On a couch in the reception chamber Victor lay, with a dawning understanding in his heavy eyes and peace in his softened countenance.  Absalom was preparing a lounge for the transient master of Charleroi, who, to-morrow, would be again the clerk of a cotton-broker, but also—­

“To-morrow,” Grandemont was saying, as he stood by the couch of his guest, speaking the words with his face shining as must have shone the face of Elijah’s charioteer when he announced the glories of that heavenly journey—­“To-morrow I will take you to Her.”

XVIII

ON BEHALF OF THE MANAGEMENT

This is the story of the man manager, and how he held his own until the very last paragraph.

I had it from Sully Magoon, viva voce.  The words are indeed his; and if they do not constitute truthful fiction my memory should be taxed with the blame.

It is not deemed amiss to point out, in the beginning, the stress that is laid upon the masculinity of the manager.  For, according to Sully, the term when applied to the feminine division of mankind has precisely an opposite meaning.  The woman manager (he says) economizes, saves, oppresses her household with bargains and contrivances, and looks sourly upon any pence that are cast to the fiddler for even a single jig-step on life’s arid march.  Wherefore her men-folk call her blessed, and praise her; and then sneak out the backdoor to see the Gilhooly Sisters do a buck-and-wing dance.

Now, the man manager (I still quote Sully) is a Caesar without a Brutus.  He is an autocrat without responsibility, a player who imperils no stake of his own.  His office is to enact, to reverberate, to boom, to expand, to out-coruscate—­profitably, if he can.  Bill-paying and growing gray hairs over results belong to his principals.  It is his to guide the risk, to be the Apotheosis of Front, the three-tailed Bashaw of Bluff, the Essential Oil of Razzle-Dazzle.

We sat at luncheon, and Sully Magoon told me.  I asked for particulars.

“My old friend Denver Galloway was a born manager,” said Sully.  He first saw the light of day in New York at three years of age.  He was born in Pittsburg, but his parents moved East the third summer afterward.

“When Denver grew up, he went into the managing business.  At the age of eight he managed a news-stand for the Dago that owned it.  After that he was manager at different times of a skating-rink, a livery-stable, a policy game, a restaurant, a dancing academy, a walking match, a burlesque company, a dry-goods store, a dozen hotels and summer resorts, an insurance company, and a district leader’s campaign.  That campaign, when Coughlin was elected on the East Side, gave Denver a boost.  It got him a job as manager of a Broadway hotel, and for a while he managed Senator O’Grady’s campaign in the nineteenth.