The two women left Frothingham alone with him, and the old man soon vented his dissatisfaction. “I suppose _you_ like this sort of thing,” he said, with a wave of the arm to indicate that he meant the establishment. “But I don’t. If I had my way we’d be simple and comfortable--no, I don’t mean that exactly. I suppose at bottom I’m as big a fool as the women. But, all the same, French cooking gives me indigestion. That infernal frog-eater in the right wing has it in for me. He’s killing me by inches. And I’m so afraid of him and the butler and all the rest of ’em that I don’t kick the traces more than once a week.” He laughed. “My wife and daughter have got me well trained. Whenever they tell me to, I sit up on my hind legs and ‘speak’ for crackers and snap ‘em off my nose.”
Frothingham liked him at once--he was a big, handsome old fellow, with keen, steel-grey eyes, and the strong look of the successful man of affairs. “I fancy he’s almost one of those Americans Wallingford talked about,” he thought.
After a smoke with Hollister he went to his rooms--a suite of vast chambers, like the show rooms of a palace, with a marble bathroom that had a small swimming pool sunk in the middle of it. He looked out upon the drive and the park and the half-hidden streams glittering in the sunshine. “These people will beat us out at our own game when they get used to the cards,” he said.
There was the sound of wheels and horses--many wheels and many horses. He looked down the drive--one after another came into view a three-seated buckboard, a stylish omnibus, a waggon with the seats taken out to make room for a huge pile of luggage. In the buckboard and the omnibus he recognised men and women whom he had met in New York--the Leightons, the Spencers, the Farrells, the Howards, Mrs. Carnarvon, Wallingford, Gresham, Browne, a man whose name he could not recall, Miss Lester, Miss Devenant. “I thought Catherine and I were to be ‘very quiet,’” he muttered.
There were thirty-two people at dinner that night, sixteen of whom, including himself, were guests in the house for stays of three days, a week, ten days. “You said you were to be alone,” he said to Catherine, with ironic reproach.
She gave him her pathetic, helpless look. “I did hope so. But I asked some, and mamma asked others, and the rest asked themselves.”