hair in such a way as to conceal his baldness.

And when a smirking, slavish youth with red checks and
awkward gestures turned up in Van Bibber's livery, his friends
were naturally surprised, and asked how he had come to lose
Walters. Van Bibber could not say exactly, at least he could
not rightly tell whether he had dismissed Walters or Walters
had dismissed himself. The facts of the unfortunate
separation were like this:

Van Bibber gave a great many dinners during the course of
the season at Delmonico's, dinners hardly formal enough to
require a private room, and yet too important to allow of his
running the risk of keeping his guests standing in the hall
waiting for a vacant table. So he conceived the idea of
sending Walters over about half-past six to keep a table for
him. As everybody knows, you can hold a table yourself at
Delmonico's for any length of time until the other guests
arrive, but the rule is very strict about servants. Because,
as the head waiter will tell you, if servants were allowed to
reserve a table during the big rush at seven o'clock, why not
messenger boys? And it would certainly never do to have half
a dozen large tables securely held by minute messengers while
the hungry and impatient waited their turn at the door.

But Walters looked as much like a gentleman as did many
of the diners; and when he seated himself at the largest table
and told the waiter to serve for a party of eight or ten, he
did it with such an air that the head waiter came over himself
and took the orders. Walters knew quite as much about