From another member of the world which had inherited or captured Sherry’s as part of the spoils of life, the question might have been offensive.  But Banneker genuinely liked Cressey.

“Not exactly,” he returned lightly.  “Do I give that unfortunate impression?”

“You give very much the impression of owning old Jules—­or he does—­and having a proprietary share in the new head waiter.  Are you here much?”

“Monday evenings, only.”

“This is a good cocktail,” observed Cressey, savoring it expertly.  “Better than they serve to me.  And, say, Banneker, did Mertoun make you that outfit?”

“Yes.”

“Then I quit him,” declared the gilded youth.

“Why?  Isn’t it all right?”

“All right!  Dammit, it’s a better job than ever I got out of him,” returned his companion indignantly.  “Some change from the catalogue suit you sported when you landed here!  You know how to wear ’em; I’ve got to say that for you....  I’ve got to get back.  When’ll you dine with me?  I want to hear all about it.”

“Any Monday,” answered Banneker.

Cressey returned to his waiting potage, and was immediately bombarded with queries, mainly from the girl on his left.

“Who’s the wonderful-looking foreigner?”

“He isn’t a foreigner.  At least not very much.”

“He looks like a North Italian princeling I used to know,” said one of the women.  “One of that warm-complexioned out-of-door type, that preserves the Roman mould.  Isn’t he an Italian?”

“He’s an American.  I ran across him out in the desert country.”

“Hence that burned-in brown.  What was he doing out there?”

Cressey hesitated.  Innocent of any taint of snobbery himself, he yet did not know whether Banneker would care to have his humble position tacked onto the tails of that work of art, his new coat.  “He was in the railroad business,” he returned cautiously.  “His name is Banneker.”

“I’ve been seeing him for months,” remarked another of the company.  “He’s always alone and always at that table.  Nobody knows him.  He’s a mystery.”

“He’s a beauty,” said Cressey’s left-hand neighbor.

Miss Esther Forbes had been quite openly staring, with her large, gray, and childlike eyes, at Banneker, eating his oysters in peaceful unconsciousness of being made a subject for discussion.  Miss Forbes was a Greuze portrait come to life and adjusted to the extremes of fashion.  Behind an expression of the sweetest candor and wistfulness, as behind a safe bulwark, she preserved an effrontery which balked at no defiance of conventions in public, though essentially she was quite sufficiently discreet for self-preservation.  Also she had a keen little brain, a reckless but good-humored heart and a memory retentive of important trifles.

“In the West, Bertie?” she inquired of Cressey.  “You were in that big wreck there, weren’t you?”