erican 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 different wines to the different dishes; Dryfoos was apt to
substitute a costlier wine where he could for a cheaper one, and he gave
Frescobaldi carte blanche for the decoration of the table with pieces of
artistic confectionery. Among these the caterer designed one for a
surprise to his patron and a delicate recognit