“Ah, how dye do, Conrad?  Brought our friend, Mr. Beaton, with me,” those within heard him say; and then, after a sound of putting off overcoats, they saw him fill the doorway, with his feet set square and his arms akimbo.

IX.

“Ah! hello! hello!” Fulkerson said, in recognition of the Marches.  “Regular gathering of the clans.  How are you, Mrs. Dryfoos?  How do you do, Mrs. Mandel, Miss Christine, Mela, Aunt Hitty, and all the folks?  How you wuz?” He shook hands gayly all round, and took a chair next the old lady, whose hand he kept in his own, and left Conrad to introduce Beaton.  But he would not let the shadow of Beaton’s solemnity fall upon the company.  He began to joke with Mrs. Dryfoos, and to match rheumatisms with her, and he included all the ladies in the range of appropriate pleasantries.  “I’ve brought Mr. Beaton along to-night, and I want you to make him feel at home, like you do me, Mrs. Dryfoos.  He hasn’t got any rheumatism to speak of; but his parents live in Syracuse, and he’s a kind of an orphan, and we’ve just adopted him down at the office.  When you going to bring the young ladies down there, Mrs. Mandel, for a champagne lunch?  I will have some hydro-Mela, and Christine it, heigh?  How’s that for a little starter?  We dropped in at your place a moment, Mrs. March, and gave the young folks a few pointers about their studies.  My goodness! it does me good to see a boy like that of yours; business, from the word go; and your girl just scoops my youthful affections.  She’s a beauty, and I guess she’s good, too.  Well, well, what a world it is!  Miss Christine, won’t you show Mr. Beaton that seal ring of yours?  He knows about such things, and I brought him here to see it as much as anything.  It’s an intaglio I brought from the other side,” he explained to Mrs. March, “and I guess you’ll like to look at it.  Tried to give it to the Dryfoos family, and when I couldn’t, I sold it to ’em.  Bound to see it on Miss Christine’s hand somehow!  Hold on!  Let him see it where it belongs, first!”

He arrested the girl in the motion she made to take off the ring, and let her have the pleasure of showing her hand to the company with the ring on it.  Then he left her to hear the painter’s words about it, which he continued to deliver dissyllabically as he stood with her under a gas-jet, twisting his elastic figure and bending his head over the ring.

“Well, Mely, child,” Fulkerson went on, with an open travesty of her mother’s habitual address, “and how are you getting along?  Mrs. Mandel hold you up to the proprieties pretty strictly?  Well, that’s right.  You know you’d be roaming all over the pasture if she didn’t.”

The girl gurgled out her pleasure in his funning, and everybody took him. on his own ground of privileged character.  He brought them all together in their friendliness for himself, and before the evening was over he had inspired Mrs. Mandel to have them served with coffee, and had made both the girls feel that they had figured brilliantly in society, and that two young men had been devoted to them.