"No. I may ask your advice some day. Will you give it when I do?"
"With pleasure," said Plank, so warmly disinterested, so plainly proud and eager to do a service that Siward, surprised and touched, found no word to utter.
Plank rose. Siward attempted to stand up, but had trouble with his crutches.
"Please don't try," said Plank, coming over and offering his hand. "May I stop in again soon? Oh, you are off to the country for a month or two? I see. … You don't look very well. I hope it will benefit you. Awfully glad to have seen you. I--I hope you won't forget me--entirely."
"I am the man people are forgetting," returned Siward, "not you. It was very nice of you to come. You are one of very few who remember me at all."
"I have very few people to remember," said Plank; "and if I had as many as I could desire I should remember you first."
Here he became very much embarrassed. Siward offered his hand again. Plank shook it awkwardly, and went away on tiptoe down the stairs which creaked decorously under his weight.
And that ended the first interview between Plank and Siward in the first days of the latter's decline.
The months that passed during Siward's absence from the city began to prove rather eventful for Plank. He was finally elected a member of the Patroons Club, without serious opposition; he had dined twice with the Kemp Ferralls; he and Major Belwether were seen together at the Caithness dance, and in the Caithness box at the opera. Once a respectable newspaper reported him at Tuxedo for the week's end; his name, linked with the clergy, frequently occupied such space under the column headed "Ecclesiastical News" as was devoted to the progress of the new chapel, and many old ladies began to become familiar with his name.
At the right moment the Mortimers featured him between two fashionable bishops at a dinner. Mrs. Vendenning, who adored bishops, immediately remembered him among those asked to her famous annual bal poudré; a celebrated yacht club admitted him to membership; a whole shoal of excellent minor clubs which really needed new members followed suit, and even the rock-ribbed Lenox, wearied of its own time-honoured immobility, displayed the preliminary fidgets which boded well for the stolid candidate. The Mountain was preparing to take the first stiff step toward Mohammed. It was the prophet's cue to sit tight and yawn occasionally.
Meanwhile he didn't want to; he was becoming anxious to do things for himself, which Leila Mortimer, of course, would not permit. It was difficult for him to understand that any effort of his own would probably be disastrous; that progress could come only through his own receptive passivity; that nothing was demanded, nothing required, nothing permitted from him as yet, save a capacity for assimilating such opportunities as sections of the social system condescended to offer.