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New guests, with the casual expectedness of the Big House, had drifted in a lawyer, by name Adolph Well, who had come to confer with Dick over some big water- right suit; Jeremy Braxton, straight from Mexico, Dick's general superintendent of the Harvest Group, which bonanza, according to Jeremy Braxton, was as "unpetering" as ever; Edwin O'Hay, a red-headed Irish musical and dramatic critic; and Chauncey Bishop, editor and owner of the San Francisco Dispatch, and a member of Dick's class and frat, as Graham gleaned.
The idea and the trick had been Dick's. Combat had joined early in the evening, when a seeming chance remark of Ernestine had enabled Aaron Hancock to fling the first bomb into the thick of O'Hay's deepest convictions. Dar Hyal, a willing and eager ally, had charged around the flank with his blastic theory of music and taken O'Hay in reverse.
He's such a deep philosopher that he has to get his fun somehow." "And if O'Hay ever locks horns with Terrence," Lute prophesied, "I can see Terrence tucking arm in arm with him, leading him down to the stag room, and heating the argument with the absentest-minded variety of drinks that ever O'Hay accomplished."
A second bridge quartet had been arranged Ernestine, Bert, Jeremy Braxton, and Graham; while O'Hay and Bishop were already deep in a bout of two-handed pinochle. "He's really a charming Irishman when he keeps off his one string," Paula went on. "Which, I think I am fair, is music," Graham said. "And on music he is insufferable," Lute observed.
"But what is it?" O'Hay asked. "Music in the dairy barns to make the cows give down their milk more placidly?" "Every farmer his own plowman while sitting on his front porch," Dick baffled back. "In fact, the labor-eliminating intermediate stage between soil production and sheer laboratory production of food. But wait till you see it.
Donald Ware was driven from his monopoly of Paula by the young people under the leadership of Jeremy Braxton; while Graham and O'Hay paired off in a window-seat and O'Hay talked shop. After a time, in which all at the piano had sung Hawaiian hulas, Paula sang alone to her own accompaniment.
"Which means a very sick O'Hay next day," Paula continued her gurgles of anticipation. "I'll tell him to do it!" exclaimed Lute. "You mustn't think we're all bad," Paula protested to Graham. "It's just the spirit of the house. Dick likes it. He's always playing jokes himself. He relaxes that way.
There was vague talk of her return for a longer stay; but, just back from Europe, she declared herself burdened with a round of duty visits which must be performed before her pleasure visiting began. O'Hay, the critic, had been compelled to linger several days in order to live down the disastrous culmination of the musical raid made upon him by the philosophers.
He shook his head: "I had already made up my mind to go right down there to that one spot and cut that fiddler out of the running. You can't dare me out of it at this late stage. Besides, there's Mr. O'Hay waiting for you to make your bet."
"Or musical criticism," Lute remarked, with no glance at all, but with a pointedness of present company that brought from O'Hay: "Or just being a charming young woman." "What price for the outfit?" Jeremy Braxton asked. "Right now, we could manufacture and lay down, at a proper profit, for five hundred.
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