Page:So Big (1924).djvu/300

 “I made it in eighty-six. That isn’t so bad for the Tippecanoe course.”

“ boxes are going pretty well but the Metropolitan grabs up all the big ones and the house wants names. Garden doesn’t draw the way she used to, even in Chicago. It’s the popular subscription that counts.”

“ grabbed the Century out of New York at two-forty-five and got back here in time to try out my new horse in the park. She’s a little nervous for city riding but we’re opening the house at Lake Forest next week”

“pretty good show but they don’t send the original companies here, that’s the trouble”

“ in London. It’s a neat shade of green, isn’t it? You can’t get ties like this over here, I don’t know why. Got a dozen last time I was over. Yeh, Plumbridge in Bond Street.”

Well, Dirk could talk like that easily enough. He listened quietly, nodded, smiled, agreed or disagreed. He looked about him carefully, appraisingly. Waist lines well kept in; carefully tailored clothes; shrewd wrinkles of experience radiating in fine sprays in the skin around the corners of their eyes. The president of an advertising firm lunching with a banker; a bond salesman talking to a rare book collector; a packer seated at a small table with Horatio Craft, the sculptor.

Two years and Dirk, too, had learned to “grab the Century” in order to save an hour or so of time