CHAPTER VIII

Mr. Weston, riding home in the taxi, was not without some astonishment at himself. Why was he so keenly annoyed at Fred's bad taste? Why had he such an ardent desire to kick Maitland? He might have gone further in his self-analysis and discovered that, though he wanted to kick Howard, he did not want to haul him over the coals, as a man of his years might well have done—merely to give a friendly tip as to propriety to a youngster whom he had seen put into breeches. Had he discovered this reluctance in himself, Arthur Weston might have decided that his indignation was based on a sense of personal injury—which has its own significance in a man of nearly fifty who concerns himself in the affairs of a woman under thirty. The fact was that, though he thought of himself only as her grandfatherly trustee, Frederica Payton was every day taking a larger place in his life. She amused him, and provoked him, and interested him; but, most of all, the pain of her passionate futilities roused him to a pity that made him really suffer. He could not bear to see pain. Briefly, she gave him something to think about.

His displeasure evaporated overnight, and when he went up to her office the next morning he was ready to[Pg 91] apologize for his words in the taxi. But it was not necessary. Fred, in the excitement of receiving a letter asking her fee for hunting up rooms, had quite forgotten that she had been scolded.

"I think I'd better advertise in all the daily papers!" she announced, eagerly.

"You're a good fellow," he said; "you take your medicine and don't make faces."

"Make faces? Oh, you mean because you called me down last night? Bless you, if it amuses you, it doesn't hurt me!"

The sense of her youth came over him in a pang of loneliness, and with it, curiously enough, an impulse of flight, which made him say, abruptly: "I shall probably go abroad in January. Can I trust you not to advertise yourself into bankruptcy before I get back?"

"Oh, Mr. Weston," she said, blankly; "how awful! Don't go!"

"You don't need me," he assured her; but a faint pleasure stirred about his heart.

"Need you? Why, I simply couldn't live without you! In the first place, my business would go to pot, without your advice; and then—well, you know how it is. You are the only person who speaks my language. Grandmother talks about my vulgarities, and Aunt Bessie talks about my stomach, and the Childs cousins talk about my vices—but nobody talks about my interests, except you. Don't go and leave me," she pleaded with him.

The glow of pleasure about his heart warmed into actual happiness. "Please don't think I approve of you!"

[Pg 92]

She looked at him with her gray, direct eyes, and nodded. "I know you don't. But I don't mind;—you understand."

"But," he said, raising a rueful eyebrow, "how shall I make Cousin Mary 'understand' your performances?"

"By staying at home and keeping me in order! Don't go away."

It was the everlasting feminine: "I need you!" There was no "new woman" in it; no self-sufficiency; nothing but the old, dependent arrogance that has charmed and held the man by its flattering selfishness ever since the world began.

He was opening the office door, but she laid a frankly anxious hand on his arm. "Promise me you won't go!"

He would not commit himself. "It depends; if you get married, and shut up shop, you won't want a business adviser."

"I sha'n't get married!" she said, and blushed to her temples.

Mr. Weston saw the color, and his face, as he closed her door and stood waiting for the elevator, dulled a little. "She's head over ears in love with him. Well, he's a very decent chap; it's an excellent match for her,—Oh," he apologized to the elevator boy, on suddenly finding himself on the street floor; "I forgot to get off! You'll have to take me up again." In his own office he was distinctly curt.

"I am very busy," he said, checking his stenographer's languid remark about a telephone call; "I am going to write letters. Don't let any one interrupt me"—and the door of his private office closed in her face.

[Pg 93]

"What's the matter with him?" the young lady asked herself, idly; then took out her vanity glass and adjusted her marcel wave.

Arthur Weston put his feet on his desk, and reflected. Why had he said what he did about going to Europe? When he went up to see Fred, nothing had been farther from his mind than leaving America. Well, he knew why he had said it.... Flight! Self-preservation! "Preposterous," he said, "what am I thinking of? I'm fond of her, and I'm confoundedly sorry for her, but that's all. Anyhow, Maitland settles the question. And if he wasn't in it—she's twenty-five and I'm forty-six." He got up and walked aimlessly about the room. "I've cut my wisdom teeth," he thought, with a dry laugh, and wondered where the lady was who had superintended that teething. For Kate's sake he had taken a broken heart to Europe. The remembrance of that heartbreak reassured him; the feeling he had about Fred wasn't in the least like his misery of that time. He gave a shrug of relief; it occurred to him that he would go and see some Chinese rugs which had been advertised in the morning paper; "might give her one for a wedding present?—oh, the devil! Haven't I anything else to think of than that girl?" He stood at the window for a long time, his hands in his pockets, looking at three pigeons strutting and balancing on a cornice of the Chamber of Commerce. "She interests me," he conceded; then he smiled,—"and she wants me to stay at home and 'take care of her'!" Well, there was nothing he would like better than to take care of Fred. The first thing he would do would be to[Pg 94] shut up that ridiculous plaything of an "office" on the tenth floor. Billy Childs put it just right: "perfec' nonsense!" Then, having removed "F. Payton" from the index of the Sturtevant Building, they—he and Fred—would go off, to Europe. He followed this vagrant thought for a moment, then reddened with impatience at his own folly: "What an idiot I am! I'm not the least in love with her, but I'll miss her like the devil when she marries that cub Maitland. She's a perpetual cocktail! She'd be as mad as a hornet if she knew that I never took her seriously." He laughed, and found himself wishing that he could take her in his arms, and tease her, and scold her, and make her "mad as a hornet." Again the color burned in his cheeks; he would do something else than tease her and scold her; he would most certainly kiss her. "Oh, confound it!" he said to himself, angrily; "I'm getting stale." He did not want to kiss her! He only wanted to make her happy, and be himself amused. "That is the difference between now and ten years ago," he analyzed. "Kate never 'amused' me; oh, how deadly serious it all was!" He speculated about Kate quite comfortably. She was married; very likely she had half a dozen brats. Again he contrasted his feeling for Fred with that brief madness of pain, and was cheered; it was so obvious that he was merely fond of her. How could he help it—she was so honest, so unselfconscious! Besides, she was pathetic. Her harangues upon subjects of which she was (like most of mankind) profoundly ignorant, were funny, but they were touching, too, for her complacent certainties would so inevitably bring her into bruising[Pg 95] contact with Life. "She thinks 'suffrage' a cure-all," he thought, amused and pitiful,—"and she's so desperately young!" In her efforts to reform the world, she was like some small creature buffeting the air. In fact, all this row that women were making was like beating the air. "What's it about, anyhow?" he thought. "What on earth do they want—the women?" It seemed to him, looking a little resentfully at the ease and release from certain kinds of toil that had come to women in the last two or three decades, that they had everything that reasonable creatures could possibly want. "Think how their grandmothers had to work!" he said to himself. "Now, all that these ridiculous creatures have to do is to touch a button—and men's brains do the rest." Certainly there is an enormous difference in the collective ease of existence; women don't have to make their candles, or knit their stockings, as their grandmothers did:—"yet, nowadays, they are making more fuss than all the women that ever lived, put together! What's the matter with 'em?"

He grew quite hot over the ingratitude of the sex. His old Scotch housekeeper, reading her Bible, and sewing from morning to night, was far happier than these restless, dissatisfied creatures, who, in the upper classes, flooded into schools of design and conservatories of music—not one in a hundred with talent enough to cover a five-cent piece!—and in the lower classes pulled down wages in factories and shops. "Amateur Man," he said, sarcastically. "Suppose we tried to do their jobs?" Then he paused to think what Fred's job, for instance, would be. Not discovering it offhand, he told himself again that if[Pg 96] women would keep busy, like their grandmothers—his contemptuous thought stopped, with a jerk; how could women do the things their grandmothers did? What was it Fred had got off—something about machinery being the cuckoo which had pushed women out of the nest of domesticity? "Why," he was surprised into saying, "she's right!"

He came upon the deduction so abruptly that for a moment he forgot his sore feeling about Frederica's youth. Suppose the women should suddenly take it into their heads to be domestic, and flock out of the mechanical industries, back to the "Home"? Arthur Weston whistled. "Financially," said he, candidly, "we would bu'st in about ten minutes."...

"Do you want to give me those prices to Laughlin before I go out to lunch?" a flat voice asked in the outer office; he slid into his desk-chair as the door opened.

"I haven't had time to look them up yet. Don't wait."

He took up his pen, but only made aimless marks on his blotting-paper; the interruption jarred him back into irritated denial of possibilities: "She amuses me, that's all; I'm not in the least—in love." Suddenly, with a spring of resolution, he took down the telephone receiver and called up a number. The conversation was brief: "Hello! Jim?... Yes; I'm Arthur. Look here, I want to break away for a week.... Yes—break away. B-r-e-a-k. I'm stale. Can't you go down to the marshes with me, for ducks?... What? Oh, come on! You're not as important as you think.... What?... I'll do the work—you just come along!"

[Pg 97]

There followed a colloquy of some urgency on his part, and then a final, satisfied "Good boy! Wednesday, then, on the seven-thirty."

He had hardly secured his man before he regretted it; the mere prospect of the arrangements he must make for the trip began to bore him. However, he sat there at his desk and made some memoranda, conscious all the time of a nagging self-questioning in the back of his mind. "I'm not!" he said, again and again. "I'll get some shooting and clear my brain up."

But by the time he had sent a despatch or two, and called Jim Jackson up a second time to decide some detail, he knew that shooting would not help him much. The nag had settled itself: he had accepted the revelation that he was "interested" in Freddy Payton. With the contrast between the pain of the old wound and the new, he would not use the word "love," but "interest" committed him to an affection, tender almost to poignancy. Of course there was nothing to do about it. He must just take his medicine, as Fred took hers, "without making faces." There was nothing to strive for, nothing to avoid, nothing to expect. She was as good as engaged to Howard Maitland, and it would be a very sensible and desirable match;—to marry a man of forty-six would be neither sensible nor desirable! No; the only thing left to her trustee was to take every care of her that her eccentricities would permit, guard her, play with her, and correct her appalling taste. "Lord! what bad taste she has!" Also, while he and Jackson were wading about on the marshes for the next week, kick some sense into himself!

[Pg 98]

That very evening, dropping in to the Misses Graham's and partaking of a bleakly feminine meal, he laid his lance in rest for her.

Miss Mary was full of flurried apologies at the meagerness of the supper-table, but old Miss Eliza said, with spirit, that bread and milk would be good for him! "Now, tell us about that child, Arthur," she commanded.

"You mean Fred Payton, I suppose?" he said, raising an annoyed eyebrow. "I don't call her a 'child.'"

"You are quite right," Miss Mary agreed, in her little neutral voice; "she is certainly old enough to know how to behave herself."

"It's merely that she wants to reform the world," Miss Eliza said, soothingly. "Reformers have no humor, and, of course, no taste;—or else they wouldn't be reformers!"

"Your dear cousin Eliza is too kind-hearted," Miss Mary said; but her own kind, if conventional, heart made her listen sympathetically enough to the visitor's excusing recital of the hardships of Fred's life.

Once, she interrupted him by saying that it was, of course, painful—the afflicted brother. And once she said she hoped that Miss Payton was a comfort to her mother—"though I don't see how she can be, off every day at what she calls her 'office'—a word only to be applied, it seems to me, to places where gentlemen conduct their business. When I was young, Arthur, a girl's first duty was in her home."

"Perhaps there is nothing for her to do at home," Miss Eliza said.

[Pg 99]

"There is always something to do, in every properly conducted household. Let her dust the china-closet."

"I'd as soon put a tornado into a china-closet as that girl! She ought to be turning a windmill," Miss Eliza said.

Her cousin gave her a grateful look, but the other lady was very serious. "I thought her manner to her grandmother most unpleasant. Youth should respect Age—"

"Not unless Age deserves respect!" cried Miss Eliza, tossing her old head.

Arthur Weston had seen that same flash in Fred's eyes. ("How young she is!" he thought.) But her sister was plainly shocked.

"Oh, my dear Eliza!" she expostulated. "I am not drawn to Mrs. Holmes myself, but—"

"Neither is Fred drawn to her," Weston interrupted; "and she is so sincere that she shows her feelings. The rest of us don't. That's the only difference."

"It is a very large difference," Miss Graham said; "this matter of showing one's feelings is as apt to mean cruelty as sincerity. It's the reason the child has no charm."

"I think she has charm," he said, frowning.

There was a startled silence; then Miss Eliza said, heartily: "Don't worry about her! Just now she thinks it's smart to put her thumb to her nose and twiddle her fingers at Life—but she'll settle down and be a dear child!"

Miss Mary shook her head. "If I were a friend of the young lady, I should worry very much. Maria Spencer called on us yesterday, and told us a most unpleasant[Pg 100] story about her. She spent the night at an inn with this same young man that she smoked with here. Oh, an accident, of course; but—"

"Miss Spencer is the town scavenger," Weston said, angrily.

Miss Mary did not notice the interruption. "I cannot help remarking that I do not think that such a young woman would make any man happy." ("It was difficult to bring the remark in," she told her sister, afterward; "but I felt it my duty.")

"The man who gets Fred will be a lucky fellow," her cousin declared.

"You know her very well, I infer," Miss Mary murmured. "I observe you use her first name."

"Oh, very well! And I knew her father before her. But the use of the first name is one of the new customs. Everybody calls everybody else by their first name. Queer custom."

"Very queer," said Miss Mary.

"Very sensible!" said Miss Eliza.

"Ah, well, we must just accept the fact that girls are not brought up as they were when—when we were young"—Arthur Weston paused, but no one corrected that "we." He sighed, and went on: "The tide of new ideas is sweeping away a lot of the old landmarks; myself, I think it is better for some of them to go. For instance, the freedom nowadays in the relations of boys and girls makes for a straightforwardness that is rather fine."

"Well," said Miss Mary, "I don't like what you call 'new ideas.' 'New' things shock me very much."

[Pg 101]

"I'm rather shocked, myself, once in a while," he agreed, good-naturedly.

"What will you do, Mary, when the 'new' heaven and the 'new' earth come along?" Miss Eliza demanded.

The younger sister lifted disapproving hands.

"As for the girls smoking," Weston said, "I don't like it any better than you do. In fact, I dislike it. But my dislike is ?sthetic, not ethical."

"I hope you don't think smoking is a sign of the 'new' heaven," Miss Mary said;—but her sister's aside—"the Other Place, more likely!"—disconcerted her so much that for a moment she was silenced.

"I never could see," said Miss Eliza, "that it was any wickeder for a lady to smoke than for a gentleman; but, as I told the child, a girl's lips ought to be sweet."

"Her smoking is far less serious than other things," said the younger sister, sitting up very straight and rigid. "I do not wish to believe ill of the girl, so I shall only repeat that I do not think she will make any man happy."

"She will," Miss Eliza said, "if he will beat her."

"Oh, my dear Eliza!" Miss Mary remonstrated. Then she tried to be charitable: "However, perhaps she is engaged to this Maitland person, in which case, though her taste would be just as bad, her meeting him here would be less shocking."

"If she isn't now, she will be very soon," Frederica's defender said.

"Well," said Miss Mary, grimly, "let us hope so, for her sake; although, as I say, I do not feel that she—"

Miss Eliza looked at her cousin, and winked; he choked[Pg 102] with laughter. Then, with the purpose of saving Freddy, he began to dissect Freddy's grandmother—her powder and false hair; her white veil, her dog-collar—"that's to keep her double chin up," he said. "Yes! She is very lively for her age!" He wished he could say that old Mrs. Holmes was in the habit of meeting gentlemen in empty apartments—anything to draw attention from his poor Fred!

When he left his cousins, promising to come again as soon as he got back from his shooting trip, and declaring that he hadn't had such milk toast in years, he knew that he had not rehabilitated Frederica. "But Cousin Mary feels that she has done her duty in warning me. Cousin Eliza would gamble on it, and give her to me to-morrow," he thought; "game old soul! But even if Howard wasn't ahead of the game, the odds would be against me—forty-six to twenty-five—and, besides, what could I offer her? Ashes! Kate trampled out the fire."