Well, he would be on guard that Old Jimmie didn’t put anything over on your obliging servant, Barney Palmer!

This was the era of legal prohibition, but thus far Barney had not been severely discommoded by the action of the representatives of America’s free institutions in Washington, for Barney knew his New York.  In an ex-saloon on Sixth Avenue, which nominally sold only the soft drinks permitted by the wise men of the Capital, Barney leaned at his ease upon the bar and remarked:  “Give me some of the real stuff, Tim, and forget that eye-dropper the boss bought you last week.”  Barney had a drink of the real stuff, and then another drink, in the measuring of neither of which had an eye-dropper been involved.

After that, much heartened, he put two dollars upon the bar and went his way.  His course took the dapper Barney into three of the gayest restaurants in the Times Square section; and in these Barney paused long enough to speak to a few after-theater supper-parties.  For this was the hour when Barney paid his social calls; he was very strict with himself upon this point.  Barney was really by way of being a rising figure in this particular circle of New York society composed of people who had or believed they had an interest in the theater, of expensively gowned women the foreground of whose lives was most attractive, but whose background was perhaps wisely kept out of the picture, and of moneyed young men who gloried in the idea that they were living the life.  These social calls from gay table to gay table, at all of which Barney was welcome—­for here Barney showed only his most attractive surfaces, his most brilliant facets—­were in truth a very important part of Barney’s business.

A little later, alone at a corner table in a quieter restaurant, Barney was eating his supper and making an inventory of his prospects.  He was in a very exultant mood.  The whiskey he had drunk had given broad wings to his self-satisfaction; and what he was now sipping from his tea-cup—­it was not tea, for Barney was on the proper terms with his waiter here—­this draught from his tea-cup tipped these broad wings at a yet more soaring angle.

Yes, he had certainly put it over so far.  And Maggie would certainly prove a winner.  Those fair women he had chatted with as he had moved from table to table, why, they’d be less than dirt compared to Maggie when Maggie was rigged out and readied up and the stage was set.  And it had been he, Barney Palmer, who had been the first to discover Maggie’s latent possibilities!

He had an eye beyond mere surfaces, had Barney.  He had used women in the past in putting over many of his more private transactions (and had done so partly for the reason that using women so was eminently “safe”—­this despite his violent outburst of sneering disdain at Larry when the latter had spoken of safety):  some of them professional sharpers, some unscrupulous actresses of the lower flight—­such women as he had just chatted with in the restaurants where he had made his brief visits.  But such, he now recognized, were rather blasees, rather too obvious.  They were the blown rose.  But Maggie was fresh, and once she was properly broken in, she would be his perfect instrument.  Yes, perfect!