He bent aside a little to see past his wife's hat, and exchanged a suave salutation with a bald-headed young man who was with two ladies and who wore a dove-gray silk bow with his evening clothes. "Young Corbin," explained Wallingford, "of the Corbin and Paley department store. He had about two dollars a week spending money till his father died, and now he and young Paley are turning social flip-flaps at the rate of twenty a minute. He belongs to the Mark family and he's great pals with me. Looks good for him, don't it?" "Jim," she said in earnest reproval, "you mustn't talk that way." "Of course I'm only joking," he returned. "You know I promised you I'd stick to the straight and narrow. I'll keep my word. Nothing but straight business for me hereafter." He, too, was quite serious about it, and yet he smiled as he thought of young Corbin. Another man, of a party just being shown to a table, nodded to him, and Mrs. Wallingford looked up at her husband with admiration. "Honestly, how do you do it?" she inquired. "We have only been here a little over forty-eight hours, and yet you have already picked up a host of nice friends." "I patronize only the best saloons," he replied with a grin; then, more seriously: "This is a mighty rich little city, Fannie. I could organize a stock company here, within a week, for anything from a burglar's trust to a church consolidation." "It's a pretty place," she admitted. "I like it very much from what I have seen of it." He chuckled. "Looks like a spending town," he returned; "and where they spend a wad they're crazy to make one. Give me one of these inland society towns for the loose, long green. New York's no place to start an honest business," and again he chuckled. "By the way, Fannie," he added after a pause, "what do you think of my going into the patent medicine line?" "How do you mean?" she inquired, frowning. "Oh, on a big scale," he replied. "Advertise it big, manufacture it big." She studied it over in musing silence. "I don't mind what you do so long as it is honest," she finally said. "Good. I'll hunt up Quagg to-morrow and spring it on him." "You don't mean that dreadful quack medicine he's selling on the street, do you?" she protested. "Why not? I don't know that it's worthless, and I do know that Quagg has sold it on street corners for twenty years from coast to coast. He goes back to the same towns over and over, and people buy who always bought before. Looks like a good thing to me. Quagg was a regular doctor when he was a kid; had a real diploma and all that, but no practice and no patience. Joke. Giggle." The oysters came on now, and they talked of other things, but while they were upon the meat Doctor Lazzier, having finished, came across to shake hands with his friend of a day, and was graciously charmed to meet Mrs. Wallingford. "Sit down," invited J. Rufus. "Won't you try a glass of this? It's very fair," and he raised a practised eyebrow to the waiter.