He stood up and strolled into the other room. Hollingsworth,
lounging away from the window, had joined himself to a languidly
convivial group of men to whom, in phrases as halting as though
they struggled to define an ultimate idea, he was expounding the
cursed nuisance of living in a hole with such a damned climate
that one had to get out of it by February, with the contingent
difficulty of there being no place to take one's yacht to in
winter but that other played-out hole, the Riviera. From the
outskirts of this group Glennard wandered to another, where a
voice as different as possible from Hollingsworth's colorless
organ dominated another circle of languid listeners.

"Come and hear Dinslow talk about his patent: admission free," one
of the men sang out in a tone of mock resignation.

Dinslow turned to Glennard the confident pugnacity of his smile.
"Give it another six months and it'll be talking about itself," he
declared. "It's pretty nearly articulate now."

"Can it say papa?" someone else inquired.

Dinslow's smile broadened. "You'll be deuced glad to say papa to
IT a year from now," he retorted. "It'll be able to support even
you in affluence. Look here, now, just let me explain to you--"

Glennard moved away impatiently. The men at the club--all but
those who were "in it"--were proverbially "tired" of Dinslow's
patent, and none more so than Glennard, whose knowledge of its
merits made it loom large in the depressing catalogue of lost