Elizabeth's uncle need not have concerned himself so seriously about
the affairs of Elizabeth's heart. The very next day the rift between
the lovers began:
"What on earth have you done to your hand?" asked Blair.
"I cut it. I was angry at Uncle, and broke his picture, and--"
Blair shouted with laughter. "Oh, Elizabeth, what a goose you are!
That's just the way you used to bite your arm when you were mad. You
always did cut off your nose to spite your face! Where is your locket?"
"None of your business!" said Elizabeth savagely. It was easy to be
savage with Blair, because David's lack of interest in her affairs had
taken the zest out of "being engaged" in the most surprising way. But
she had no intention of not being engaged! Romance was too flattering
to self-love to be relinquished; nevertheless, after the first week or
two she lapsed easily, in moments of forgetfulness, into the old
matter-of-fact squabbling and the healthy unreasonableness natural to
lifelong acquaintance. The only difference was that now, when she and
Blair squabbled, they made up again in new ways; Blair, with gusts of
what Elizabeth, annoyed and a little disgusted, called "silliness";
Elizabeth, with strange, half-scared, wholly joyous moments of
conscious power. But the "making-up" was far less personal than the
fallings-out; these, at least, meant individual antagonisms, whereas
the reconciliations were something larger than the girl and
boy--something which bore them on its current as a river bears straws
upon its breast. But they played with that mighty current as
thoughtlessly as all young creatures play with it. Elizabeth used to
take her engagement ring from the silk thread about her neck, and,
putting it on her finger, dance up and down her room, her right hand on
her hip, her left stretched out before her so that she could see the
sparkle of the tiny diamond on her third finger. "I'm engaged!" she
would sing to herself.
"'Oh, isn't it joyful, joyful, joyful!'
"Blair's in love with me!" The words were so glorious that she rarely
remembered to add, "I'm in love with Blair." The fact was, Blair was
merely a necessary appendage to the joy of being engaged. When he
irritated her by what she called "silliness," she was often frankly
disagreeable to him.
As for Blair, he, too, had his ups and downs. He swaggered, and threw
his shoulders back, and cast appraising eyes on women generally, and
thought deeply on marriage. But of Elizabeth he thought very little.
Because she was a girl, she bored him quite as often as he bored her.
It was because she was a woman that there came those moments when he
offended her; and in those moments she had but little personality to
him. In fact, their love-affair, so far as they understood it, apart
from its elemental impulses which they did not understand, was as much
of a play to them as the apple-tree housekeeping had been.
So Mr. Ferguson might have spared himself the unpleasant interview with
Blair's mother. He recognized this himself before long, and was even
able to relax into a difficult smile when Mrs. Richie ventured a mild
pleasantry on the subject. For Mrs. Richie had spoken to Blair, and
understood the situation so well that she could venture a pleasantry.
She had sounded him one evening in the darkness of her narrow garden.
David was not at home, and Blair was glad of the chance to wait for
him--so long as Mrs. Richie let him lounge on the grass at her feet.
His adoration of David's mother, begun in his childhood, had
strengthened with his years; perhaps because she was all that his own
mother was not.
"Blair," she said, "of course you and I both realize that Elizabeth is
only a child, and you are entirely too wise to talk seriously about
being engaged to her. She is far too young for that sort of thing. Of
course _you_ understand that?"
And Blair, feeling as though the sword of manhood had been laid on his
shoulder, and instantly forgetting the smaller pride of being
"engaged," said in a very mature voice, "Oh, certainly _I_ understand."
If, in the dusk of stars and fireflies, with the fragrance of white
stocks blossoming near the stone bench that circled the old
hawthorn-tree in the middle of the garden--if at that moment Mrs.
Richie had demanded Elizabeth's head upon a charger, Blair would have
rejoiced to offer it. But this serene and gentle woman was far too wise
to wring any promise from the boy, although, indeed, she had no
opportunity, for at that moment Mr. Ferguson knocked on the green door
between the two gardens and asked if he might come in and smoke his
cigar in his neighbor's garden. "I'll smoke the aphids off your
rose-bushes," he offered. "You are very careless about your roses!"
"A 'bad tenant'?" said Mrs. Richie, smiling. And poor Blair picked
himself up, and went sulkily off.
But Mrs. Richie's flattering assumption that Blair and she looked at
things in the same way, and David's apparent indifference to
Elizabeth's emotions, made the childish love-affair wholesomely
commonplace on both sides. By mid-September it was obvious that the
prospect of college was attractive to Blair, and that the moment of
parting would not be tragic to Elizabeth. The romance did not come to a
recognized end, however, until a day or two before Blair started East.
The four friends, and Miss White, had gone out to Mrs. Todd's, where
David had stood treat, and after their tumblers of pink and brown and
white ice-cream had been emptied, and Mrs. Todd had made her usual joke
about "good-looking couples," they had taken two skiffs for a slow
drift down the river to Willis's.
When they were rowing home again, the skiffs at first kept abreast, but
gradually, in spite of Miss White's desire to be "at her post," and
David's entire willingness to hold back, Blair and Elizabeth
appropriately fell behind, with only a little shaggy dog, which
Elizabeth had lately acquired, to play propriety. In the yellow
September afternoon the river ran placidly between the hills and
low-lying meadows; here and there, high on a wooded hillside, a maple
flamed among the greenness of the walnuts and locusts, or the chestnuts
showed the bronze beginnings of autumn. Ahead of them the sunshine had
melted into an umber haze, which in the direction of Mercer deepened
into a smudge of black. Elizabeth was twisting her left hand about to
get different lights on her ring, which she had managed to slip on her
finger when Cherry-pie was not looking. Blair, with absent eyes, was
singing under his breath:
"'Oh! I came to a river, an' I couldn't get across;
Sing "Polly-wolly-doodle" all the day!
An' I jumped upon a nigger, an' I thought he was a hoss;
Sing Polly-wolly--'
"Horrid old hole, Mercer," he broke off, resting on his oars and
letting the boat slip back on the current.
"I like Mercer!" Elizabeth said, ceasing to admire the ring. "Since
you've come home from boarding-school you don't like anything but the
East." She began to stroke her puppy's head violently. Blair was
silent; he was looking at a willow dipping its swaying finger-tips in
the water.
"Blair! why don't you answer me?"
Blair, plainly bored, said, "Well, I don't like hideousness and dirt."
"David likes Mercer."
"I bet Mrs. Richie doesn't," Blair murmured, and began to row lazily.
"Oh, Mrs. Richie!" cried Elizabeth; "you think whatever she thinks is
about perfect."
"Well, isn't it?"
Elizabeth's lip hardened. "I suppose you think she's perfect too?"
"I do," Blair said.
"She thinks I'm dreadful because, sometimes, I--get provoked,"
Elizabeth said angrily.
"Well, you are," Blair agreed calmly.
"If I am so wicked, I wonder you want to be engaged to me!"
"Can't I like anybody but you?" Blair said, and yawned.
"You can like everybody, for all I care," she retorted. Blair whistled,
upon which Elizabeth became absorbed in petting her dog, kissing him
ardently between his eyes.
"I hate to see a girl kiss a dog," Blair observed;
"'Sing Polly-wolly-doo--'"
"Don't look, then," said Elizabeth, and kissed Bobby again.
Blair sighed, and gave up his song. Bobby, obviously uncomfortable,
scrambled out of Elizabeth's lap and began to stretch himself on the
uncertain floor of the skiff.
"Lie down!" Blair commanded, and poked the little creature, not
ungently, with his foot. Bobby yelped, gave a flying nip at his ankle,
and retreated to the shelter of his mistress's skirts. "Confound that
dog!" cried Blair.
"You are a horrid boy!" she said, consoling her puppy with frantic
caresses. "I'm glad he bit you!"
Blair, rubbing his ankle, said he'd like to throw the little wretch
overboard.
Well, of course, Elizabeth being Elizabeth, the result was inevitable.
The next instant the ring lay sparkling in the bottom of the boat. "I
break my engagement! Take your old ring! You are a cruel, wicked boy,
and I hate you--so there!" "I must say I don't see why you should
expect me to enjoy being bitten," Blair said hotly. "Well, all right;
throw me over, if you want to. I shall never trust a woman again as
long as I live!" He began to row fiercely. "I only hope that darned pup
isn't going mad."
"I hope he _is_ going mad," said Elizabeth, trembling all over, "and I
hope you'll go mad, too. Put me on shore this instant!"
"Considering the current, I fear you will have to endure my society for
several instants," Blair said.
"I'd rather be drowned!" she cried furiously, and as she spoke, even
before he could raise his hand to stop her, with Bobby in her arms she
sprang lightly over the side of the boat into the water. There was a
terrific splash--but, alas! Elizabeth, in preferring death to Blair's
society, had not calculated upon the September shallows, and even
before the horrified boy could drop his oars and spring to her
assistance, she was on her feet, standing knee-deep in the muddy
current.
The water completely extinguished the fires of wrath. In the hubbub
that followed, the ejaculations and outcries, Nannie's tears, Miss
White's terrified scolding, Blair's protestations to David that it
wasn't his fault--through it all, Elizabeth, wading ashore, was silent.
Only at the landing of the toll-house, when poor distracted Cherry-pie
bade the boys get a carriage, did she speak:
"I won't go in a carriage. I am going to walk home."
"My lamb! you'll take cold! You mustn't!"
"You look like the deuce," Blair told her anxiously; and David blurted
out, "Elizabeth, you can't walk home; you're a perfect object!"
Elizabeth, through the mud trickling over her eyes, flashed a look at
him:
"_That's_ why I'm going to walk!" And walk she did--across the bridge,
along the street, a dripping little figure stared at by passers-by, and
followed by the faithful but embarrassed four--by five, indeed, for
Blair had fished Bobby out of the water, and even stopped, once in a
while when no one was looking, to give the maker of all this trouble a
furtive and apologetic pat. At Elizabeth's door, in a very scared frame
of mind lest Mr. Ferguson should come out and catch him, Blair
attempted to apologize.
"Don't be silly," Elizabeth said, muddy and shivering, but just; "it
wasn't your fault. But we're not engaged any more." And that was the
end of the love-story!
Elizabeth told Cherry-pie that she had "broken with Blair Maitland
_forever!_" Miss White, when she went to make her report of the
dreadful event to Mr. Ferguson, added that she felt assured the young
people had got over their foolishness. Elizabeth's uncle, telling the
story of the ducking to David's horrified mother, said that he was
greatly relieved to know that Elizabeth had come to her senses.
But with all the "tellings" that buzzed between the three households,
nobody thought of telling Mrs. Maitland. Why should they? Who would
connect this woman of iron and toil and sweat, of noise and motion,
with the sentimentalities of two children? She had to find it out for
herself.
At breakfast on the morning of the day Blair was to start East, his
mother, looking over the top of her newspaper at him, said abruptly:
"Blair, I have something to say to you before you go. Be at my office
at the Works at ten-fifteen." She looked at him amiably, then pushed
back her chair. "Nannie! Get my bonnet. Come! Hurry! I'm late!"
Nannie, running, brought the bonnet, a bunch of rusty black crepe, with
strings frayed with many tyings. "Oh, Mamma," she said softly, "do let
me get you a new bonnet?"
But Mrs. Maitland was not listening. "Harris!" she called loudly, "tell
Watson to have those roller figures for me at eleven. And I want the
linen tracing--Bates will know what I mean--at noon without fail.
Nannie, see that there's boiled cabbage for dinner."
A moment later the door banged behind her. The abrupt silence was like
a blow. Nannie and Harris caught their breaths; it was as if the oxygen
had been sucked out of the air; there was a minute before any one
breathed freely. Then Blair flung up his arms in a wordless protest; he
actually winced with pain. He glanced around the unlovely room; at the
table, with its ledgers and clutter of unmatched china--old Canton, and
heavy white earthenware, and odd cups and saucers with splashing
decorations which had pleased Harris's eye; at the files of newspapers
on the sideboard, the grimy walls, the untidy fireplace. "Thank Heaven!
I'm going off to-day. I wish I need never come back," he said.
"Oh, Blair, that is a dreadful thing to say!"
"It may be dreadful, but that's the way I feel. I can't help my
feelings, can I? The further mother and I are apart, the better we love
each other. Well! I suppose I've got to go and see her bossing a lot of
men, instead of sitting at home, like a lady;--and I'll get a dreadful
blowing up. Of course she knows about the engagement now, thanks to
Elizabeth's craziness."
"I don't believe she knows anything about it," Nannie tried to
encourage him.
"Oh, you bet old Ferguson has told her," Blair said, gloomily. "Say,
Nannie, if Elizabeth doesn't look out she'll get into awful hot water
one of these days with her devil of a temper--and she'll get other
people into it, too," he ended resentfully. Blair hated hot water, as
he hated everything that was unbeautiful. "Mother is going to take my
head off, of course," he said.
But Sarah Maitland, entirely ignorant of what had happened, had no such
intention; she had gone over to her office in a glow of personal
pleasure that warmed up the details of business. She intended to take
Blair that morning through the Works,--not as he had often gone before,
tagging after her, a frightened child, a reluctant boy--but as the
prince, formally looking over the kingdom into which he was so soon to
come! He was in love: therefore he would wish to be married; therefore
he would be impatient to get to work! It was all a matter of logical
and satisfactory deduction. How many times in this hot summer, when
very literally she was earning her son's bread by the sweat of her
brow, had she looked at Elizabeth and Blair, and found enjoyment in
these deductions! Nobody would have imagined it, but the big, ungainly
woman _dreamed!_ Dreamed of her boy, of his business success, of his
love, of his wife,--and, who knows? perhaps those grimy pink baby socks
began to mean something more personal than the missionary barrel. It
was her purpose, on this particular morning, to tell him, after they
had gone through the Works, just where, when he graduated, he was to
begin. Not at the bottom!--that was Ferguson's idea. "He ought to start
at the bottom, if he is ever to get to the top," Ferguson had barked.
No, Blair need not start at the bottom; he could begin pretty well up
at the top; and he should have a salary. What an incentive that would
be! First she would tell him that now, when he was going to college,
she meant to increase his allowance; then she would tell him about the
salary he would have when he got to work. How happy he would be! For a
boy to be in love, and have all the pocket-money he wanted, and a great
business to look forward to; to have work--work! the finest thing in
the world!--all ready to his hand,--what more could a human being
desire? At the office, she swept through the morning business with a
speed that took her people off their feet. Once or twice she glanced at
the clock; Blair was always unpunctual. "He'll get _that_ knocked out
of him when he gets into business," she thought, grimly.
It was eleven before he came loitering across the Yards. His mother,
lifting her head for a moment from her desk, and glancing impatiently
out of the dirt-begrimed office window, saw him coming, and caught the
gleam of his patent-leather shoes as he skirted a puddle just outside
the door. "Well, Master Blair," she said to herself, flinging down her
pen, "you'll forget those pretty boots when you get to walking around
your Works!"
Blair, dawdling through the outer office, found his way to her sanctum,
and sat down in a chair beside her desk. He glanced at her shrinkingly,
and looked away. Her bonnet was crooked; her hair was hanging in wisps
at the back of her neck; her short skirt showed the big, broad-soled
foot twisted round the leg of her chair. Blair saw the muddy sole of
that shoe, and half closed his eyes. Then remembering Elizabeth, he
felt a little sick; "she's going to row about it!" he thought, and
quailed.
"You're late," she said; then, without stopping for his excuses, she
proceeded with the business in hand. "I'm going to increase your
allowance."
Blair sat up in astonishment.
"I mean while you're at college. After that I shall stop the allowance
entirely, and you will go to work. You will go on a salary, like any
other man." Her mouth clicked shut in a tight line of satisfaction.
The color flew into Blair's face. "Why!" he said. "You are awfully
good, Mother. Really, I--"
"I know all about this business of your engagement to Elizabeth," Mrs.
Maitland broke in, "though you didn't see fit to tell me about it
yourself." There was something in her voice that would have betrayed
her to any other hearer; but Blair, who was sensitive to Mrs. Richie's
slightest wish, and careful of old Cherry-pie's comfort, and generously
thoughtful even of Harris--Blair, absorbed in his own apprehensions,
heard no pain in his mother's voice. "I know all about it," Mrs.
Maitland went on. "I won't have you call yourselves engaged until you
are out of college, of course. But I have no objection to your looking
forward to being engaged, and married, too. It's a good thing for a
young man to expect to be married; keeps him clean."
Blair was struck dumb. Evidently, though she did not know what had
happened, she did know that he had been engaged. Yet she was not going
to take his head off! Instead she was going to increase his allowance
because, apparently, she approved of him!
"So I want to tell you," she went on, "though you have not seen fit to
tell me anything, that I'm willing you should marry Elizabeth, as soon
as you can support her. And you can do that as soon as you graduate,
because, as I say, when you are in the Works, I shall pay you"--her
iron face lighted--"I shall pay you _a salary!_ a good salary."
More money! Blair laughed with satisfaction; the prospect soothed the
sting of Elizabeth's "meanness"--which was what he called it, when he
did not remember to name it, darkly, "faithlessness." He was so
comforted that he had, for the first time in his life, an impulse to
confide in his mother; "Elizabeth got provoked at me"--there was a
boyish demand for sympathy in his tone; "and--"
But Mrs. Maitland interrupted him. "Come along," she said, chuckling.
She got up, pulled her bonnet straight, and gave her son a jocose
thrust in the ribs that made him jump. "I can't waste time over lovers'
quarrels. Patch it up! patch it up! You can afford to, you know, before
you get married. You'll get your innings later, my boy!" Still
chuckling at her own joke, she slammed down the top of her desk and
tramped into the outer office.
Blair turned scarlet with anger. The personal familiarity extinguished
his little friendly impulse to blurt out his trouble with Elizabeth, as
completely as a gust of wind puts out a scarcely lighted candle. He got
up, his teeth set, his hands clenched in his pockets, and followed his
mother through the Yards--vast, hideous wastes, scorching in the
September heats, full of endless rows of pig, piles of scrap, acres, it
seemed to Blair, of slag. The screeching clamor of the place reeked
with the smell of rust and rubbish and sour earth, and the air was
vibrant with the clatter of the "buggies" on the narrow-gauge tracks
that ran in a tangled network from one furnace to another. Blair,
trudging along behind his mother, cringing at the ugliness of
everything about him, did not dare to speak; he still felt that dig in
the ribs, and was so angry he could not have controlled his voice.
Mrs. Maitland walked through her Iron Works as some women walk through
a garden:--lovingly. She talked to her son rapidly; this was so and so;
there was such and such a department; in that new shed she meant to put
the draftsmen; over there the timekeeper;--she paused. Blair had left
her, and was standing in an open doorway of the foundry, watching,
breathlessly, a jibcrane bearing a great ladle full of tons of liquid
metal that shimmered above its white-hot expanse with the shifting blue
flames of escaping gas. Seething and bubbling, the molten iron slopped
in a flashing film over the side of the caldron, every drop, as it
struck the black earth, rebounding in a thousand exploding points of
fire. Above the swaying ladle, far up in the glooms under the roof, the
shadows were pierced by the lurching dazzle of arc-lamps; but when the
ladle tipped, and with a crackling roar the stream of metal flowed into
a mold, the sizzling violet gleam of the lamps was abruptly
extinguished by the intolerable glare of light.
"Oh," Blair said breathlessly, "how wonderful!"
"It _is_ wonderful," his mother said. "Thomas, here, can move the lever
that tips the ladle with his two fingers--and out comes the iron as
neatly as cream out of a jug!"
Blair was so entirely absorbed in the fierce magnificence of light, and
in the glowing torsos of the molders, planted as they were against the
profound shadows of the foundry, that when she said, "Come on!" he did
not hear her. Mrs. Maitland, standing with her hands on her hips, her
feet well apart, held her head high; she was intensely gratified by his
interest. "If his father had only lived to see him!" she said to
herself. In her pride, she almost swaggered; she nodded, chuckling, to
the molder at her elbow:
"He takes to it like a duck to water, doesn't he, Jim?" "And," said
Jim, telling the story afterward, "I allowed I'd never seen a young
feller as knowing about castings as him. She took it down straight. You
can't pile it on too thick for a woman, about her young 'un."
"Somebody ought to paint it," Blair said, under his breath.
Mrs. Maitland's face glowed; she came and stood beside him a moment in
silence, resting her big, dirty hand on his shoulder. Then she said,
half sheepishly, "I call that ladle the 'cradle of civilization.' Think
what's inside of it! There are rails, that will hold New York and San
Francisco together, and engines and machines for the whole world; there
are telegraph wires that will bring--think of all the kinds of news
they will bring, Blair,--wars, and births of babies! There are bridges
in it, and pens that may write--well, maybe love-letters," she said,
with sly and clumsy humor, "or even write, perhaps, the liberty of a
race, as Lincoln's pen wrote it. Yes!" she said, her face full of
luminous abstraction, "the cradle of civilization!"
He could hardly hear her voice in the giant tumult of exploding metal
and the hammering and crashing in the adjacent mill; but when she said
that, he looked round at her with the astonishment of one who sees a
familiar face where he has supposed he would see a stranger. He forgot
his shame in having a mother who ran an iron-mill; he even forgot that
impudent thrust in the ribs; a spark of sympathy leaped between them as
real in its invisibility as the white glitter of the molten iron
sputtering over their heads. "Yes," he said, "it's all that, and it is
magnificent, too!"
"Come on!" she said, with a proud look. Over her shoulder she flung
back at him figures and statistics; she told him of the tons of bridge
materials on the books; the rail contract she had just taken was a big
thing, very big! "We've never handled such an order, but we can do it!"
They were walking rapidly from the foundry to the furnaces; Sarah
Maitland was inspecting piles of pig, talking to puddlers, all the
while bending and twisting between her strong fingers, with their
blackened nails, a curl of borings, perhaps biting on it, thoughtfully,
while she considered some piece of work, then blowing the crumbs of
iron out from between her lips and bursting into quick directions or
fault-finding. She stood among her men, in her short skirt, her gray
hair straggling out over her forehead from under her shabby bonnet, and
gave her orders; but for the first time in her life she was
self-conscious--Blair was looking on! listening! thinking, no doubt,
that one of these days he would be doing just what she was doing! For
the moment she was as vain as a girl; then, abruptly, her happy
excitement paused. She stood still, flinching and wincing, and putting
a hand up to her eye.
"Ach!" she said; "a filing!" she looked with the other sympathetically
watering eye at her son. "Here, take this thing out."
"_I_?" Blair said, dismayed. "Oh, I might hurt you." Then, in his
helplessness and concern--for, ignorant as he was, he knew enough of
the Works to know that an iron filing in your eye is no joke--he
turned, with a flurried gesture, to one of the molders. "Get a doctor,
can't you? Don't stand there staring!"
"Doctor?" said Mrs. Maitland. She gave her son a look, and laughed.
"He's afraid he'll hurt me!" she said, with a warm joyousness in her
voice; "Jim, got a jack-knife? Just dig this thing out." Jim came,
dirty and hesitating, but prepared for a very common emergency of the
Works. With a black thumb and forefinger he raised the wincing lid, and
with the pointed blade of the jack-knife lifted, with delicacy and
precision, the irritating iron speck from the eyeball. "'Bliged," Mrs.
Maitland said. She clapped a rather grimy handkerchief over the poor
red eye, and turned to Blair. "Come on!" she said, and struck him on
the shoulder so heartily that he stumbled. Her cheek was blackened by
the molder's greasy fingers, and so smeared with tears from the still
watering eye that he could not bear to look at it. He hesitated, then
offered her his handkerchief, which at least had the advantage of being
clean. She took it, glanced at its elaborate monogram, and laughed;
then she dabbed her eye with it. "I guess I'll have to put some of that
cologne of yours on this fancy thing. Remember that green bottle with
the calendar and the red ribbons on it, that you gave me when you were
a little fellow? I've never had anything of my own fine enough to use
the stuff on!"
When they got back to the office again she was very brief and
business-like with him. She had had a fine morning, but she couldn't
waste any more time! "You can keep all this that you have seen in your
mind. I don't know just where I shall put you. If you have a
preference, express it." Then she told him what his salary would be
when he got to work, and what allowance he was to have for the present.
"Now, clear out, clear out!" she said; "good-by"; and turned her cheek
toward him for their semi-annual parting. Blair, with his eyes shut,
kissed her.
"Good-by, Mother. It has been awfully interesting. And I am awfully
obliged to you about the allowance." On the threshold of the office he
halted. "Mother," he said,--and his voice was generous even to
wistfulness; "Mother, that cradle thing was stunning."
Mrs. Maitland nodded proudly; when he had gone, she folded his
handkerchief up, and with a queer, shy gesture, slipped it into the
bosom of her dress. Then she rang her bell. "Ask Mr. Ferguson to step
here." When her superintendent took the chair beside her desk, she was
all business; but when business was over and he got up, she stopped
him: "Tell the bookkeeper to double Blair's allowance, beginning
to-day."
Ferguson made a memorandum.
"And Mr. Ferguson, I have told Blair that I consent to his engagement
with Elizabeth, and I shall make it possible for them to be married as
soon as he graduates--"
"But--"
"I do this," she went on, her satisfaction warm in her voice, "because
I think he needs the incentive that comes to a young man when he wants
to get married. It is natural and proper. And I will see that things
are right for them."
"In the first place," said Robert Ferguson, "I would not permit
Elizabeth to marry Blair; but fortunately we need not discuss that.
They have quarreled, and there is no longer any question of such a
thing."
"Quarreled! but only this morning, not an hour ago, he let me
suppose--" She paused. "Well, I'm sorry." She paused again, and made
aimless marks with her pen on the blotter. "That's all this morning,
Mr. Ferguson." And though he lingered to tell her, with grim amusement,
of Elizabeth's angry bath, she made no further comment.
When he had left the office she got up and shut the door. Then she went
back to her chair, and leaning an elbow on her desk, covered her lips
with her hand. After she had sat thus for nearly ten minutes, she
suddenly rang for an office-boy. "Take this handkerchief up to the
house to my son," she said; "he forgot it."