“Charley’s not a bad little sort. Of course, he needs coaching a bit here and there--just now, for instance, when he didn’t see that that girl wouldn’t think of riding in the machine that had just killed her dog. By Jove, give that girl a year in civilization and she’d do! Who was the young fire-eater?”
“Fire-eater! He’s a lot more decent than you or I.”
“Oh, hang it with your ‘seriously’! Well, then, seriously, melodrama was the correct ticket and all that in 1840, but we’ve outgrown it; it’s devilish demode to chuck things in people’s faces.
“I’m not sorry John Mayrant did it!” I brought out his name with due emphasis.
“All the same,” Beverly was beginning, when the automobile returned rapidly upon us, and, guessing the cause of this, he waved the parasol. Charley descended to get it--an unnecessary act, prompted, I suppose, by the sudden relief of finding that it was not lost.
He made his thanks marked. “It is my sister’s,” he concluded, to me, by way of explanation, in his slightly foreign accent. “It is not much, but it has got some stones and things in the handle.”
We were favored with a bow from the veiled Hortense, shrill thanks from Kitty, and the car, turning, again left us in a moment.
“Little Gazza,” Beverly returned. “Italian; though from his morals you’d never guess he wasn’t Parisian. Great people in Rome. Hereditary right to do something in the presence of the Pope--or not to do it, I forget which. Not a bit of a bad little sort, Gazza. He has just sold a lot of old furniture--Renaissance--Lorenzo du Borgia--that sort of jolly old truck--to Bohm, you know.”
“Oh, yes, you do, old boy. Harry Bohm, of Bohm & Cohn. Everybody knows Bohm, and we’ll all be knowing Cohn by next year. Gazza has sold him a lot of furniture, too. Bohm’s from Pittsfield, or South Lee, or East Canaan, or West Stockbridge, or some of those other back-country cider presses that squirt some of the hardest propositions into Wall Street. He’s just back from buying a railroad, and four or five mines in Mexico. Bohm represents Christianity in the firm. At Newport they call him the military attache to Jerusalem. He’s the big chap that sat behind me in the car. He’ll marry Kitty as soon as she can get her divorce. Bohm’s a jolly old sort--and I tell you, you old sourbelly, you’re letting this Southern moss grow over you a bit. Hey? What? Yellow rich isn’t half bad, and I’ll say it myself, and pretend it’s mine; but hang it, old man, their children won’t be worse than lemon-colored, and the grandchildren will be white!”