in our struggle with the mother-country, the trammels of tradition and precedent, and had settled down, a free nation, to the practice of the arts of peace; how the spirit of commercialism had stolen insidiously upon us, and the infernal impulse of competition had embroiled us in a perpetual warfare of interests, developing the worst passions of our nature, and teaching us to trick and betray and destroy one another in the strife for money, till now that impulse had exhausted itself, and we found competition gone and the whole economic problem in the hands of monopolies—­the Standard Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, the Rubber Trust, and what not.  And now what was the next thing?  Affairs could not remain as they were; it was impossible; and what was the next thing?

The company listened for the main part silently.  Dryfoos tried to grasp the idea of commercialism as the colonel seemed to hold it; he conceived of it as something like the dry-goods business on a vast scale, and he knew he had never been in that.  He did not like to hear competition called infernal; he had always supposed it was something sacred; but he approved of what Colonel Woodburn said of the Standard Oil Company; it was all true; the Standard Oil has squeezed Dryfoos once, and made him sell it a lot of oil-wells by putting down the price of oil so low in that region that he lost money on every barrel he pumped.

All the rest listened silently, except Lindau; at every point the colonel made against the present condition of things he said more and more fiercely, “You are righdt, you are righdt.”  His eyes glowed, his hand played with his knife-hilt.  When the colonel demanded, “And what is the next thing?” he threw himself forward, and repeated:  “Yes, sir!  What is the next thing?”

“Natural gas, by thunder!” shouted Fulkerson.

One of the waiters had profited by Lindau’s posture to lean over him and put down in the middle of the table a structure in white sugar.  It expressed Frescobaldi’s conception of a derrick, and a touch of nature had been added in the flame of brandy, which burned luridly up from a small pit in the centre of the base, and represented the gas in combustion as it issued from the ground.  Fulkerson burst into a roar of laughter with the words that recognized Frescobaldi’s personal tribute to Dryfoos.  Everybody rose and peered over at the thing, while he explained the work of sinking a gas-well, as he had already explained it to Frescobaldi.  In the midst of his lecture he caught sight of the caterer himself, where he stood in the pantry doorway, smiling with an artist’s anxiety for the effect of his masterpiece.

“Come in, come in, Frescobaldi!  We want to congratulate you,” Fulkerson called to him.  “Here, gentlemen!  Here’s Frescobaldi’s health.”

They all drank; and Frescobaldi, smiling brilliantly and rubbing his hands as he bowed right and left, permitted himself to say to Dryfoos:  “You are please; no?  You like?”