all down as childish prattle and said as much to the Mixer later in the day as she had a dish of tea at the Grill. “Yes, Sour-dough’s right,” she observed. “That Earl just hates the sight of her--can’t bear to look at her a minute.” But she, too, intoned the thing queerly. “He’s putting pressure to bear on her,” I said. “Pressure!” said the Mixer; and then, “Hum!” very dryly.