"But you were right—absolutely!—that's just what I want to say! I 'm finding out more and more every day how true that word was. This whole Movement now—what is it? What's it for? Blest if I know! The last time we talked about it, you may remember, I took the ground that the Movement—or what I supposed was the Movement, that week—suffered by confusing itself with another propaganda it hadn't a thing under the sun to do with. But—"
"No—what propaganda? I don't remember."
"Oh!—Personal Liberty!... The Cult of the Ego, perhaps you might call it. But, of course, for all I know," said the light masterful Charles, "that is the Movement, and always has been. Only last week I lighted on a new formula—sort of a definition—to-morrow I'll probably discard it for another. It's very unsettling—for my writing, you know. By the way—can't you help me out a little? What would be your best definition of the Unrest—for literary purposes?"
But Mary, with a carefulness not usual to her, eluded controversy, merely saying it all depended on how you looked at it, or words to that effect. And then she gave him a small thrill by neatly taking his bait.
"But what is your new definition?"
"Oh, that! Definition's too grand a word, of course. I merely wondered if what is called the Woman's Movement was anything more than a projection—don't you know?—of an everlasting struggle going on between two irreconcilable elements in every woman's nature."
The car rolled in silence.
"There's a pessimistic definition for you! For I suppose," said the friend of women, and could no longer keep the seriousness out of his voice, "it must be true that every struggle implies the defeat—of something.... Doesn't it? I suppose we can really never get away from the sad discovery of childhood, that we can't eat our cake and have it too."
"That's interesting! But I don't believe I understand you altogether. What do you symbolize as the cake?"
She, the strong and successful, had turned on him her level arched gaze, intent with its habitual interrogativeness. It was instantly clear that, though she might be struck with his few remarks, she was far indeed from being struck personally. And her sudden characteristic look was to him like a hand held up, the banner of her independence flung out—and just in time, too.
Charles laughed mirthlessly. He was aware of the lameness of his reply.
"Exactly!—what? It all depends on how you look at it, as you just said. And I seem unable to look at it the same way two days running.... Number 6 Olive Street, Eustace."
Mary's response escaped him.
He sat staring through the glass, at the passing sights, a curious sense of anti-climax within, a strange flat feeling of failure. He was like a boy who, having run valiantly at a jump, tamely subsides and ducks under the string. What then? Had he really been about to court a new humiliation bylecturingMary Wing? Telling himself that he came generously to warn her about Donald, had he actually been thinking that he would discuss the personal losses involved in Leaving Home?—perhaps by some frankness even bridge the gap in the old friendship? It really did seem that some such thoughts must have lurked in his mind, judging by this sense within him now.
Then, out of blankness and frustration, the young man felt slowly rising a deep exasperation, a mighty grievance. So he shook himself at once, donned his mask quickly while yet he could, and said in quite a natural-seeming voice:—
"But I'm afraid I've bored you horribly with these purely literary troubles. And, by the way,—speaking of realism versus romance just now,—how are Donald and Miss Carson getting on these days?"
She appeared a little surprised at the change of topic, but replied easily: "Oh!—very well, indeed, I believe. They're together somewhere nearly every evening.—But why—"
"Really! That relieves me—knowing your serious interest in that affair. I was beginning to fear Donald might be wandering a little in his affections."
"Wandering? No—how do you mean?"
"Well, he has seemed quite attentive to your pretty cousin of late, don't you think?"
Then the Secretary turned her head again, sharply. And it hardly improved Charles Garrott's frame of mind to perceive that, of all he had said in the strangely talkative drive, this alone had really touched her: this, which affected her personal purposes, her Own ambitions.
"Angela? Why, not that I know of! I didn't know he'd seen her at all—except one casual meeting, perhaps!"
"I've happened to see them driving together from tune to time, as I plod about on my rounds. But no doubt it's all quite casual, as you say, since you've heard nothing about it."
"You have? But please tell me!—where have you seen them together—and when?"
He cited particulars from his collection, damaging ones, though perhaps not so damaging as he could have made them had not self-interest restrained. Still, something in him was not displeased as he saw his old friend's concern steadily deepening.
"I'm surprised, and—frankly, I 'm sorry," she said slowly, at the end. "Of course Angela's a dear girl, very sweet and attractive, but—I shouldn't like Donald to see too much of her—in view of my other hopes! I've had good reason to think that he's really interested in Helen, and she in him.—Well!" she went on, after a small pause, "this seems to require some diplomatic management. Donald has engagements for every evening this week—but—"
"It's in the daytime that he meets Miss Flower. At least, I don't think she takes the Fordette out at night."
Beside him on the padded seat, Mary sat silent, a little pucker between the dark brows which set such a question-mark in her colorless face. Considering her formidable strength, it was odd how all but ethereal, how sincerely girlish, she could look at times.
"Well, Donald's going to New York on Friday," she said, thoughtfully. "He's had a fine offer from Blake & Steinert—to go into the firm, had you heard?—so fine that I think he'd have taken it, and thrown over Wyoming, if I had let him! He'll be gone nearly a week. Then, about the time he comes back, I've arranged to have him invited to Creekside, the Kingsleys' place at Hatton, for a week-end party. Helen's to be there—I've really been hoping great things of that. Meantime," she rounded up efficiently, "there are the afternoons. Perhaps I could start him to playing golf, or something of that sort.... I suppose, of course, you're too busy to—"
"I?" said the young man, hastily. "Oh, I fear I can offer nothing to rival Miss Angela's attractions just now."
"Does it look as serious as that? Well," she said, with a sort of determined friendliness, "all the more reason that I should like to have your help."
He hardly repressed a sardonic laugh. "Are you asking me to helpyou?"
"What's so extraordinary about that?"
"Not a thing, of course. I wasn't certain I'd understood you, that was all."
But it appeared that the idea of helping this young woman had ceased to have the smallest pulling power now. Rather, there was bitterness in the thought that she still seemed ready to use him when she could.
He said, with savage urbanity: "Perhaps you might get Donald a motor-cycle, and encourage him to practice up as a Speed Demon."
The remark was received in entire silence. It was probably true that she literally did not understand him. All the same, his displeasure grew.
"But really," he continued sweetly, "if these two young people are so strongly attracted to each other—love at first sight, who knows?—really, is it judicious to interfere? Don't you believe in elective affinities at all?"
"As a matter of fact, you know, Donald was greatly attracted to Helen, at first sight. And as for Angela, I'm certain—"
"You see," he interrupted, stung beyond all calculations, "my personal idea is that Miss Angela would probably make him a more suitable wife."
That unwisdom made everything worse at once; for Mary, after one glance at him and a stare out the window, said in a changed, "diplomatic" tone: "Well, I mustn't let you misunderstand me, at any rate. You know, I've agreed with you perfectly, all along, that she's thoroughly charming.... And, by the way, she likesyouso much, too!"
Charles froze instantly.
"In fact, she thinks you're much more attractive than Donald—or did, just a little while ago. I have her word for it. So if she's seeing a good deal of Donald just now, I don't believe it's from affinity, necessarily!"
"Indeed?"
"She was inquiring about you the last time I saw her—saying that she never saw you now, asking if you ever spoke of her to me, and so on. I told her, of course, you did, and repeated some of the compliments you paid her—"
Again he interrupted her, now with some slipping of his mask. It was true, to be just, that Mary Wing knew nothing of his long struggles to elude the Fordette. Nevertheless, her patent desire to hand him back to it, merely by way of furthering a little her plans for Donald, seemed somehow the last straw. A friendly reward for magnanimity this! And it may be some touch of purely male chagrin enhanced the philosophic anger, that any woman should be thus eager to pass on him, Charles, to another.
"I believe my remark was that I considered Miss Angela a suitable wife for Donald. So far as I am aware, I do not come into the conversation at all. If your suggestion is that I should step in and take her off his hands—in order to help you—may I beg you to put such an idea from your head, once and for all?"
It was clear that he astonished her: made her indignant as well. Her scrutiny of him was direct and sharp: but she did not speak at once, as if weighing her words or firmly counting ten, and when she did speak, her manner bore evidences of strong control.
"You are rather puzzling to-day. I should like to know what you have on your mind. 'Take her off his hands!' Do you really think that's quite the way to speak of a girl who—"
"I don't, indeed. But the idea was your own, was it not?"
"Mine!—why, how can you! I only—"
"Then why not let things take their natural course, as I suggested?"
On that, turning her head away from him, she said quietly, too quietly in fact: "I'm afraid you wouldn't understand now, if I were to tell you."
That seemed to bring the conversation to a naturalimpasse. And then—as if no touch were to be wanting from this embittering hour—at just this instant, as Eustace slowed down to make his curve into Olive Street, the two estranged friends in the old lady's limousine found themselves looking together into the eyes of their common and particular enemy, Mary's former principal at the High School.
Mr. Mysinger, her conqueror and his own, no less, was approaching down the sunny promenade. He gave the two in the car just one full surveying stare; then casually moved his gaze a degree or two away. But, as he dropped back out of the range of vision, Charles could have sworn he saw a smile springing under the glossy mustache he had once pledged himself to pull off.
But this time, he felt no such bitter hostility toward the victorious foe as had shaken him on that other remembered occasion. There was a transient flicker of the Old Blood toward his temples, a brief iciness within, and that was all. Recalling the childish folly of the setting-up exercises, he experienced a cold mirth: "Why, of course, she'd say she'd have licked Mysinger herself, if she'd considered it worth the trouble!" And, at his old friend's side, Charles had the most disloyal thought of her that had ever knocked at his mind. Was Mysinger, perhaps, so entirely to blame for the ancient friction? Had he, Charles, been principal of the High School, did he think he would have found Mary so acceptable, so perfect, a subordinate?...
Assisting her to alight at her door, the young man inquired politely if she had yet found a tenant for her flat. Mary replied, quite distantly, he thought, that the John Wensons were going to take it. His comment was that old Jack should make her a fine tenant. He courteously sent his regards to her mother; he amiably wished her a good-afternoon.
And then he shut the limousine door on himself so hard that the glass shook.
Finding himself unable to reflect with pleasure or pride upon this interview, Charles resolved, within the hour, not to reflect upon it at all. For the fourth time—or was it the fourteenth?—he determined to think of Egoettes no more. At least, he had given his warning, unthanked, and that ended it. He might rest upon the ground that the match would really be a very suitable thing; or, conversely, he might argue that Donald was just amusing himself a little with Angela, at odd times, while at heart perfectly true to Helen, etc. But chiefly he stood upon the warning which made all this Mary Wing's concern henceforward, and no longer his. And, bent upon bringing his last relation and duty in the case to a clear, honorable conclusion, Charles sallied from the Studio next morning with the new "Marna" tucked under his arm.
But there seemed to hang a curse over everything connected with this unhappy book. Because he had brought it with him to-day, the azure heavens became overcast at noon; at two o'clock, it was drizzling dismally; and all that afternoon, and all the next day, the cold rain poured in torrents. To call in such home-keeping weather would be a wanton provocation: Charles hung off, yet again. The third day proved well worth waiting for, a brilliant, blue, and tingling day, gloriously inviting to all owners of vehicles. And now a new plague befell. When Charles emerged from Miss Grace's on this day, his face firmly set for his duty, the Big Six wasn't there.
The discovery was most disconcerting. The young man stood irresolute on the Choristers' steps, "Marna" clutched in his hands, gazing up and down the street.
Unfortunately, Eustace's habits had not been kept completely virtuous by his light duties with his mistress's tutor. The grinning black rascal had got himself pleasantly illuminated the first day, and had remained in that state with considerable consistency ever since. However, being kept excellently tipped, he had never failed to meet an appointment before; and Charles, eyeing the spot where Jehu should have been, but wasn't, was most unpleasantly struck with his own sense of helplessness ensuing. It really appeared that soft custom had made him as dependent on the limousine as if he lacked the means of locomoting for himself.
He scanned the horizon. Many vehicles rolled up and down Washington Street, but his own swift chariot was nowhere among them.
Then, while he irritably hesitated between telephoning to the garage, on the off chance that Eustace might be there, and tamely abandoning the enterprise once more, a third alternative, ingenious in its way, quite unexpectedly offered itself. Down the street came jogging a carriage for hire—empty. Providence seemed to be directing straight at him, Charles. And, by chance, he knew this old carriage well; Walter Taylor's carriage, it was; many and many a time had it driven him forth to parties when he was young and gay.
On the first quick impulse, Charles went springing down the Choristers' steps.
"Walter!... Here, you old rascal! Where're you going?"
"At libbuty, suh!" cried Walter Taylor, drawing rein with alacrity. "Whar mout you wish to be druv, Mist' Garrott?"
"Well!—Perhaps I'll let you—"
The young man hesitated, fractionally, struck with the rattletrap's supreme lack of dignity. Then, with decision, he plucked open the weather-beaten door.
"One seven East Center. And look sharp now!" he ordered, stepping in—"I'm in a hurry. Mind you don't stop for anything!"
"Yassuh! Sutney, suh!" said Walter Taylor, with great enthusiasm, and gave his old nag a prodigious wallop.
So it fell out that, for his first call at the Flowers' since the bridge-party—his party-call, his book-call, and his call about the Kiss—Charles Garrott fared forth in a closed livery hack.
Inside the hack, Charles laughed briefly; and then at once began to react. In the fine afternoon, numbers of people were abroad. Strangers seemed to look with surprise at the apparently able-bodied young man who liked thus to trot around in a hack; chance acquaintances were seen to smile in passing; more than one called out derisive remarks. Charles himself questioned whether his employment of the hack was quite reasonable.... Seemed inconsistent till you stopped to think. Inasmuch as he was going straight to see Angela, why, it might be asked, all this elaborate precaution in advance? Well—there was really no inconsistency there; no, none at all. He wasnotgoing to see Angela; he was only going to pay The Call, while she was out in her Fordette—a totally different matter. But this raised fresh questions of consistency: how was he going to hold his position that Angela was just the wife for Donald, if he himself would only go to see her in a hack?... Well, the answer to that was simple enough, too. Donald was a marrying man, while he, Charles (though probably still liked best) emphatically was not. Moreover, Donald was a primitive male, while he, Charles, was a modern.... Or, no, perhaps he wasn't a modern, exactly—but—yes, hewasa modern, a true one, while others he could name were only self-centered extremists....
At Gresham Street, the hack turned south, at Center it turned back west. Walter Taylor, up aloft, began to look for his street-number. And then, while Charles still argued uneasily about the spiritual differences between Donald and himself, his eye all at once fell on Donald in the flesh, close by—striding up Center Street homeward on his way from the office he left so early now.
The sight of the youth at this moment was unwelcome to Charles. Instinctively, he sat far back in the hack. But Donald, unluckily turning at the sound of wheels, had caught sight of him; and he stopped stock-still on the sidewalk at once, staring with unaffected interest.
"Well, I'll be darned!" he said, as the carriage came up with him. "Whither away in the sea-going, old top?"
Unwillingly appearing at the window, Charles said: "Well, Donald.... Just driving around."
"Driving!—Thought you must be going to a funeral, at least," said Donald, stepping along to keep up. "Here! Stop the blamed thing! I want to look you over."
"You don' want me to stop, does you, Mist' Garrott?" bawled down Walter Taylor from the box.
"No, I told you! Go on!"
Walter cut his nag a mighty crack, and with the same movement drew rein sharply.
"Here's yo' number, suh!" he cackled, with great merriment. "One seven, like you said! Yassuh!"
So the hack halted, and the fare reluctantly discharged himself. His friend, having come up, halted, too, a few feet away; it was noted that his gibing expression had suddenly altered. And then Charles understood instantly that this fool's destination was no other than his own.
"Oho!" said Donald, slowly and suspiciously. "So this is where you were driving around to?"
Controlling an immense complication of sensations, Charles said coldly: "You mean you're going to—the Flowers', too?"
"You've guessed it!" retorted the engineer, with a slight touch of consciousness. And he added, assuming an indifferent air: "Just got to stop by and leave a book Miss Flower lent me."
And then, for the first time, Charles noticed the volume in a gaudy wrapper protruding beneath Donald's sturdy arm. The coincidence was remarkable, to say the least of it. It was also exceedingly annoying.
"Time, too," quoth the primitive male. "I've had it since before I went to Wyoming."
On Angela's sidewalk, the two young men stood gazing hard at each other. Whatever the argument in the case, it was surely Charles's higher nature that spoke at last, icily but firmly:—
"I am going here to return a book, and also to pay a call—on the family. If you wish, I will return your book for you."
"Couldn't think of troubling you, Charlie, old top."
"As you like, of course—"
"But as I'm going in, anyway, why need you stop at all? Glad to take charge of your book for you. Save you a little hack-fare."
To this, Charles disdained reply. So the two members of the coterie, with their books to return under their arms, stepped up the bricked walkway side by side.
Charles rang the Flowers' loud little bell. Having done so, he turned on the shabby verandah, with the intention of looking Donald hostilely up and down. But he found that Donald was already looking him up and down, in the most hostile manner conceivable. Then the youth's dullness, his grotesque conception of a male rivalry here, his impervious blind asininity,—all this acting upon the original concern about the Call, produced a sudden infuriation. Speech flowed from Charles:—
"Of all the laughing jackasses that ever broke loose from a zoo, I do think you take the cake, Manford. How you keep from falling off bridges, or butting out the pan where your brain ought to be on stone-copings, passes all understanding. If I didn't have you to look at, I wouldn't believe it possible that an ordinary well-meaning chucklehead could deteriorate so horribly, just in a week or two."
Donald seemed slightly nonplussed by this attack. All that he could muster in reply was some very poor childish stuff, introduced by shakings of his head and "significant" tappings of his forehead.
"So that's why they sent him around here in a closed carriage—oho! Old Doc Flower's an alienist—forgot that! H'm! Funny how it runs in the family. First old Blenso, now poor Charlie-boy ..."
Then a servant opened the door, and relieved the high tension instantly by saying, in reply to two simultaneous questions, that Miss Flower was out.
Donald looked slightly crestfallen. Charles's look was the opposite. The youth's presence here had strongly suggested that Angela was known to be in, despite the fine weather. When the Flowers' servant—answering Donald's "Oh, she's out, is she?"—said further that Miss Angela had gone driving with a genaman, his relief rose to genuine thanksgiving. And then Donald cleared the air completely by cavalierly handing in his book, with only his card for acknowledgment, and clattering away down the steps. Evidently, he sought a little amusement here, and nothing more.
Charles himself hesitated on the veranda. The thing was over and done with. The Call was formally and honorably paid. Perhaps he only wanted to do something different from Donald; perhaps he thought to mark signally his revised good opinion of Angela; or perhaps mere revulsion of feeling swung him into exuberant excesses. At any rate, in the very act of extending his book, he recalled a long-forgotten promise, and said suddenly, but tentatively:—
"And Dr. Flower? I suppose he's out, too?"
"Him? Naws', he's in," said the slatternly and ill-favored woman.
"What!—he is? Are you sure?"
"Ef yo' want to see him, walk in."
"Ah—well, I'll just stop and see him for a few moments. That is,ifhe happens to be at leisure."
So the hack waited in front of the Flowers', and Charles stepped (for the first time on his own motion) over the threshold of Angela's Home.
He felt that this was a superfluous proceeding; it turned out considerably worse. Having entered the Home, he found himself abruptly plunged into the middle of it, as it were. In fact, the impromptu extension of the Call to Dr. Flower, besides everything else that could be said against it, proved as inopportune as could well have been imagined.
Thecontretempsindicated was due to the servant (Luemma, in short), who apparently did not believe in announcing visitors, or perhaps had never heard of the civil custom. She merely stood by, in a disapproving, suspicious sort of way, while the caller deposited his book on the hatstand beside Donald's, and removed his overcoat and gloves. And then she said, with a manner no whit better than her appearance:—
"Walk this way."
Charles, necessarily assuming that this was the rule of the house, walked that way.
The hall of the Home was narrow and dark, the pervading atmosphere noted as somewhat cheerless. It was not lighted and decked for festivity now, as on the famous night of the bridge-party: parlor and dingy little dining-room, glimpsed in passing, wore (to the author's sensitive eye) a depressing air, vaguely suggestive of failure, incompetence and the like. But that, of course, is the front that poverty so commonly wears: all the more reason that a hard-worked Temporary Spinster, or vicarious Home-Maker, should wish to get out sometimes, and go and meet her friends....
However, Charles also was conscious of a wish to get out. Why was he doing this, exactly? Really, now, what was the sense of it?
The black worthy was leading him toward a shut door in the dusk beyond the dining-room: the office, clearly, of that patientless provider, Angela's father. Now the young man was aware of voices behind that door, or rather of a voice. It was a woman's voice, pitched in rather a complaining key, and for the first second Charles thought, with a start, that it was Angela's. It wasn't, of course; but his steps instinctively slackened.
"Ah—the Doctor seems to be engaged—after all," he threw out, in lowered tones. "Perhaps I'd better come another day."
"Naws', he ain't engaged. Just him and Miz' Flower talkin'."
Charles, truth to tell, was scarcely reassured by that assurance: he did not like to run in on a strange couple this way, in particular when the lady was speaking in that tone. But his sour guide had not paused. And now there came a different voice through the thin door: a man's voice, faintly humorous, faintly sarcastic, and considerably weary. It was recognizably the voice of the esteemed Doctor, and it said, with fatal distinctness:—
"Is it possible you forget, madam, that you're speaking to your husband and the father of your children?"
If the feet of the reluctant caller had lagged before, they now stopped short. One of his overminds perceived instantly that the strange words he had had no business to hear possessed a sort of distorted familiarity, like a horrid parody of a sentiment known and established; but as to that, there was not time to speculate now. What was only too plain was that something like a domestic scene was afoot in the office of the home, making the intrusion of a stranger peculiarly inapropos.
"Don't!—I'll not stop now!" he murmured hastily and sharply. "Just take these cards here, and—"
But the maladroit blackamoor was already opening the door; and the young man's last stand against the Call was put down with a brief and surly:—
"Genaman to see Doctor. Walk in."
That settled the matter, beyond any undoing. Charles Garrott was a caller now, whether or no. With an embarrassment such as none of his many calculations about this hour had anticipated, he stepped blundering in upon Angela's unwitting parents.
Dr. Flower's small office was dark; its light came only through a single window from a narrow air-well. Hence, the forms of the lady and gentleman in it were at first but dimly apprehended. Having turned in their seats at the sound which disturbed their privacy, they seemed to be peering together, in silent inquiry, at the intruder. It was the intruder's move, obviously; and, being in for it, he did his hasty best to pluck a hearty calling manner over his decided malease.
"Oh!—good-afternoon, Dr. Flower! It's Garrott, Charles Garrott—perhaps you may remember—"
Now the dim forms were rising together, the tall Doctor's with a jerk:—
"Ah, yes! Howdo, Mr. Garrott! Quite—"
"I hope I'm not interrupting! I stopped to return some books, and—ah—finding that Miss Angela was out, I thought I'd take the opportunity—"
"Quite so—very kind! Come in! But I'd better make a light? Take seat, sir. Mrs. Flower?"
The Doctor's manner, of course, was natively too queer to betray anything, even astonishment at the Call. But it was not observed that Angela's mother bore any of the marks of a lady surprised in the middle of a "scene," and this was a relief, unquestionably; the parents didn't know him for an eavesdropper, at any rate. Agreeably accepting his introduction of himself, Mrs. Flower was bestowing upon him a dim but comforting smile, and a limp hand to shake.
"I feel that I already know you, Mr. Garrott. I've so often heard my daughter speak of you," she said, in the slightly plaintive voice he had heard through the door. "She'll be so sorry to miss you...."
The hearty Charles spoke his little mendacity.
"But a friend of hers from Mitchellton is here to-day to see her—Daniel Jenney—and Angela has just taken him out for a little drive in her car, to see the town. I feel sure she'll be in soon, though."
Mr. Jenney's presence in the city was the best news heard by Charles in many a day. All in all, things weren't going off so badly. And, if he knew Angela in the least, she would not be in soon, either; he had thought of all that on the verandah.
Then the Doctor's match caught the gas with a faintpop, and the little room filled with a high white light. In the sudden brightness, the caller's eye noted two unrelated matters almost together. One was merely an ash-tray upon the mantel. The other was Mrs. Flower herself, and her unexpected resemblance to her pretty young daughter. Line for line, the two faces were different enough, no doubt, and this one was no longer young. But to a stranger's eye, the general likeness was rather remarkable; Charles was much struck with it.
"Sit down, sir," said the Doctor, and contributed his match to the ash-tray.
"Ah, thank you."
But of course he could not sit down while Angela's mother remained standing and conversing with him; and she did so stand and converse a moment or so, rather idly, seemingly uncertain whether she intended to stay or go, and trying to make up her mind. Once or twice she glanced at her husband undecidedly, as if he might have something to do with the matter; and no wonder. But her final verdict was that she was to go; and Charles was rather glad that it worked out this way, though why he hardly knew.
Mrs. Flower's decisive remark was that she must get on with her household duties. She gave Charles her limp hand again, again mentioned her daughter's distress, if she missed him; she bestowed upon him another pretty and somewhat significant smile; and then faded out of the Call, leaving behind a vague impression of feminine inadequacy and a button missing from her black waist.
So the young man was left with the worthy Doctor, who could speak so sarcastically to a defenseless woman, his wife. And for a space he found the tête-à-tête heavy going, indeed, and was more oppressed than ever with the essential meaninglessness of it all.
Angela's father did not look like a brute, but only dryer, queerer, shabbier, than before. He jerked his neck more, looked more unrelated to his environment. He was very civil, but he cocked his eye too much toward the ceiling, felt too little responsibility as to keeping a conversation going. Charles's efforts (hearty enough, despite the counter-feelings going on within him) seemed to bound off dead from that juiceless, withdrawn manner. Having refused a cigar (there was a little talk about smoking, but he couldn't keep it going), he proposed for discussion the Doctor's son Wallie, his education, abilities as a chemist, skill as a lamp-repairer, etc. The topic promised well, and did well for a couple of minutes, but petered out mysteriously and beyond resurrection. The Doctor's work out at the Medical School yielded almost nothing; the weather enjoyed but a brief and fitful run. Presently, Charles found himself fairly driven to Mary Wing, and her imminent departure to lead her own life; and this subject won a real success, though not of a sort he could take much satisfaction in. It quickly developed that Angela's parent held ante-bellum views on Woman, which he put forward with some dry zest, in the strange backhanded fashion noted by Charles in their previous meeting. After a very few exchanges, the old eccentric was delivering himself of paragraphs like this:—
"Ah, you throw out that suggestion? An interesting idea!—quite so!" (Charles had thrown out no suggestion of any sort.) "Your observation is that the Lord has formed woman specifically for the needs of family and the home—quite so!—and that efforts to change her destiny seem to result in constitutional perversion? Well, sir, I dare say the physicians would support your contention there, too. Who knows?"
Even "Marna," even Mary Wing, had never made Charles so conservative as this. Oddly enough, he found the Doctor's criticisms unwelcome; it was his turn to let a subject die from malnutrition. In the pause, he considered whether he had not called long enough now. About to rise, he chanced to note a worn volume of Henderson's "Stonewall Jackson" lying open on the table, and asked, with little hope, if the Doctor had read it. The old codger replied: "I am reading it now for the seventh time, sir." And to the young man's agreeable surprise, he at once uncocked his eye from the ceiling (where he seemed to have meant to leave it permanently), and began to talk along almost like a regular person.
During the remainder of the Call, conversation flowed very satisfactorily. It appeared that the War was one of this old codger's subjects, even as Woman was Charles's; and he talked well, too, now that he cared to, criticizing strategy as one having authority, revealing, behind that spare, intensely conservative manner, flashes of broad outlook and incisive speech which might have helped to explain why the Medical School had been glad to draw this man from Mitchellton to its staff. But the truth was that Charles Garrott heard scarcely a word of this excellent discourse. Once he had got Angela's father fairly going, he became captured and fascinated by a totally independent line of thought.
In short, the young man's gaze had returned to almost the first thing he had definitely noticed in the Home, to wit, the ash-tray on the Doctor's mantel.
The ash-tray was really a large saucer, or small plate, and the intriguing and really exciting thing about it was that it contained the remains of scarcely less than a dozen cigars. Just before he made the lucky remark about Henderson's "Life," the caller had inadvertently discovered two more cigar-ends, poised perilously on the mantel's edge; this it was that had started him reacting yet again. For, considering that the Doctor was out a large part of the day, lecturing, it appeared incredible that he could have achieved such astonishing results since morning. Rather, the mantel had the air of having stood undisturbed for some little time....
"If those men," he was saying, "had but shot another way, that night at Chancellorsville—"
"Ah, sir! the vast 'ifs' of history. And none bigger than that, it may be. Yet, as I say ..."
From the large heaped saucer, with its ring of spilled ashes, the detective eye flitted over the room, briefly, somewhat guiltily, yet uncontrollably. It received an impression of dust on the table, dust on the bookshelves, disorder pervasively, and a waste-basket brimful of trash. Finally, the eye rested anew on the Doctor himself, with his frayed collar and joyless mien. And all the time, under the mask of the caller, a question was irresistibly rising and thrusting itself upon the attention of the authority: What housekeeper had charge of this untidy little room, what home-maker was in the business of supplying beauty and charm to this jaded gentleman?
Unaware that he was being thought of in these terms, Angela's father reverted austerely to the Seven Days' fighting around Richmond....
The scientific inquiry had a perfectly proper answer, of course. In the truest sense, Mrs. Flower was the housekeeper in question; that faded belle, with the button off her waist, owed the beauty and charm due in this quarter. Not for nothing did she have that distinctly inefficient voice. And the moment Charles thought of that voice, his mind, with a sort of jump, made a link, and he understood at once why the Doctor's strange speech, eavesdropped by him outside the door, had seemed to have the quality of a parody. Of course! This dry husband, with the sick-man's face, had merely been giving back, in a masculinized version, a reminder not infrequently heard on the lips of womanly women, when married. Before he had invented that ironic retort, how often had Angela's father heard it said:I'm your wife, and the mother of your children....
"And what," the civil caller said, "do you think of Mary Johnston's picture of Jackson? I assume, of course, you're familiar with—"
"A brilliant achievement, sir. Indeed, astonishing—for a woman," said the conservative Doctor, jerking his neck; and resumed.
But the young authority found his reactions oddly and increasingly disturbing, and shortly rose to go. He had become certain, abruptly, that he had party-called long enough.
His eccentric host, who had appeared so dryly indifferent to his coming, seemed, on the whole, to regret his departure. And Charles, perceiving this, found himself feeling rather sorry for him. But he showed his sympathies, not by offering to stay longer or to come again, but by inviting Angela's father to lunch with him at Berringer's, one day very soon at his convenience.
"I feel that we should further the acquaintance," he said, as they shook hands, "because of—ah—my long friendship for your—that is, for your wife's cousin."
And then he had a new surprise; for, though the Doctor's lips twitched a little at his correction, showing that he was not altogether devoid of humor, it was with instant seriousness that he said:—
"I do insist upon the distinction, you allege? Well, I'm free to say to you, sir, that I have but scant sympathy with these fantastic modern notions. If all women did as my wife's young cousin does, what, pray, would become of the Home?"
"Ah, what?" said Charles.
And as he thought of Mary Wing's charming and beautifully kept sitting-room, he seemed to feel his head going round. Surely, he had never before seen conservatism so magnificent as this.
"Meanwhile, come in again, sir, when you find time. I have few callers, and have appreciated your visit—"
"Yes!—thank you!"
"My daughter will be sorry—"
And then, as the Doctor opened the door, and his lusterless eye looked out, he added with an approach to grave pleasure in his voice:—
"Ah, here is Angela now—just in time."
The caller's eye went slipping down the hall; and so it was. In the light of the open front door, her rural swain behind her, the young home-maker stood by the hatstand, examining the two returned books she had just found there. What chance had brought her back thus early, cutting off his retreat? Had she passed and seen his hack standing there, and wondered?
But, curiously, Charles's bachelor shrinking from this re-meeting seemed suddenly to have vanished. All his determined championship of the Type, dating back to the Redmantle Club, all his personal sense of honorable obligation, had mysteriously thinned to nothing in half an hour in Dr. Flower's office. In some way that defied analysis, the interior of the Home seemed to have wiped out Angela's girlish claim, the ash-tray had overcome the Kiss. And Charles, bidding her father farewell, went walking down the narrow hall with a tread firm as a soldier's.
Angela had turned at the sound of voices; she stood gazing somewhat uncertainly into the dimness (for she was a little short-sighted without the opera-glasses, and perhaps this was only a patient). The instant of recognition of her friend was marked with an exclamation, almost a cry, of pleasure; and she started toward him with the happiest surprised welcome.
The re-meeting was effected by the hatstand, where Charles had stood on the day he had borrowed the book he now came to return. Water had flowed under London Bridge since then. Mr. Jenney, owner of the celebrated ring, was presented. He was a long-legged, gangling, curly-headed youth, with a face that was beautiful in its way, no less; and it must have been a frank face, too, since Charles, the observer, immediately had the fellow's whole secret. Here was Mr. Jenney's fair ideal, his high star and lady of dreams; and his full reward for his pure devotion was to be kept hanging on, a masculine anchor to windward—just in case, as they say. Still, he might prove thedeus ex machinaof the issue yet.
At the moment, however, little was seen of Mr. Jenney, since, almost in the first breath, his star said: "Oh, Dan, father's in now, and he'll wantsoto see you!"—and Mr. Jenney straightway withdrew obediently. One gathered that obedience was his fatal quality.
Thus the unheroic Charles confronted his Temporary Spinster at last, in her dark home-hall. And she, not guessing the new philosophic resistance within him, said, with the gayest confident air, and no little archness, too:—
"Well, Mr. Garrott!... Did you decide to pay your party-call?"
Charles smiled.
"I've been promising myself to come in for some time," he said pleasantly. "I had several excellent excuses, you see. For one thing, there was your book, which I've appropriated all this time—"
"Oh, that! I just saw it there—and thought I must have missed you! That would have been too mean, after all this time!" She glanced toward the hatstand, adding: "And—Mr. Manford gave you that other one to bring back, I suppose?"
"No—ah—we came together, but, of course, he left when he found that you were out. I wanted especially to pay my respects to your father, so—"
"I'm awfully glad he kept you for me.... How are you now? You don't know how I've missed you, since you had to stop walking entirely!"
"I've been extremely well, thank you. Or—at least—I've been pretty well—"
"Oh, I know you haven't been well!—you just try to make light of it! Mr. Manford told me you were breaking yourself down from overwork—you oughtn't to do it! And then that night when I phoned, and your Secretary said you were sick from not taking any exercise, I was worried, truly I was! I wanted to write you a little note—but—"
"A mere temporary indisposition, not worth a moment of your thought," said Mr. Garrott. He was wholly recovered now.
"I'm so glad. You really do look well! It's been ages since I've seen you! But why," she said, laughing up at him prettily, "am I keeping you standing at the door like this! Come in the parlor."
"I'm sorry, but I really can't, thank you. I must be going."
She stopped in complete surprise. "Going! Oh, you mustn't gonow!—when I've just come in! Why, youcouldn't!—"
"My time's up, you see, and more. Writing," said Charles sententiously, "is a dreadful taskmaster. But I've explained all that—"
"I know!—but you're here now! You can surely take alittletime, Mr. Garrott—when I haven't seen you for days and days—"
"I've already overstayed my scant allowance, you see, with your father. But I'm glad to have had a little glimpse of you, at any rate."
On the whole, he had sought to speak in his usual voice and air; but now he saw that his new power of firmness had disclosed itself to her not too sensitive ear. The liquid eyes under the becoming new hat regarded him with sudden inquiry, puzzled and speculative....
To think seriously ill of this girl, because, perhaps, she was not an enthusiastic cleaner of the parental home, was not in Charles, the man, whatever the authority might have to say. Her soft and unlessoned youthfulness, confronting him, disarmed all criticism. But the chance resemblance to her plaintive mother had seemed, oddly, to strike him much deeper. Looking down at this virginal sweet freshness, by the hatstand and the books, the young man had been full of the elusive sense that as the daughter looked and charmed now, so the mother had looked once; and beyond her present air of alluring femininity, he seemed persistently to be seeing Angela at fifty, sitting idle in an unswept room and continually reminding a worn-out husband of her sacrifices and her service.... Pure fantasy, was it, a fiction-writer's imagining born of a superficial likeness? Or was there a deeper, a more romantic, kinship between the girl who set so naïve an estimate on the value of her kiss, and the woman who would plume herself through an indolent lifetime on the ancient history of her maternity?...
The girl opened her mouth to speak: but there came a welcome diversion. A step was heard on the wooden verandah, and the two young people, turning their heads together, saw a liveried servant at the still open door, bowing, speaking:—
"Miss Flower, marm?"
"Yes—I am Miss Flower."
"Fum Mr. Tilletts, marm," said the servant, extending a note. "And he say please don't you trouble to write, if you'd kindly send an answer by me, marm."
"Oh! All right."
Having said, "Excuse me, Mr. Garrott," Angela opened and glanced through her note, and then remarked: "Mr. Tilletts wants me to go to the theater with him to-night. How nice!"
Her back to the servant, she made a little deprecating face at Mr. Garrott; but her voice seemed pleasurably stirred all the same, and her answer to the chauffeur was:—
"Thank Mr. Tilletts, and say Miss Flower'll be very glad, indeed, to go, and will be ready at quarter past eight."
Charles wondered afterward if the opportune Tilletts had not subtly assisted his own withdrawal; but for the moment it rather seemed otherwise. While Angela spoke to the servant, he had turned hastily toward his overcoat; and now her hand fell upon his arm, with just a touch of the spoiled darling air, or at least with that added confidence which comes to a girl with these concrete evidences of her success.
"No, you mustn't! Don't go yet.Please!"
"I'm compelled to, unluckily. I very rarely allow myself the pleasure of calling at all, you know, and—"
"But youhaveallowed yourself the pleasure, now, Mr. Garrott! Oh!—don't be sofirm! Come in—for only a minute! You can surely spare me a minute—when I ask you to specially—"
"It is literally impossible."
Angela had extended her small hand to lead him into the parlor. Now she let it fall at her side, and stood looking at him with a conscious expression on her face, a pretty expression, but one that he scarcely liked. Of course both of them knew that it was by no means literally impossible for Mr. Garrott to come in, for only a minute. But doubtless a womanly girl could be trusted to find an explanation for his peculiar speeches that plucked their stingers from them, as it were.
"You're so strange. You're displeased with me, I can see that. Why?—because I wasn't in when you called? Why, I'm nearly always out on fine afternoons!"
"I know that," ventured the young man.
"If you'd just told me in advance.... Don't you know I'd never have gone out with Dan Jenney, if I'd dreamed you were going to call?"
He knew this also, only too well; but this time he only said: "A caller must take his chances, of course. By the way, let me thank you very much, again, for lending me that book. I found it immensely interesting."
"Oh!—'Marna'? I didn't want you to come just for that.... Did she make you think of Cousin Mary at all?"
He smiled distantly, turned away, and put on his overcoat.
This was done in entire silence; Angela urged him to stay no longer. But when he turned, hat in hand, to say good-bye, she stood confronting him again, very near. There was a faint flush on her smooth cheek; her woman's eyes were very bright; her look upon him was sweet, self-conscious, and wistful, oddly appealing. Rarely had he seen her look more girlishly desirable.
"Mr. Garrott, why have you always been different to me since that night—of my bridge-party?"
"Different?" queried Mr. Garrott.
"Oh, you know you have! You know you've never really got over what I said to you—and all that dreadful misunderstanding!"
And he knew then that this nice girl would go to her grave thinking of him as a lover whose confidence in his suit had been reft from him by a too sharp rebuke. Well, so be it. He was content that she should have that satisfaction: let that stand as a further liquidation of the old obligation, a bonus payment on the esteemed Kiss.
"You know you've never forgiven me!"
"I've never had anything to forgive you, Miss Flower."
"Then you've never believed I've forgiven you! I've tried to show you that I have, that I've truly appreciated all the nice things you've done for me—but you've still been different."
It was doubtless his imagination, but she seemed to be a little nearer as she said, with a pink and winsome hesitancy:—
"Can't I make you believe that I—I've really always been the same?"
Extending his hand, the voluntary celibate replied, with cheerful reassurance: "I believe it now, Miss Flower. Absolutely. Positively. And now I must run."
Angela did not seem to see the hand he offered. She continued to look at him, and something seemed to die out of her face,—a momentary expectancy, was it, or the mere native optimism of youth? Her gaze turned away from his face, turned back again; and then she suddenly gave a little laugh, an odd laugh, half angry, half sad:—
"Oh, I do think you're absolutely—obtuse!"
And Charles then knew that, whether she realized it or not, Angela was giving him up.
But still she did not see his farewell hand. Her eyes, going past him again, had become fixed with a new expression, arresting him, and now she said, in another tone, what he found perhaps the most interesting remark in the duologue:—
"Here's Mr. Manford back!"
Charles wheeled, with a little jump.
And sure enough, there, beyond the glass of the door, was the form of the young engineer, incredibly returning. Yes, there he came back again, poor, vain, grinning, flattered fool, who only the other day had said: "Charlie, she worries me."
With one last look at Mr. Garrott, Angela turned to open the door for Mr. Manford. The greeting smile succeeded the good-bye reproach. And even in this disturbed moment, the writer's mind was subtly struck with the symbolism of that gesture: and once again this girl was a type to him, sister of a million sisters. Even so, must the womanly Spinster, through all her seeking days, turn from the man who does not desire her little offerings of beauty and charm, to the man who—well, possibly may. And it really wasn't right, wasn't fair....
"Old Sherlock!—sees the Fordette outside—guesses who's at home now!" the man who possibly might was saying, with a tone of buoyant intimacy and a repellent smirk. "I thought you weren't going to forget me altogether!... Oh! And there's Charlie-boy, too! Feeling better, old top?"
Charles looked through him in silence.
But when Angela drifted by them into the parlor—for she avoided any formal farewell with her former principal friend—and he was passing Donald to the door, he bent and flung into the youth's long ear one futile taunt:—
"Fool, I suppose she lent you the sequel!"
Before the dingy little house of the Flowers', there stood a line of waiting vehicles. The passer would have said that a reception, or perhaps a wedding, was going on within.
To the left, Mr. Tilletts's shining sedan still stood at the broken curb. The driver, having paused to exchange badinage with Walter Taylor, was just mounting to his seat. Full in front of the house stood a conveyance more in character with the unpretentious street: Charles Garrott's aged hackney-coach, in short. On the other side, at the nose of the hack-horse and properly leading the procession, stood the stout little Fordette, resting now from its labors. There only lacked a bicycle for Mr. Jenney, and something—a donkey, let us say—to stand for Donald Manford.
And Angela, indeed, had accomplished this; here was her true creative work, here her self-expression made visible. She it was who, poor and obscure, with nobody to help her, had drawn these vehicles and these gentlemen thronging about her door.
"Where toe, suh?" cried Walter Taylor, flourishing his whip.
"Number 6 Olive Street."
The fare spoke all but automatically, out of his new genuine disquiet. However, he corrected himself at once: "No—wait a minute."
If his position that she was just the wife for Donald lay silently abandoned somewhere behind him: if the business could no longer be viewed as Donald's idle-hour amusement, but all at once had come to look decidedly serious: still, what under heaven was the use of giving Mary another and more rousing warning? He had warned Mary once, and what was the result? Two calls from Donald to Angela in the course of a single afternoon. No; if the labor of taking off was now to follow "putting on," it was clear that some hand far subtler than the too manly Mary's would have to do the job. And he knew whose hand was plainly indicated, too....
And then the young man remembered, with a surprising uprush of relief and freedom, that this day was Friday, and Donald was off to New York to-night, within an hour or two. And the foolish youth would be gone a solid week, too, with Mr. Jenney and Mr. Tilletts left in possession of the field.
Thus, Walter Taylor, on his box, received a small surprise. Instead of giving him a new number, Mr. Garrott unexpectedly produced a dollar-bill from his pocketbook, and tossed it up to him with a sudden laugh.
"That's all, Walter.I'll walk!"
Donald Manford's absence in far-away New York saw the calendar into February. It was a month which for some time had held a fixed place in Charles's thought, as Mary Wing's last month at home. Now the days had brought him this new concern, by no means unrelated to Mary's impending departure. That Donald was his concern now, as well as hers, he had acknowledged, once and for all, in that moment of pause by the hack: and none saw more clearly than he that the acknowledgment was a damaging one, opening long vistas of annoying possibilities. Well it might be that all he had once planned and worried for himself, and much more, he would now have to plan and worry for his weak and amorous friend. And suppose Mary Wing went off, leaving the whole business still unsettled?
However, there was no use in borrowing trouble. For the present, Donald's well-wishers enjoyed an interlude of complete repose. And on or about the day of the simpleton's return to the danger-zone, it was recalled, he was to be whisked off again to the Helen Carson house-party, where all might end happily yet. Mary deserved her tittle of credit for that arrangement, at any rate. Charles, making the most of these peaceful days, reconsecrated himself to Letters and the finding of his Line.
Donald himself remained pleasantly unaware of the difficulties created by his unreliable antics. The youth was known to possess a common combination of characteristics: he had a novel-hero's chin and an underlying soft streak. Donald was a little ease-loving; he unconsciously slanted to the line of least resistance. As to work, Mary Wing, who had caught him young, had pretty well ironed out his softness; yet it seemed to persist even there. Witness his dallying for a moment with an "office proposition" in New York, at whatever emolument, when far larger professional opportunities awaited him in a Wyoming camp. As to getting himself married off, Donald's traits were obviously at once an advantage to his friends and an added risk: they seemed to indicate clearly that he or she who had his ear last, and took the strongest hand with him, would win the day. Doubtless his truest friends were most resolved that such hand should be theirs.
At any rate, the young squire's presentation of himself at the Wings', on the afternoon of the day he got back from New York, was by appointment strictly. It was Friday again, a week to a day from his two calls upon Angela. Donald "stopped by" Olive Street on his hurried way uptown. Having had a very strenuous part of a day in his office at Hoag, Hackett & Manford's, and having a number of things still to do before five o'clock, he designed to give, say, ten minutes to his call upon his more than sister. He gave thirty minutes, and emerged into the sunshine with a sobered face. And, on leaving Mary thus, almost the first person he saw next was Mary's special friend, Charles Garrott, bowling by.
The eyes of the young men met and Donald nodded gloomily. Charles, as it happened, was but taking a last use of his car, prior to the old lady's return on Monday. But Donald did not know that, and he thought, absently, what a fool old Charlie was to ride around this way all the time, when he had legs and could walk like a man. At the same moment, Charles, inevitably, was thinking what a fool Donald was, for exactly the opposite reason. Never again, it might be, would Charles Garrott see a bachelor walking Washington Street alone, without some vague sense of circumambient peril.
Charles had not expected to take up the new worries until after the match-making house-party; but the sight of Donald unprotected out there made an irresistible appeal to his higher nature, especially as no trouble to himself would be involved. Accordingly, he answered Donald's distrait salute with demonstrative smiles and signalings, and immediately fired an order through the speaking-tube. And the engineer, surprised, saw the splendid car of the old lady stop with a jerk, back, wheel, and come sliding up to his side at the curb.
"Well, old fellow! Glad to see you back!" said Charles, hospitably swinging open the door. "Hop in and let me drive you up! I want to hear about your trip."
Donald was faintly pleased by this unusual attentiveness. He was one of those extraordinary persons who never ride when it is possible to walk; on the other hand, he seldom turned away from the chance of a good talk about himself. And he was very short of time now, too, owing to his detention at the Wings'.
So he stepped into the limousine, his manner abstracted and distinctly consequential.
Charles, smiling slightly to himself, gave the address, and prompted:—
"You're just back, aren't you?"
"And off again at five twenty-two. And I've got two hours' unpacking and repacking to do before then."
"Youarea traveler these days! What's this," inquired Charles, innocently—"another business trip?"
"House-party at the Kingsleys', down at Hatton. Tell your boy to skip along there, Charlie. I'm in a rush."
Amiably, Charles spoke into the mouthpiece: "Skip along there, Eustace. Mr. Manford's in a rush." And resuming he said, with an air of honest envy: "At the Kingsleys'! By George, that sounds pretty good! Congenial crowd, winter sports, dancing every night—you're in luck! Who's going along?"
Donald named the guests. It did not escape the observant Charles that he named Miss Carson last, after a perceptible pause and in a manner clumsily careless. Nothing escaped Charles, not Donald's sober face, certainly not the fact that he had just come from the Wings'. Now, with a thrill of satisfaction, he understood that Mary had been talking to the young light-o'-love at last, giving him to understand plainly where his duty lay. And this look of Donald's was precisely the right look, too: just the intensely self-important, nervous, faintly complacent, highly worried look of a man who has suddenly learned that he is going to be married directly.
He gave the strong Mary another large credit-mark, and continued: "Three days with that crowd!—how I'd like to get in! As for poor old Talbott—ha, ha!—he'll foam at the mouth when I tell him about this."
"What's he got to do with it?"
"Why, I thought you'd heard! Miss Carson knocked him flat with one look—that lunch of mine! He can't see anybody else since, poor chap. But he admits he doesn't make any time at all."
"She's not the kind that takes to any whippersnapper that comes along."
His odious smugness delighted Charles. So did his fidgeting about, his hasty glances at his watch, his long solemn stares at himself in the little mirror.
"Poor old Talbott swears she must be interested in somebody else," laughed Charles. "But he confessed he couldn't think of a man he knew who'd be at all likely to interest a girl like that—I either." And then, not to overdo it, he said interestedly: "But, Donald, what about Blake & Steinert?"
"Oh, I turned 'em down," said the coming fiancé, and briefly expanded. Of the fine old firm, he said: "They were associated with me on Hog Bay Breakwater." Old Blake was a prince; Steinert a crackerjack. They had raised their offer, so eager were they to get him, and insisted on leaving it open for him. He had seen all the shows, lunched at five clubs, "closed up several important deals," etc., etc.
Dipping up his watch again, Donald said suddenly: "Seen Mary lately?"
This being none of his business, Charles replied with a monosyllable.
"Anything wrong between you two?"
"Not that I'm aware of.... Great heavens! I'm a worker, my good fellow! I haven't time to fuss around house-partying—pop-calling—all the time!—Not, of course, that I don't wish I were going—"
"Well, you won't have much time to be pop-calling on Mary," reproved Donald, with his new responsible soberness. "Drop around this afternoon, Charlie, after your lessons. See if you can't cheer her up a little."
The limousine reeled off half a block before Charles answered:
"Seems I'm behind the times again. What does Miss Mary need to be cheered up about, exactly?"
"What d'you s'pose now, Charlie? Going off to New York to live, herself; me off to Wyoming for two years at least; Aunt Ellen moving to North Carolina; home broken up—why, I tell you the thing is the worst kind of smash-up! I've just been with Mary—never saw her so blue in my life."
Charles said, after another silence: "But she understood all that from the beginning, didn't she?"
"Understood—what's that got to do with it? Besides, you never understand things till you get right down to 'em. Take me," said Donald, recurring to his favorite subject with a frown. "I hadn't an idea how much I was going to mind this business—ending it all here, moving off to the back side of nowhere to—"
"Well, don't be sentimental about it, for pity's sake! This is a realistic story we're living, or I miss my guess entirely.—When does Miss Mary leave?"
"Oh, about two weeks, I believe, but—"
"Two weeks!"
"Wensons want the flat around the 20th, I understand. We didn't speak of that just now—Mary'll tell you about it. Let's see," said Donald, fidgeting about and looking first out one window, then another. "Going to your mother's to-morrow, I suppose? Drop in this afternoon, Charlie—or to-night. And that's so!—you can take around a package for me, things I bought for Mary in New York—oh, neck-fichus, silk stockings—that sort of stuff."
But the thought of himself as Mary's cheerer-up at this juncture in her Career was bitterly ironic to Charles, and, answering curtly that he would be too busy to run errands this afternoon, he changed the subject at once. In short, when did Donald go to Wyoming? Unable to resist the opening, Donald said that he would probably start on March 15th; and so began to talk fitfully of himself. At the other window, Charles relapsed into thought. He did not speak again until the car rolled up to the entrance of the showy apartment-hotel where Donald lived. Then, rousing himself abruptly, he said, with a well-done air of negligent sprightliness:—
"Oh, by the by, Donald—heard anything from our little friend in the four-wheeler, as you call it? I haven't laid eyes on her since that day you and I marched up like little soldiers to give back her books. Funny, that was!—ha, ha!"
Donald's face of a young man about to be married changed perceptibly. He answered, quite stiffly:—
"I fail to see anything funny in it. Miss Flower's perfectly well, I believe."
"Good!—glad to hear it. She needs her health, all the driving about she does.... Why, where'd she see you to-day?"
"I didn't say I'd seen her to-day, that I remember. By Jove, I don't get a minute to see anybody or anything, rushed about this way all the time!... Well! Obliged for the lift."
"And how do you know she's well, then?"
"Because she told me so over the telephone, if you give a darn! What's this about, anyway?"
"Why, not a thing! Why, my dear fellow! Ofcourse, I understand perfectly! You don't suppose I suspect you of being old Tilletts's rival, do you? Not likely—ha, ha! No, I think it's awfully nice of you, old fellow, knowing as I do that you don't admire her particularly. That's what I wanted to say," proceeded Charles, laying his hand affectionately and detainingly on Donald's arm. "Of course you know she doesn't have much of a time—attention and all that—oh, I see through you perfectly! It's just Talbott and the Oldmixon girls over again—"
"Oh, she told me aboutyou!" said Donald in a blustering manner; and, snatching his arm away, he sprang out upon the sidewalk.
His remark evoked curiosity; but Charles's overweening interest was not in Angela now. And he was thinking intently: "He's not engaged to Helen Carson yet, by a long shot. He's not even at the station—that's a mile—on Washington Street. I'd better keep an eye on you, my buck ..."
Aloud he said: "She did?—nothing good, I fear. Here!—wait a minute! That package for Miss Mary, Donald—I expect you'd better leave it for me to take, after all. I'll find some way to get it around to her—"
"All right—"
"You bring it by as you start for the station, that's the best way. Then we'll drive down together," said Charles, fixing his friend with a compelling gaze. "I've—ah—got some things I want to talk to you about."
"I'll bring it by," said Donald, non-committally, and rushed away.
He went up seven floors, telephoned for the "staff valet," and proceeded to business. There was a period of the wildest activity. At the end of it, the hour being then too late for hope that any expressman would make the train with the trunk, Donald engaged the valet to secure a carriage, take down and check the baggage, get him a ticket and a seat, and be waiting for him with these things at a given point. In such slapdash, inefficient fashion this young man conducted all his personal life.
"And mind you see the baggage on the train," he warned the fellow. "This is an important trip."
He shot down again, dressed to "kill" the house-party, but lugging a large box, and strode out into the fading sunshine. Before the hotel door, to his surprise, stood Charlie Garrott's borrowed car, empty, and before the car stood Charlie Garrott's borrowed driver, greeting him with all his teeth.
"What'reyouwaiting here for?" said Donald, staring.
"Goin' to drive you an' Mist' Garrott to the deepo—yessuh! Mist' Garrott tole me to wait right here an' bring you round, suh!"
Donald again was rather touched by the thoughtfulness of his friend. Take him all in all, old Charlie was a pretty good fellow. However, he would have ridden down in the hack with the valet, if he had wanted to ride. Of course, he might send the box around by this fellow—but no, if old Charlie was expecting him, that would seem pretty short, particularly as Mrs. Herman's was right on his way.
"I'm much obliged to you—er—Eustace—but I'll walk, I guess. I haven't had any exercise to-day."
"Boss, he say you mout not ketch yo' train if you was to walk."
"Oh, I've got plenty of time for the train—plenty!" said Donald, hastily, and shifted the box to look at his watch again. "I'll leave word for Mr. Garrott myself."
"Suh! Thank you kindly, suh!"
Donald swung off toward Mrs. Herman's, but three blocks distant. Behind him, unobserved, trailed the old lady's limousine, very slow. When he was still a block from his destination, the hurrying young man was all at once struck with an annoying recollection. "Curses!" he groaned. "I forgot my sweater!" That meant that he would have to go back, without doubt: for the sweater was a brand-new one, of brilliant Australian wool, and specially purchased in New York for the winter-sports. Donald, accordingly, felt unable to linger over his good-bye messages to Charles. He said hurriedly to Mrs. Herman, who opened the door for him: "How-do! Please give this box to Mr. Garrott, and tell him I decided to walk. He'll understand." And on that, he sprang away down the steps, two at a time, and started swiftly back to the Bellingham.