The Guilford House coffee was not just what he was used to, but he was in an amiable humor and enjoyed hugely the conversation of the commercial travelers with whom he took his breakfast. He did not often escape from himself or the burden of his family reputation, and these strangers were profoundly entertaining. It had never occurred to Ardmore that man could be so amiable so early in the day and his own spirits rallied as he passed the sugar, abused the hot bread and nodded his approval of bitter flings at the inns of other southern towns of whose existence he only vaguely knew. They spoke of the president of the United States and of various old world monarchs in a familiar tone that was decidedly novel and refreshing; and he felt that it was a great privilege to sit at meat with these blithe spirits. Commercial travelers, he now realized, were more like the strolling players, the wandering knights, the cloaked riders approaching lonely inns at night, than any other beings he had met out of books. It was with the severest self-denial that he resisted an impulse to invite them all to visit him at Ardsley or to use his house in Fifth Avenue whenever they pleased. When the man nearest him, who was having a second plate of corn cakes and syrup, casually inquired his "line," Ardmore experienced a moment of real shame, but remembering the jug he had acquired in the night he replied: "Crockery." "Mine's drugs. Do you know Billy Gallop?--he's in your line." "Should say I did," replied Ardmore unhesitatingly. "I took supper with him in Philadelphia Sunday night." "How's trade?" "Bully," replied Ardmore, reaching for the syrup, "I broke my record yesterday." The drug man turned to listen to a discussion of the row between Governors Osborne and Dangerfield precipitated by one of the company who had fortified himself with a newspaper, and Ardmore also gave ear. "Whatever did happen at New Orleans," declared a Maiden Lane jewelry representative, "you can be quite sure that Dangerfield won't get the hot end of the poker. I've seen him, right here at Raleigh, and he has all the marks of a fighting man. He'd strip at two hundred, and he's six in his socks." "Pshaw! Those big fellows are all meat and no muscle," retorted the drug man. "I doubt if there's any fight in him. Now Osborne's a different product--a tall lean cuss, but active as a cat. A man to be governor of South Carolina has got to have the real stuff in him. If it comes to a show-down you'll see Dangerfield duck and run."