"All right," he said. "Herschenrother is now my middle name, and if it's
not convenient to talk, you can give me the high sign."
Toots Warrington came along just then with an army officer she'd taken
on. They got clear round the palms and into the pantry before they saw
us, and her face was funny.
Mother and I had another heart-to-heart talk that night on the way home.
Father had gone a couple of hours earlier and we had the car to
ourselves. Mother was tired and irritable.
"It seemed to me, Kit," she observed, "that you danced with every
hopeless ineligible there. You danced three times with Henry."
"For heaven's sake, mother," I snapped, "let poor Henry alone. Henry is
the most useful person I know."
"You can't play with red-headed people and not get burned," mother said
with unconscious humour. "He's very fond of you, Kit. I watched him
to-night."
"The fonder the better," I said flippantly. Yes, that's what I said.
When I look back on that evening and think how little Henry entered into
my plans, and the rest of it, it makes me cold.
"I want you to do one thing--just one, mother: I want you to be very
cool to Russell Hill."
"Cool!"
"And I want you to forbid me to see him."
"I'm not insane, Katherine."
"Listen, mother," I said desperately. "All his life Russell Hill has had
everything he wanted. He's had so much that--that he's got a sort of
social indigestion. The only things he wants now are the things he
can't have. So he can't have me."
Mother's not very subtle. And she was alarmed. I can still see her
trying to readjust her ideas, and getting tied up in them, and coming a
mental cropper, so to speak.
"If he can't have me he'll want me."
"I'm not sure of it. He----"
"Mother," I said in despair, "you've been married for twenty years, and
you know less about men in a month than I do in a minute. Please forbid
him the house--not in so many words, but act it."
"Why?" she said feebly.
"Anything you can think of--Toots Warrington will do."
She got out her salts and held them to her nose.
"I feel as though I'm losing my mind," she said at last. "But if you're
set on it----"
That was all until we got home. Then on the stairs I thought of
something.
"Oh, yes," I said. "No matter what I am doing, mother, if Herschenrother
the tailor calls up I want to go to the telephone."
I can still see her staring after me with her mouth open as I went up
the stairs.
Herschenrother called me up the next morning, and asked me how I was,
and how the dragons were, and if there was any chance of my walking in
the park at five o'clock. I said there was, and called up Henry and
asked him to walk with me.
"I should say so," he said. "You've only got to ask me, Kit. I'm always
ready to hang round."
There was rather a bad half hour in the park, and for a time I felt that
Henry had been a wrong move. But, as it turned out he hadn't, for
Russell took advantage of somebody's signalling to Henry from a machine
to say:
"Just a bit afraid of me still, aren't you?"
"Why?"
"You brought Henry. I know the signs. You asked him, and he's so set up
about it that he's walking on clouds."
"I am afraid."
"Of me?"
"Of myself."
He caught my arm as he helped me across a puddle, and squeezed it.
"Good girl!" he said.
And later on, when Henry was called again--he's terribly popular, Henry
is--he had another chance.
"I'm going to see you alone if I have to steal you," he said.
Herschenrother called up again the next day, and Madge, who had come
home for the Christmas holidays, called me.
"Gee, Kit," she said, "you must be getting a trousseau. That tailor's
always on the phone."