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Updated: June 15, 2025
He had never liked Brauer and he did not find this sharp-nosed inquisitiveness to his taste. He began to wonder why he had come with him. Lunching with Brauer had never been a habit. Occasionally, quite by accident, they managed to achieve the same restaurant and the same table, but it was not a matter of prearrangement.
Brauer, disconcerted by his friend's vehemence, merely had shrugged, but at another time he said, craftily: "If Hilmer wants to break even on the fire business he gives us, why can't we make it up some other way?... There's nothing against giving him all the commissions on that automobile liability policy we placed the other day. We can do what we please with that profit." Starratt flushed.
The waiter brought the usual plate of shrimps that it was customary to serve with an oyster order, and Starratt and Brauer fell to. A glass of beer foamed with enticing amber coolness before each plate. Brauer reached over and lifted his glass. "Well, here's success to crime!" he said, with pointed facetiousness. Starratt ignored the lead.
Starratt voiced these fears to Brauer. "Sure he expects a rake-off," Starratt's silent partner had said. "Everybody gets it ... if they've got business enough to make it worth while." "Well, he won't get it from me," Fred returned, decisively. "I've signed my name to an agreement and that agreement will stick if I starve doing it!"
By the side of Van Ostade or Brauer, for example, one of Greuze's bits of humble life seems like an academic composition, quite out of touch with its subject, and, except for its art, absolutely lifeless and insipid. In a word, his choice of subjects, of genre, is really no disguise at all of his essential classicality.
"Including your share in the Hilmer business?" Brauer had the grace to wince. "Well, there was nothing said absolutely." "And what did you figure was Hilmer's reason for ... well, wanting me to summer at Fairview?" Brauer toyed with a spoon. "There could only be one reason." "Don't be afraid. You mean that my wife..." "Yes ... just that!"
A distressed murmur of concern and pity rose all about her, everyone patted her shoulder, and bitter denunciations of Mr. Brauer and Miss Kirk broke forth. Even Hunter, Baxter & Hunter were not spared, being freely characterized as "the rottenest people in the city to work for!" "It would serve them right," said more than one indignant voice, "if the whole crowd of us walked out on them!"
"Brauer," complained the young man, "has gone off and locked my hat in his office. I can't go to lunch." "Why didn't you walk through Front Office?" said Susan, leading the way so readily and so sedately, that the gentleman was instantly put in the position of having addressed her on very slight provocation. "This inner door is always unlocked," she explained, with maternal gentleness.
I've saved up quite a bit, and..." The waiter broke in upon them with the oysters. Starratt knitted his brows. "Well, why not?" was his mental calculation. Brauer ordered two more pints of beer. Starratt had leaned at first toward keeping his business venture a secret from Helen. But in the end a boyish eagerness to sun himself in the warmth of her surprise unlocked his reserve.
He hated to go around and ask any further favors of his contemptible ex-partner, and he hoped he wouldn't have to request another postponement to the formality of putting the Brauer check through. Of course he had had no business making out a check for funds not in hand. But under the circumstances... What in hell was he worrying for? Everything would come out all right.
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