“Kind of hog got anything to do with the taste?” asked Mason in all sincerity.  He was learning New York ways—­a new lesson each day, and intended to keep on, but not by keeping his mouth shut.

“Nothing whatever,” replied Hodges.  “They must never be allowed to bite them, of course.  You can wound a truffle as you can everything else.”

Mason looked off into space and the Colonel bent his ear.  Purviance’s diet had been largely drawn from his beloved Chesapeake, and “dug-up dead things”—­as he called the subject under discussion—­didn’t interest him.  He wanted to laugh—­came near it—­then he suddenly remembered how important a man Hodges might be and how necessary it was to give him air space in which to float his pet balloons and so keep him well satisfied with himself.

Mason, the Chicago man, had no such scruples.  He had twice as much money as Hodges, four times his digestion and ten times his commonsense.

“Send that dish back here, Breen,” Mason cried out in a clear voice—­so loud that Parkins, winged by the shot, retraced his steps.  “I want to see what Mr. Hodges is talking about.  Never saw a truffle that I know of.”  Here he turned the bits of raw rubber over with his fork.  “No.  Take it away.  Guess I’ll pass.  Hog saw it first; he can have it.”

Hodges’s face flushed, then he joined in the laugh.  The Chicago man was too valuable a would-be subscriber to quarrel with.  And, then, how impossible to expect a person brought up as Mason had been to understand the ordinary refinements of civilization.

“Rough diamond, Mason—­Good fellow.  Backbone of our country,” Hodges whispered to the Colonel, who was sore from the strain of repressed hilarity.  “A little coarse now and then—­but that comes of his early life, no doubt.”

Hodges waited his chance and again launched out; this time it was upon the various kinds of wines his cellar contained—­their cost—­ who had approved of them—­how impossible it was to duplicate some of them, especially some Johannesburg of ’74.

“Forty-two dollars a bottle—­not pressed in the ordinary way—­just the weight of the grapes in the basket in which they are gathered in the vineyard, and what naturally drips through is caught and put aside,” etc.

Breen winced.  First his truffles were criticised, and now his pet Johannesburg that Parkins was pouring into special glasses—­cooled to an exact temperature—­part of a case, he explained to Nixon, who sat on his right, that Count Mosenheim had sent to a friend here.  Something must be done to head Hodges off or there was no telling what might happen.  The Madeira was the thing.  He knew that was all right, for Purviance had found it in Baltimore—­part of a private cellar belonging some time in the past to either the Swan or Thomas families—­he could not remember which.