Two or three days later Dorothy advanced her second parallel. In the
interval they had bathed every morning and had driven to the Point every
afternoon, and they had held converse upon the veranda of the hotel
every evening until ten o’clock with certain eminently respectable
people from Philadelphia, by whom Dorothy was bored, as she did not
hesitate to confess, almost to desperation. Further, Mr. Port had given
a lunch-party to which these same Philadelphians were invited; and his
niece had informed him, when the festivity was at an end, that if he did
anything like that again she certainly would either run away or drown
herself. Any trials in this world or any dangers in the next, she
declared, were preferable to sitting opposite to such a person as Mrs.
Logan Rittenhouse, who talked nothing but uninteresting scandal and
crochet, and next to Mr. Pennington Brown, who talked only about
peoples’ great-grandfathers and great-aunts.
It was with a lively alarm that Mr. Port noted these signs of
discontent, together with returning symptoms of the grumpiness which
had disturbed his comfort and digestion at Saratoga; and it was most
selfishly in his own self-interest that he tried to think of something
that would afford his niece amusement. Miss Lee, when she perceived that
her intelligently laid plans were working successfully, was graciously
pleased to assist him.
“It is a great pity, Uncle Hutchinson,” she vouchsafed to remark on the
fourth day of suppressed domestic sunshine, “that you don’t like tennis.
Don’t you think, for your angel’s sake, that you could go for just a
little while this afternoon? There’s going to be a capital match this
afternoon, and your angel does so want to see it. You haven’t been
very--very agreeable the past two or three days, you dear, and I fear
that your liver must be a little out of order. Really, you haven’t given
your angel a single chance to be affectionate--and unless she can be
affectionate and sweet and clinging, and things like that, you know,
your poor angel is not happy at all. Suppose we try the tennis for just
half an hour or so? It won’t be much of a sacrifice for you, and it will
make your angel so happy that she will make herself dearer to you than
ever, you precious thing.”
This form of address was disconcerting to Mr. Port, for during the
period to which Miss Lee referred he certainly had been trying--not very
cleverly, perhaps, for such efforts were not at all in his line, but
still to the best of his ability--to make himself as agreeable as
possible; and the effort on the part of his niece to be angelic, of
which she spoke so confidently, he could not but think had fallen rather
more than a little short of absolute success. The one ray of comfort
that he extracted from Dorothy’s utterance was her reference to herself
as his angel; he had come to understand that the use of this term was
a sign of fair weather, and he valued it accordingly. But even for the
sake of fair weather Mr. Port was not yet prepared to expose his elderly
joints to the draughty discomforts of the galleries overhanging the
tennis-court; and he said so, pretty decidedly. Almost anything else he
was willing to do, he added, but that particular thing he would not do
at all.
“As you please, Uncle Hutchinson,” Dorothy answered, in a tone of gloomy
resignation. “I am used to hearing that. It is just what poor dear mamma
used to say. She always was willing, you know, to do everything but
the thing that I wanted her to do. I remember, just to mention a single
instance, how mamma broke up a delightful water party on Windermere that
Sir Gordon Graham had arranged expressly for us. The weather was rather
misty, as it is apt to be up there, you know, but nothing worth minding
when you are well wrapped up. But mamma said that if she went out in
such a drizzle she knew her cough would be ever so much worse--and of
course she couldn’t really know that it would be worse, for nobody truly
knows what the weather is going to do to them--and so she wouldn’t
go. And Sir Gordon was very much hurt about it, and never came near
us again. And unless I’m very much mistaken, Uncle Hutchinson, mamma’s
selfishness that day lost me the chance of being Lady Graham. So I’m
used to being treated in this way, and you needn’t at all mind refusing
me everything that I ask.” And, being delivered of this discourse, Miss
Lee lapsed into a condition of funereal gloom.
At the end of another twenty-four hours Mr. Port knuckled under. “I
have been thinking, Dorothy,” he said, “about what you were saying about
tennis. It’s a beastly game, but since you insist upon seeing it I’ll
take you for a little while this afternoon.” This was not the most
gracious form of words in which an invitation could be couched; but
Dorothy, who was not a stickler for forms provided she was successful in
results, accepted it with alacrity. Later in the day, as they returned
from the Casino, she declared:
“Your angel has had a lovely afternoon, Uncle Hutchinson, and she is
sure that you have had a lovely afternoon too. And now that you’ve found
what fun there is in looking at tennis, we’ll go every day, won’t we,
dear? Sometimes, you know, you are just a little, just a very little
prejudiced about things; but you are so good and sweet-tempered that
your prejudices never last long, and so your angel cannot help loving
you a great deal.”
Mr. Port, who was not at all sweet-tempered at that moment, was prepared
to reply to the first half of this speech in terms of some emphasis;
for he was limping a little, and a shocking twinge took him in his
left shoulder when he attempted to raise his arm. But Dorothy’s sudden
shifting to polite personalities was of a nature to choke off his
projected indignant utterance. Yet not feeling by any means prepared
to meet in kind her pleasing manifestation of affection, Mr. Port was a
little put to it to find any suitable form of response. After a moment’s
reflection he abandoned the attempt to reply coherently, and contented
himself with grunting.