best advice to you is
to stay home and tend to your knitting.

"You and Bea can go play round New York all you like. Let the New York
crowd come to see you and be entertained, they'll be glad to eat your
dinners and drink your wine if they don't have to pay for it. We can
get away with Hanover but we'd be handcuffed if we tried New York.
When I made a hundred thousand dollars I was tempted to try New York
instead of staying here--to make Bea the most gorgeous girl in the
metropolis. But horse sense made me pass it by and stay on my own home
diamond. So I've made a good many more hundreds of thousands and,
what's to the point, I've kept 'em!"

Here the conversation drifted into more technical business detail with
Steve expostulating and contradicting and Constantine frowning at his
son-in-law through his bushy eyebrows, admiring him prodigiously all
the while.

* * * * *

Beatrice had telephoned Steve's office, to be told that her husband
was at lunch and would not be in until two o'clock.

"Have him come to our apartment," she left word, "just as soon as he
can. I am just leaving Mr. Constantine's house to go there."

After which she began telling Aunt Belle good-bye.

"Dear me, Bea, what a wonderful hat!" her aunt sighed. "I never saw
anything more becoming."

It took ten minutes to admire Bea's costume of rosewood crape and the
jewelled-cap effect, somewhat like Juliet's, caught over each ear by a
pink satin rose.

"Steve doesn't appreciate anything in the way of costumes," she
complained. "He just says: 'Yes, deary, I love you, and anything you
wear suits me.' Quite discouraging and so different from the other
boys."

"I'd call it very comfortable," suggested her aunt.

"I suppose so--but comfortable things are often tiresome. It is
tiresome, too, to see too much of the same person. I was really bored
to death in the Yosemite--Steve is so primitive--he wanted to stay
there for days and days."

"Steve comes from primitive people," her aunt said, soberly, not
realizing her own humour.

"Don't mention it. Didn't he force me to go to Virginia City, the most
terrible little ghost world of tumbledown shacks and funny one-eyed,
one-suspendered men, and old women smoking pipes and wearing blue
sunbonnets! He was actually sentimental and enthusiastic about it all,
trying to hunt up old cronies of his grandfather's--I was cross as
could be until we came back to Reno.