You want to get this fellow, who is neither
partner nor clerk, down here to talk business with him.
Well, now, you just talk business with him at the office."
The only social attention which Lapham succeeded in
offering Corey was to take him in his buggy, now and then,
for a spin out over the Mill-dam. He kept the mare in town,
and on a pleasant afternoon he liked to knock off early,
as he phrased it, and let the mare out a little.
Corey understood something about horses, though in a
passionless way, and he would have preferred to talk
business when obliged to talk horse. But he deferred to his
business superior with the sense of discipline which is
innate in the apparently insubordinate American nature.
If Corey could hardly have helped feeling the social
difference between Lapham and himself, in his presence he
silenced his traditions, and showed him all the respect
that he could have exacted from any of his clerks.
He talked horse with him, and when the Colonel wished he
talked house. Besides himself and his paint Lapham had
not many other topics; and if he had a choice between the
mare and the edifice on the water side of Beacon Street,
it was just now the latter. Sometimes, in driving in or out,
he stopped at the house, and made Corey his guest there,
if he might not at Nantasket; and one day it happened
that the young man met Irene there again.
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