clean. She found plenty of comfort in this certainty of his character; many and many a time when with men, or when listening to Clara's calm notations on life, Marjorie thought, "That may be true; but there's Billy. And if I know one like him there must be lots and lots of others." But she never mentioned him to Clara; what was the use?
She did guardedly mention Gregg; and Rinderfeld; and even her father, but without letting Clara suspect—she thought—that, in her pre-Clearedge Street days, she had been more than an acquaintance of Charles Hale, who was much in the newspapers now.
For the new president of Tri-Lake Products was doing big and spectacular things; he bought out a competitor whose mills had been shut down for six months and restarted with full force, working full time. Marjorie missed being "in" that triumph; she knew just how he had worked it, or would have worked it, if the home in Evanston had remained as it was. She with her mother, or alone, had been hostess of many big business parties—dinners, sometimes, when you had Martin order lots of heavy, meaty, men's food, with strong cheeses and stronger cigars and champagne, and big, ponderous unimportant men strutted in and overate, and little, insignificant looking, awfully important ones fiddled with the silver mostly; suppers, sometimes at midnight, when half a dozen men came back from the golf club; and then breakfast for them all the next morning at the house. And their talk; and father's talk. Oh, Marjorie missed that; and she tried to figure, from the accounts in the newspaper, just how he had worked this merger. At his clubs, mostly, she thought; but he had one dinner at home; and she wondered what
