CHAPTER XXIV
HER admirers had a sorry time of it for the next two weeks; she was capricious, even irritable, absent-minded, and at no pains to conceal that they bored her. Her appetite remained good, or Mrs. Montgomery would have grown alarmed.
The answer to Cecil’s letter had required an entire day of anxious thought. Her pen ran over with the emotions he had quickened; but pride conquered, and she finally wrote him a gay friendly letter, assuring him of a welcome in which curiosity would play no insignificant part, but studiously concealing her burning interest.
She was profoundly thankful to the inspiration which dictated that letter when his answer came. It was very brief, and its only enthusiasm was inspired by the buffalo. There was not a mutually personal line in it. He concluded by remarking that if he did not write again, she could expect him any time just outside of a month. He should go to Southern California first to visit some English ranchers, whom he had known at Oxford, and to kill his grizzly.
Lee tore this letter into strips, and plunged into a desperate flirtation with Randolph, giving him an unusual meed of dances at the little parties of Menlo, making him get up at unearthly hours to ride withher before his day in town—he detested riding—and driving every evening to the station to meet him. He was puzzled, but inclined to take the pleasant caprices of the gods without analysis. He was very busy, and it was enough to know, as he sat at his table, his pencil working at the thousand and one prosaic details of a huge iron building he was designing, that his evenings and Sundays were to be made radiant by the smiles of the most charming woman in the world. He forgot Cecil Maundrell; and the future he tenaciously desired seemed imminent.