It was disgusting to slink back down the stairs, regain the wraps and coats and hats, and make two elevator-loads again. Willie alone was cheerful.
"Now, maybe you'll go to the Plaza or some place and have a human supper."
"I'm going to have a trot and a tango if I have to hunt the town over," said Persis.
Willie gnashed his teeth, but had the car recalled, and asked her where she would go.
"Let's try the Beaux Arts," she said; and they huddled together once more.
"It's too bad we were thrown out of Reisenweber's," Winifred pouted. "I was dying to see François dance and have a dance with him."
Forbes felt well enough acquainted by now to ask: "Pardon my ignorance, but who is François?"
"Oh, he's a love of a French lad," said Winifred. "Everybody's mad over him. I used to see him in Paris dancing between the tables at the Café de Paris or the Pré-Catalan with some girl or other. Then somebody brought him over here for a musical comedy, and he's been on the crest of the wave ever since."
"They say he's getting rich dancing in theaters and restaurants and giving lessons at twenty-five per."
"Somebody was telling me he actually makes fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars a week," said Mrs. Neff.
"If I had that much, would you marry me, Persis?" said Ten Eyck.
"In a minute," said Persis. "We might earn it ourselves. You dance as well as he does, and you could practise whirling me round your neck."
"It's outrageous!" said Willie. "That fellow with an income equal to five per cent. on a couple of million dollars."
"What you kicking about, Willie?" said Winifred. "You get several times as much, and you never lifted hand or foot in your life."
"But Willie's father did," said Mrs. Neff. "He killed himself working."
"Willie has it much better arranged," said Bob. "Instead of Willie working for money he has the money working for him."
"It works while he sleeps," said Winifred.
Forbes was thinking gloomily in the gloom of the car. This dancer, this mountebank, François, was earning as much in a week as the government paid him in a year, after all his training, his campaigning, his readiness to take up his residence or lay down his life wherever he was told to.
Then he compared his income with Willie Enslee's. Enslee did not even dance for his supper, yet into his banks gold rained where pennies dribbled into Forbes' meager purse. And it was not a precarious salary such as dancers and soldiers earned by their toil; it was the mere sweat from great slumbering masses of treasure.