Dryfoos necessarily depended upon him for advice concerning the scope and nature of the dinner, but he received the advice suspiciously, and contested points of obvious propriety with pertinacious stupidity.  Fulkerson said that when it came to the point he would rather have had the thing, as he called it, at Delmonico’s or some other restaurant; but when he found that Dryfoos’s pride was bound up in having it at his own house, he gave way to him.  Dryfoos also wanted his woman-cook to prepare the dinner, but Fulkerson persuaded him that this would not do; he must have it from a caterer.  Then Dryfoos wanted his maids to wait at table, but Fulkerson convinced him that this would be incongruous at a man’s dinner.  It was decided that the dinner should be sent in from Frescobaldi’s, and Dryfoos went with Fulkerson to discuss it with the caterer.  He insisted upon having everything explained to him, and the reason for having it, and not something else in its place; and he treated Fulkerson and Frescobaldi as if they were in league to impose upon him.  There were moments when Fulkerson saw the varnish of professional politeness cracking on the Neapolitan’s volcanic surface, and caught a glimpse of the lava fires of the cook’s nature beneath; he trembled for Dryfoos, who was walking rough-shod over him in the security of an American who had known how to make his money, and must know how to spend it; but he got him safely away at last, and gave Frescobaldi a wink of sympathy for his shrug of exhaustion as they turned to leave him.

It was at first a relief and then an anxiety with Fulkerson that Lindau did not come about after accepting the invitation to dinner, until he appeared at Dryfoos’s house, prompt to the hour.  There was, to be sure, nothing to bring him; but Fulkerson was uneasily aware that Dryfoos expected to meet him at the office, and perhaps receive some verbal acknowledgment of the honor done him.  Dryfoos, he could see, thought he was doing all his invited guests a favor; and while he stood in a certain awe of them as people of much greater social experience than himself, regarded them with a kind of contempt, as people who were going to have a better dinner at his house than they could ever afford to have at their own.  He had finally not spared expense upon it; after pushing Frescobaldi to the point of eruption with his misgivings and suspicions at the first interview, he had gone to him a second time alone, and told him not to let the money stand between him and anything he would like to do.  In the absence of Frescobaldi’s fellow-conspirator he restored himself in the caterer’s esteem by adding whatever he suggested; and Fulkerson, after trembling for the old man’s niggardliness, was now afraid of a fantastic profusion in the feast.  Dryfoos had reduced the scale of the banquet as regarded the number of guests, but a confusing remembrance of what Fulkerson had wished to do remained with him in part, and up to the day of the dinner he dropped