Blair had need of sympathy. His plan for a "dinner" had encountered difficulties, and he had had moments of racking indecision; but when, on the toss of a penny, 'heads' declared for carrying the thing through, he held to his purpose with a perseverance that was amusingly like his mother's large and unshakable obstinacies. He had endless talks with Harris as to food; and with painstaking regard for artistic effect and as far as he understood it, for convention, he worked out every detail of service and arrangement. His first effort was to make the room beautiful; so the crimson curtains were drawn across the windows, and the cut-glass chandeliers in both rooms emerged glittering from their brown paper-muslin bags. The table was rather overloaded with large pieces of silver which Blair had found in the big silver-chest in the garret; among them was a huge center ornament, called in those days an epergne--an extraordinary arrangement of prickly silver leaves and red glass cups which were supposed to be flowers. It was black with disuse, and Blair made Harris work over it until the poor fellow protested that he had rubbed the skin off his thumb--but the pointed leaves of the great silver thistle sparkled like diamonds. Blair was charmingly considerate of old Harris so long as it required no sacrifice on his own part, but he did not relinquish a single piece of silver because of that thumb. With his large allowance, it was easy to put flowers everywhere--the most expensive that the season afforded. When he ordered them, he bought at the same time a great bunch of orchids for Miss White. "I can't invite her," he decided, reluctantly; "but her feelings won't be hurt if I send her some flowers." As for the menu, he charged the things he wanted to his mother's meager account at the grocery-store. When he produced his list of delicacies, things unknown on that office-dining-room table, the amazed grocer said to himself, "Well, _at last_ I guess that trade is going to amount to something! Why, damn it," he confided to his bookkeeper afterward, "I been sendin' things up to that there house for seventeen years, and the whole bill ain't amounted to shucks. That woman could buy and sell me twenty times over. Twenty times? A hundred times! And I give you my word she eats like a day-laborer. Listen to this"--and he rattled off Blair's order. "She'll fall down dead when she sees them things; she don't even know how to spell 'em!" Blair had never seen a table properly appointed for a dinner-party; but Harris had recollections of more elaborate and elegant days, a recollection, indeed, of one occasion when he had waited at a policemen's ball; and he laid down the law so dogmatically that Blair assented to every suggestion. The result was a humorous compound of Harris's standards and Blair's aspirations; but the boy, coming in to look at the table before the arrival of his guests, was perfectly satisfied.