over New York from you and the run-down Dutch. The Anglo-Saxon stock in America that sticks to its stock is almost through. It's going down and going under or it's gone up and"
"And what?" she urged him, when he stopped.
"Diminishes," said Rinderfeld quietly, choosing, as he always did, the least offensive word and adding, as he liked to, the flourish, "Here about us are those who are taking over American civilization."
They had not been in this restaurant then but in another very like it; and Clara and Sam Troufrie had not been with them, as now. They had been alone, Marjorie Hale and Felix Rinderfeld, on the occasion of his second call upon her after she had taken a room at Jen Cordeen's. That second visit was of his own initiative but the first had been of hers; for Rinderfeld had possessed the restraint and perception to wait until she sent for him. Of course, he knew she was bound to summon him, sooner or later, since he composed the sole connection she retained with the world which had been hers.
He had been wholly careful to preserve the impersonal in that first business interview since she had left her home; and in the second, when he sought her with a most plausible business excuse, he had let himself relax from the formal less than she.
For Marjorie was hungry for personal details, for the tiny, tremendously significant trifles about her father who was doing big things again and whom Rinderfeld was seeing and she never; and when she had learned all she could of her personal matter, she questioned him about more general affairs; and Rinderfeld replied to her, luring her on. On into the most subtle and subversive activity of mankind,—the use
