, 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 ordering a dinner as did his master; and when Van Bibber
was too tired to make out the menu, Walters would look over the card
himself and order the proper wines and side dishes; and with such a
carelessly severe air and in such a masterly manner did he discharge
this high function that the waiters looked upon him with much respect.

But respect even from your equals and the satisfaction of having your
fellow-servants mistake you for a member of the Few Hundred are not
enough. Walters wanted more. He wanted the further satisfaction of
enjoying the delicious dishes he had ordered; of sitting as a coequal
with the people for whom he had kept a place; of completing the
deception he practised only up to the point where it became most
interesting.

It certainly was trying to have to rise with a subservient and
unobtrusive bow and glide out unnoticed by the real guests when they
arrived; to have to relinquish the feast just when the feast should
begin. It would not be pleasant, certainly, to sit for an hour at a
big empty table, ordering dishes fit only for epicures, and then, just
as the waiters bore down with the Little Neck clams, so nicely iced
and so cool and bitter-looking, to have to rise and go out into the
street to a _table d'hote_ around the corner.

This was Walters's state of mind when Mr. Van Bibber told him for the
hundredth time to keep a table for him for three at Delmonico's.
Walters wrapped his severe figure in a frock-coat and