This hint or slur at his mother’s veracity made Coverly feel sad and homesick and annoyed with his cousin’s rattling conversational style and the pretentions of simplicity and homeliness in her parlor and he might have said something about this, but the butler refilled his glass again and when he took another gulp of gin the oscillations in his larynx began all over again and he couldn’t speak. Then Mr. Brewer came in—he was much shorter than his wife—a jolly pink-faced man with a quietness that might have been developed to complement the noise she made. “So you’re a Wapshot,” he said to Coverly when they shook hands. “Well, as Mildred may have told you, I’m very much interested in the family. Most of these things come from the homestead in St. Botolphs. That cradle rocked four generations of the Wapshot family. It was made by the village undertaker. That tulip-wood table was made from a tree that stood on the lawn at West Farm. Lafayette rode under this tree in 1815. The portrait over the mantelpiece is of Benjamin Wapshot. This chair belonged to Lorenzo Wapshot. He used it during his two terms in the state legislature.” With this Mr. Brewer sat down in Lorenzo’s chair and at the feel of this relic beneath him a smile of such sensual gratification spread over his face that he might have been squeezed between two pretty women on a sofa. “Coverly has the nose,” Cousin Mildred said. “I’ve told him that I could have picked him out in a crowd. I mean I would have known that he was a Wapshot. It will be so nice having him work for you. I mean it will be so nice having a Wapshot in the firm.”
It was quite some time before Mr. Brewer replied to this but he smiled broadly at Coverly all during the pause and so it was not an anxious silence and during it Coverly decided that he liked Mr. Brewer tremendously. “Of course, you’ll have to start at the bottom,” Mr. Brewer said.
“Oh, yes sir,” Coverly exclaimed; his father’s son. “I’ll do anything sir. I’m willing to do anything.”
“Well, I wouldn’t expect you to do anything,” Mr. Brewer said, tempering Coverly’s earnestness, “but I think we might work out some kind of apprenticeship, so to speak—some arrangement whereby you could decide if you liked the carpet business and the carpet business could decide if it liked you. I think we can work out something. You’ll have to go through personnel research. We do this with everyone. Grafley and Harmer do this for us and I’ll make you an appointment for tomorrow. If they’re done with you on Monday you can report to my office then and go to work.”
Coverly was not familiar with a correct dinner service, but by watching Cousin Mildred he saw how to serve himself from the dishes that the waitress passed and he only got into trouble when he was about to drop his dessert into his finger bowl, but the waitress, by smiling and signaling, got him to move his finger bowl and everything went off all right. When dinner was finished they went down on the elevator and were driven through the rain to the opera.
It is perhaps in the size of things that we are most often disappointed and it may be because the mind itself is such a huge and labyrinthine chamber that the Pantheon and the Acropolis turn out to be smaller than we had expected. At any rate, Coverly, who expected to be overwhelmed by the opera house, found it splendid but cozy. Their seats were in the orchestra, well forward. Coverly had no libretto and he could not understand what was going on. Now and then the plot would seem to be revealed to him but he was always mistaken and in the end more confused than ever. He fell asleep twice. When the opera ended he said good night and thank you to Cousin Mildred and her husband in the lobby, feeling that it would be to his disadvantage to have them drive him back to the slum where he lived.
