The messenger, Julius Farrow, a bookkeeper, could answer no questions.  He knew only that Harvey D. had been very polite about it, and if Dave couldn’t find it convenient to-day he was to say when he might find it convenient to have a conference.  Dave felt relieved at hearing the word “conference.”  A mere summons to a strange place like a bank might be sinister, but a polite invitation to a conference at his convenience was different.  He put down his half-filled stick.  He had been at work on the Advance locals for the Wednesday paper, two and three-line items to tell of the trivial going and coming of nobodies which he was wont to set up with an accompaniment of satirical comment on small-town activities.  He had broken off in the midst of perpetuating in brevier type the circumstance that Adelia May Simsbury was home from normal school over Sunday to visit her parents, Rufus G. Simsbury and wife, north of town.

“I’ll go with you,” Dave told Julius Farrow.  “I can always find a little time for bankers.  I never kept one waiting yet, and I won’t begin now.  Ask any of em—­they’ll tell you I come when called.”

Julius looked puzzled, but offered no comment.  Dave doffed his green eye-shade and his apron of striped ticking, hastily dampened his hands in the tin washbasin and wiped them on a roller towel rich in historic associations.  He spent a moment upon his hair before a small, wavy, and diagonally cracked mirror, put on his blue cutaway coat and his derby hat and called, “Back in five minutes, Sam,” casually into the open door of another room, where Sam Pickering wrestled with a fearless editorial on the need of better street lighting.  It seemed to Dave that five minutes would amply suffice for any talk a banker might be needing with him.

In the back office of the First National Bank he was presently ensconced at a shining table of mahogany across from Harvey D. Whipple and his father—­the dubious trousers and worn shoes hidden beneath the table so that visibly he was all but well dressed.

“Smoke?” asked Gideon, and proffered an open cigar case.

“Thanks,” said Dave, “I’ll smoke it later.”

He placed a cigar in the upper left-hand pocket of the eminently plaid waistcoat from whence already protruded the handle of a toothbrush and a fountain pen.  He preened his moustache, smoothed his hair, waited.

Harvey D. coughed in a promising manner, set a wire basket of papers square with the corners of the table, and began.

“We have been thinking, Mr. Cowan, my father and I—­you see—­”

He talked on, but without appeasing Dave’s curiosity.  Something about Dave’s having boys, he gathered, and about the Whipples not having them; but it occurred to Dave again and again as Harvey wandered on that this was a discrepancy not in his power to correct.  Once a monstrous suspicion startled him—­this conference, so called, was shaping into nothing less than a proposal on behalf of the person he had so carelessly saluted the day before.  It was terrifying; he grew cold with pure fright.  But that was like some women—­once show them a little attention, they expected everything!