“I see,” said Cheyne, with the brilliant and perfect comprehension of one born into and bred up to city pride. “We’ll stay over for Memorial Day, and get off in the afternoon.”
“Guess I’ll go down to Disko’s and make him bring his crowd up before they sail. I’ll have to stand with them, of course.”
“Oh, that’s it, is it,” said Cheyne. “I’m only a poor summer boarder, and you’re—”
“A Banker—full-blooded Banker,” Harvey called back as he boarded a trolley, and Cheyne went on with his blissful dreams for the future.
Disko had no use for public functions where appeals were made for charity, but Harvey pleaded that the glory of the day would be lost, so far as he was concerned, if the We’re Here s absented themselves. Then Disko made conditions. He had heard—it was astonishing how all the world knew all the world’s business along the waterfront—he had heard that a “Philadelphia actress-woman” was going to take part in the exercises; and he mistrusted that she would deliver “Skipper Ireson’s Ride.” Personally, he had as little use for actresses as for summer boarders; but justice was justice, and though he himself (here Dan giggled) had once slipped up on a matter of judgment, this thing must not be. So Harvey came back to East Gloucester, and spent half a day explaining to an amused actress with a royal reputation on two seaboards the inwardness of the mistake she contemplated; and she admitted that it was justice, even as Disko had said.
Cheyne knew by old experience what would happen; but anything of the nature of a public palaver was meat and drink to the man’s soul. He saw the trolleys hurrying west, in the hot, hazy morning, full of women in light summer dresses, and white-faced straw-hatted men fresh from Boston desks; the stack of bicycles outside the post office; the come-and-go of busy officials, greeting one another; the slow flick and swash of