CHAPTER XII

Toward six o’clock one afternoon in late February Ned Stillman, making his way from the business district at California and Montgomery Streets toward his club, suddenly remembered a forgotten luncheon engagement for that day with Lily Condor.

“Well,” he muttered at once, “I’m in for it now!  I guess I might as well swing out and see her and get the thing over with.”

It was curious of late how often he was given to muttering.  Previously, petty annoyances had not moved him to these half-audible and solitary comments which he had always found contemptuously amusing in others.  He wondered whether this new trick was the result of his business ventures, his sly charities, or his approach toward the suggestive age of forty.  Associating the name of Lily Condor with his covert charities, he was almost persuaded that they lay back of this preposterous habit.  And the more he thought about it the more he muttered and became convinced that Lily Condor was usually the topic of these vocal self-communings.

Ned Stillman had always prided himself upon his sense of personal freedom concerning the trivial circumstances of life.  Of course, like any man of sensibility, he was bound by the chains that deeper impulses forge, but he had never been hampered by any restraints directed at his ordinary uprisings and downsittings.  In short, he had answered the beck and nod of no man, much less a woman, and he was not finding Lily Condor’s growing presumptions along this line altogether agreeable.

He would not have minded so much if there was any personal gratification in yielding to the lady’s whip-hand commands.  There are certain delights in self-surrender which give a zest to slavery, but there is no joy in being held a hostage.  Looking back, Stillman marveled at the indiscretion he had committed when he handed over not only his reserve, but Claire Robson’s reputation into the safekeeping of Lily Condor.  Had he ever had the simplicity to imagine that a woman of Mrs. Condor’s stamp would constitute herself a safe-deposit vault for hoarding secrets without exacting a price?  Well, perhaps he had expected to pay, but a little less publicly.  He had not looked to have the lady in question ring every coin audibly in full view and hearing of the entire market-place, and yet, if his experience had stood him in good stead, he must have known that this was precisely what she would do.  Stillman’s hidden gratitude, his private beneficences, did not serve her purpose, but the spectacle of him in the role of her debtor was a sight that went a long way to establishing a social credit impoverished by no end of false ventures.

Her command for him to take her to luncheon—­and it had been a command, however suavely she had managed to veil it—­bore also the stamp of urgency.  Usually she was content to lay all her positive requests to the charge of mere caprice, but on this occasion she took the trouble to intimate that there was a particular reason for wanting to see him.  It did not take him long to conclude that this particular reason had to do with Claire Robson.  That was why he yielded with a better grace than he had been giving to his troublesome friend’s disagreeable pressure.