But the younger Lambert was yet to be reckoned with.

“It is a hard and fast arrangement so far as I am concerned,” he said quietly now.  “Dad can fire me.  I shan’t fire myself.”

Mr. Cressy made a savage lunge at a fly that had ventured to light on the sugar bowl, not knowing it was for the time being Millionaire Cressy’s sugar bowl.  He hated being balked, even temporarily.  He had supposed the hardest sledding would be over when he had won the father’s consent.  He had authentic inside information that the son had stakes other than financial.  He counted on youth’s imperious urge to happiness.  The lad had done without Carlotta for two months now.  It had seemed probable he would be more amenable to reason in August than he had been in June.  But it did not look like it just now.

“You are a darn fool, my young man,” he gnarled.

“Very likely,” said Phil Lambert, with the same quietness which had marked his father’s speech earlier in the day.  “If you had a son, Mr. Cressy, wouldn’t you want him to be the same kind of a darn fool?  Would you expect him to take French leave the first time somebody offered him more money?”

Harrison Cressy snorted, beckoned to the waiter his face purple with rage.  Why in blankety blank blank et cetera, et cetera, didn’t he bring the fish?  Did he think they were there for the season?  Philip did not know he had probed an old wound.  The one great disappointment of Harrison Cressy’s career was the fact that he had no son, or had had one for such a brief space of hours that he scarcely counted except as a pathetic might-have-been And even as Phil had said, so he would have wanted his son to behave.  The boy was a man, every inch of him, just such a man as Harrison Gressy had coveted for his own.

“Hang the money part.” he snapped back at Phil, after the interlude with the harrassed waiter.  “Let’s drop it.”

“With all my heart,” agreed Phil.  “Considering the money part hanged what is left to the offer?  Carlotta?”

Mr. Cressy dropped his fork with a resounding clatter to the floor and swore muttered monotonous oaths at the waiter for not being instantaneously on the spot to replace the implement.

“Young man,” he said to Phil.  “You are too devilish smart.  Carlotta—­is why I am here.”

“So I imagined.  Did she send you?”

“Great Scott, no!  My life wouldn’t be worth a brass nickel if she knew I was here.”

“I am glad she didn’t.  I wouldn’t like Carlotta to think I could be—­bribed.”

“She didn’t.  Carlotta has perfectly clear impressions as to where you stand.  She gives you entire credit for being the blind, stubborn, pigheaded jack-ass that you are.”

Phil grinned faintly at this accumulation of epithets, but his blue eyes had no mirth in them.  The interview was beginning to be something of a strain.  He wished it were over.

“That’s good,” he said.  “Apparently we all know where we all stand.  I have no illusions about Carlotta’s view-point either.  There is no reason I should have.  I got it first hand.”