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No. It was none of it real.

If he was exhilarated that he had been kept for dinner, he was ecstatic when the Senator said, “Would you care to come for dinner again day after tomorrow? Good. I’ll send Martens for you at seven-thirty. Don’t dress. ”

In a dream phantasmagoria he started home, driven by Martens, the Senator’s chauffeur-butler, with unnumbered things that had puzzled him in writing his book made clear.

When he arrived at the Sky Peaks camp, the guests were still sitting about the dull campfire.

“My!” said Miss Selma Swanson, teacher of history. “Mr. Iddle says you’ve spent the whole evening with Senator Ryder. Mr. Iddle says he’s a grand person—used to be a great politician. ”

“Oh, he was kind enough to help me about some confused problems,” murmured Selig.

But as he went to bed—in a reformed corncrib—he exulted, “I bet I could become quite a good friend of the Senator! Wouldn’t that be wonderful!”

Lafayette Ryder, when his visitor—a man named Selig or Selim—was gone, sat at the long dining table with a cigarette and a distressingly empty cognac glass. He was meditating, “Nice eager young chap. Provincial. But mannerly. I wonder if there really are a few people who know that Lafe Ryder once existed?”

He rang, and the crisply coy Miss Tully, the nurse, waltzed into the dining room, bubbling, “So we’re all ready to go to bed now, Senator!”

“We are not! I didn’t ring for you; I rang for Martens. ”

“He’s driving your guest. ”

“Humph! Send in cook. I want some more brandy. ”

“Oh, now, Daddy Ryder! You aren’t going to be naughty, are you?”

“I am! And who the deuce ever told you to call me ‘Daddy’? Daddy!”

“You did. Last year. ”

“I don’t—this year. Bring me the brandy bottle. ”

“If I do, will you go to bed then?”

“I will not!”

“But the doctor—”

“The doctor is a misbegotten hound with a face like a fish. And other things. I feel cheerful tonight. I shall sit up late. Till All Hours. ”

They compromised on eleven-thirty instead of All Hours, and one glass of brandy instead of the bottle. But, vexed at having thus compromised—as so often, in ninety-odd years, he had been vexed at having compromised with Empires—the Senator was (said Miss Tully) very naughty in his bath.

“I swear,” said Miss Tully afterward, to Mrs. Tinkham, the secretary, “if he didn’t pay so well, I’d leave that horrid old man tomorrow. Just because he was a politician or something, once, to think he can sass a trained nurse!”

“You would not!” said Mrs. Tinkham. “But he IS naughty. ”

And they did not know that, supposedly safe in his four-poster bed, the old man was lying awake, smoking a cigarette and reflecting:

“The gods have always been much better to me than I have deserved. Just when I thought I was submerged in a flood of women and doctors, along comes a man for companion, a young man who seems to be a potential scholar, and who might preserve for the world what I tried to do. Oh, stop pitying yourself, Lafe Ryder! … I wish I could sleep. ”

Senator Ryder reflected, the next morning, that he had probably counted too much on young Selig. But when Selig came again for dinner, the Senator was gratified to see how quickly he was already fitting into a house probably more elaborate than any he had known. And quite easily he told of what the Senator accounted his uncivilized farm boyhood, his life in a state university.

“So much the better that he is nave, not one of these third-secretary cubs who think they’re cosmopolitan because they went to Groton,” considered the Senator. “I must do something for him. ”