"'Noticed'?"

"Say, you may be a smart man, Rudolph Pelz--everybody tells me you are--but they should know once on the Picture Rialto how dumb as a father you are. 'Noticed?' he asks. All right then--if you need a brick house--noticed that David Feist hates your daughter and 'ain't got eyes for her and don't try every excuse to get invited here for sup--dinner."

"You mean, Rosie--"

"Of course I mean! It's pitiful how he follows her everywhere with his eyes. In the box last night at the opera you was too asleep to see it, but all evening Etta was nudging me how he nearly ate up our Bleema just with looks."

"You women with your nonsense!"

"I guess, Rudolph, it would be a bad thing. Our daughter and a young man smart enough to make himself from a celluloid collar-cutter to a millionaire five times over on a little thing like inventing a newfangled film-substance should tie up with the only child of Rudolph Pelz, the picture king."

"I give you my word, Rosie, such talk makes me sick."

"You'd hate it, wouldn't you? A prince like David Feist."

"People don't talk such things till they happen. If our daughter could have the King of England and didn't want him, I'd say she should not marry the King of England. I want my girl home by me yet, anyway, for many a long day. She should be playing with her dolls instead of her mother and aunt Etta filling her up with ideas. Don't think I'm so stuck, neither, on how she runs around with my film stars."

"Honest, Roody, the way you're so strict with that child it's a shame!

The girl has got to have her pleasure."

"Well, if she's got to have her pleasure, she should have it with young men like Feist and not with--"

"There! Didn't I tell you so? Didn't I?"

"Say, I don't deny if I got some day to have a son-in-law, my first choice for him would be Feist."

"Roody, the two estates together in one!"

"I'm surprised at you, Rosie--honest, I'm surprised. Such talk!"

Mrs. Pelz took a pinch of his each cheek, tiptoeing to kiss him squarely on the lips.

"Go get dressed," she said, "and I'll wait for you."

"Rosie Posy," he said, clucking into his cheek with his tongue and moving away through the pink-shaded twilight.

At the door to the whitely glittering bathroom she called to him again, softly; he turning.

"What'll you bet, Roody, that I get my biggest wish as soon as I got the gray roadster and the Belgian check?"

"Women's nonsense!" said Mr. Pelz, his voice suddenly lost in the violent plunge of water into porcelain.

In a drawing-room faithful to Dunlap Brothers' exorbitant interpretation of the Italian Renaissance, a veritable forest of wrought-iron candle-trees burned dimly into a scene of Pinturicchio table, tapestry-surmounted wedding-chest, brave and hideous with _pastiglia_ work, the inevitable camp-chair of Savonarola, an Umbrian-walnut chair with lyre-shaped front, bust of Dante Alighieri in Florentine cap and ear-muffs, a Sienese mirror of the soul, sixteenth-century suit of cap-a-pie armor on gold-and-black plinth, Venetian credence with wrought-iron locks. The voiceless and invoiced immobility of the museum here, as if only the red-plush railing, the cords from across chairs, and the "Do Not Sit" warnings to the footsore had been removed.

Against a chair cruel to the back with a carved coat of arms of the Lombardi family Mr. David Feist leaned lightly and wisely. If his correct-enough patent pumps ever so slightly escaped the floor, his span of shoulders left hardly an inch to be desired. There was a peninsula of rather too closely shaved but thick black hair jutted well down Mr.

Feist's brow, forming what might have been bald but were merely hairless inlets on either side. Behind _pince-nez_ his eyes sparkled in points not unlike the lenses themselves. Honed to a swift, aquiline boniness of profile which cut into the shadows, there was something swiftly vigorous about even his repose.

Incongruous enough on the Pinturicchio table, and as if she had dared to walk where mere moderns feared to tread, a polychrome framed picture of Miss Bleema Pelz, tulle-clouded, piquant profile flung charmingly to the northwest, and one bare shoulder prettily defiled with a long screw-curl, lit, as it were, into the careful gloom.

Deliberately in range of that photograph, and so beatific of gaze that it was as if his sense were soaked in its loveliness, Mr. Feist smiled, and, smiling, reddened. Enter then Mrs. Pelz, hitting softly into white taffetas beneath the black lace; Mr. Pelz, wide, white and boiled of shirt-front.

"Good evening, Mr. Feist! It's a shame the way we kept you waiting."

"Not at all, Mrs. Pelz--a pleasure. Hello! how's my friend, the picture king?"

"Rotten," said Mr. Pelz, amiably, shaking hands with a great riding-up of cuff, and seating himself astride a Florentine bench and the leather-embossed arms of the Strozzi family.

"Roody, what a way to sit!"

"'What a way to sit,' she tells me. I'd like to see a fellow sit any way in this room without making a monkey of himself. Am I right, Feist? The Eyetalians maybe didn't know no better, but I should have to suffer, too, when for four-seventy-nine I can buy myself at Tracy's the finest kind of a rocking-chair that fits me."

"Roody!"

"Say, Feist agrees with me; only, he don't know you well enough yet to let on. I notice that with all his Louis-this and Louis-that rooms in his own house, up in his own room it is a good old Uncle Sam's cot and a patent rocker."

"You've got a gorgeous room here just the same, Pelz."

"Gorgeous for a funeral."

"Every collector in the country knows that table. I had my eye on it for my music-room once myself when it was shown at Dunlap's."

"Dunlap's are a grand firm of decorators, Mr. Feist. I'm having them do Grismer, too."

"Well, Feist, how does it feel to have us for neighbors?"

"Immense, Pelz!"

"Like I said to my husband, between us the way the estates adjoin, we got a monopoly on Long Island--ain't it so?"

"And believe me, Mrs. Pelz, you'll never regret the buy. The finest pleasure my money brought me yet is that view of my little bedroom I took you up to, Pelz."

"Wonderful!"

"I've got an outlook there, Mrs. Pelz, is a paradise to see. You can have all my forty-two rooms and two garages if you'll leave me my little top room with its miles of beautiful greenness, and--and so--so much beauty that--that it gets you by the throat. I--don't express it the way I see it, but--"

"I should say so, Mr. Feist! Out of every one of our thirty-four rooms and eighteen baths you can see a regular oil-painting."

Mr. Pelz leaned over, tongue in cheek and, at the screwing noise again, poking Mr. Feist in the region of the fifth rib.

"She said to me up-stairs just now, Feist, 'Like we was used to it from home?' Eh? C-c-c-cluck! Eighteen baths a day! I know the time when one every Saturday night was stuck up."

"Roody, honest, you're awful!"

"Say, me and Feist speak the same language. We ain't entertaining a lot of motion-picture stars to-night."

"I want Mr. Feist to come over some night to sup--dinner when we have a few of them over. We're great friends, Mr. Feist, with Norma Beautiful and Allan Hunt and Lester Spencer and all that crowd. We entertain them a good deal. My daughter is quite chums with them all. Elsie Love sleeps here some nights. Honest, Mr. Feist, you never saw a more unassuming girl for her salary."

"Yes, especially is she unassuming when she spoils ninety feet of film yesterday in a row with Spencer over who should have one-half inch nearer to the center of the picture."