the midst of that hostile luxury, and he was glad to see Dryfoos make up to him and begin to talk with him, as if he wished to show him particular respect, though it might have been because he was less afraid of him than of the others.  He heard Lindau saying, “Boat, the name is Choarman?” and Dryfoos beginning to explain his Pennsylvania Dutch origin, and he suffered himself, with a sigh of relief, to fall into talk with Kendricks, who was always pleasant; he was willing to talk about something besides himself, and had no opinions that he was not ready to hold in abeyance for the time being out of kindness to others.  In that group of impassioned individualities, March felt him a refuge and comfort—­with his harmless dilettante intention of some day writing a novel, and his belief that he was meantime collecting material for it.

Fulkerson, while breaking the ice for the whole company, was mainly engaged in keeping Colonel Woodburn thawed out.  He took Kendricks away from March and presented him to the colonel as a person who, like himself, was looking into social conditions; he put one hand on Kendricks’s shoulder, and one on the colonel’s, and made some flattering joke, apparently at the expense of the young fellow, and then left them.  March heard Kendricks protest in vain, and the colonel say, gravely:  “I do not wonder, sir, that these things interest you.  They constitute a problem which society must solve or which will dissolve society,” and he knew from that formula, which the colonel had, once used with him, that he was laying out a road for the exhibition of the hobby’s paces later.

Fulkerson came back to March, who had turned toward Conrad Dryfoos, and said, “If we don’t get this thing going pretty soon, it ’ll be the death of me,” and just then Frescobaldi’s butler came in and announced to Dryfoos that dinner was served.  The old man looked toward Fulkerson with a troubled glance, as if he did not know what to do; he made a gesture to touch Lindau’s elbow.  Fulkerson called out, “Here’s Colonel Woodburn, Mr. Dryfoos,” as if Dryfoos were looking for him; and he set the example of what he was to do by taking Lindau’s arm himself.  “Mr. Lindau is going to sit at my end of the table, alongside of March.  Stand not upon the order of your going, gentlemen, but fall in at once.”  He contrived to get Dryfoos and the colonel before him, and he let March follow with Kendricks.  Conrad came last with Beaton, who had been turning over the music at the piano, and chafing inwardly at the whole affair.  At the table Colonel Woodburn was placed on Dryfoos’s right, and March on his left.  March sat on Fulkerson’s right, with Lindau next him; and the young men occupied the other seats.

“Put you next to March, Mr. Lindau,” said Fulkerson, “so you can begin to put Apollinaris in his champagne-glass at the right moment; you know his little weakness of old; sorry to say it’s grown on him.”

March laughed with kindly acquiescence in Fulkerson’s wish to start the gayety, and Lindau patted him on the shoulder.  “I know hiss veakness.  If he liges a class of vine, it iss begause his loaf ingludes efen hiss enemy, as Shakespeare galled it.”