ORCHARD LANE
After the interim of quiet that Lent always brings in Clarkson, the
spring came swiftly. There was a renewal of social activities which ran
from dances and teas into outdoor gatherings. Evelyn had enjoyed to the
full her experience of home. She had plunged into the frivolities of the
town with a zest that was a trifle emphasized through her wish to escape
any charge of being pedantic or literary. She was glad that she had gone
to college, but she did not wish this fact of her life to be the
haunting ghost of her days; and by the end of the winter she felt that
she had pretty effectually laid it.
In June Mr. Porter began discussing summer plans with Evelyn. He
eliminated himself from them; he could not get away, he said. But there
was Grant to be considered. The boy was at school in New Hampshire, and
Evelyn protested that it was not wise to subject him to the intense heat
of a Clarkson summer. The first hot wave sent Porter to bed with a
trifling illness, and his doctor took the opportunity to look him over
and tell him that it was imperative for him to rest. Thompson came home
from Arizona to spend the summer. He and Wheaton were certainly equal to
the care of the bank, so they urged upon Porter, and he finally
yielded. Evelyn found a hotel on the Massachusetts North Shore which
sounded well in the circulars, and her father agreed to it. When they
reached Orchard Lane he liked it better than he had expected; the hotel
was one of those vast caravansaries where all sorts and conditions
assemble; and he was reassured by the click of the telegraph instrument
and the presence of the long distance telephone booth in the office. He
was a cockney of the rankest kind and it dulled the edge of his
isolation to know that he was not entirely cut off from the world. Every
night he sat down with cipher telegrams, and constructed from Thompson's
statistics the day's business in the bank. He received daily from New
York the closing quotations on the shares he was interested in, and as
he walked the long hotel verandas he effected a transmigration of spirit
which put him back in his swivel chair in the Clarkson National.
Evelyn made him drive with her and Grant, and dragged him to the golf
course, where she was the star player, and where Grant was learning the
game.
A college friend of Evelyn's, in one of the near-by cottages, asked her
neighbors to call on the Porters. The fact that the cottagers thus set
the mark of their approval upon the Westerners, gave them distinction at
the hotel. Several men of Porter's age took him to their quieter porches
and found him interesting; they liked his stories, though they hardly
excused his ignorance of whist; in their hearts they accused him of
poker, of which he was guiltless. Incidentally they got a good deal of
information from him touching their Western interests; it was worth
while to know a man that received the crop news ahead of the
newspapers. He liked the praise of Evelyn which was constantly reaching
him; she was the prettiest girl in the place; her golf was certainly
better than any other girl's. When she won a cup in the tournament he
waited anxiously to see what the Boston papers said about it, and he
surreptitiously mailed the cuttings home to the Clarkson _Gazette_.
In August Warry Raridan appeared suddenly and threw himself into the
gaieties of the place for a fortnight. Mr. Porter asked him to sit at
their table and marveled at the way Evelyn snubbed him, even to the
extent of running away for three days with some friends who had a yacht
and who carried her to Newport for a dance. During her absence Warry
made all the other girls about the place happy; they were sure that
"that Miss Porter" was treating him shabbily and their hearts went out
to him. Warry sulked when Evelyn returned and they had an interview
between dances at a Saturday night hop.
He sought again for recognition as a lover; she had not praised the
efforts he had been making to win her approval by diligence at his
office; he took care to call her attention to his changed habits.
"But, Evelyn, I am doing differently. I know that I wasted myself for
years so that I'm a kind of joke and everybody laughs about me. But I
want to know--I want to feel that I'm doing it for you! Don't you know
how that would help me and steady me? Won't you let it be for you?" He
came close to her and stood with his arms folded, but she drew away from
him with a despairing gesture.
"Oh, Warry," she cried, wearily, "you poor, foolish boy! Don't you know
that you must do all things for yourself?"
"Yes," he returned eagerly. "I know that; I understand perfectly; but if
you'd only let me feel that you wanted it--"
"I want you to succeed, but you will never do it for any one, if you
don't do it for yourself."
He went home by an early train next morning to receive Saxton's
consolation and to turn again to his law books. Margrave, on behalf of
the Transcontinental, had offered to compromise the case of the poor
widow whose clothes lines had been interfered with; but Raridan rejected
this tender. He needed something on which to vent his bad spirits, and
he gave his thought to devising means of transferring the widow's cause
to the federal court. The removal of causes from state to federal courts
was, Warry frequently said, one of the best things he did.