re 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 in at Frescobaldi's
and ordered more dishes and more of them. He impressed the Italian as
an American original of a novel kind; and when he asked Fulkerson how
Dryfoos had made his money, and learned that it was primarily in natural
gas, he made note of some of his eccentric tastes as peculiarities that
were to be caressed in any future natural-gas millionaire who might
fall into his hands. He did not begrudge the time he had to give
in explaining to Dryfoos the relation of the differ