During the ensuing week, a considerable portion of which Mr. Port passed
in the privacy of his own room, the relations between Miss Lee and her
guardian were characterized by a chill formality that was ominous of
a coming storm. In point of fact, Mr. Port was waiting only until
he should fully regain his strength in order to try conclusions with
Dorothy once and for all--and he was most highly resolved that in the
impending battle royal he should not suffer defeat. So far, he had gone
down in each encounter with his spirited antagonist because the tactics
employed against him were of an unfamiliar sort. But he was beginning to
get the hang of these tactics now; and he also had got what in fighting
parlance would have been styled his second wind. As he thought of the
wrongs which had been heaped upon him, rage filled his breast; and the
strong determination slowly shaped itself within him that to the finesse
of the enemy he would oppose a solid front of brute force.
Astuteness was not the least marked of Miss Lee’s many charming
characteristics, and although her guardian gave no outward sign of his
belligerent intentions, she felt an inward conviction that a decisive
trial of strength between them was at hand. Five or six years earlier
she had engaged in a trial of this nature with her mother, and had
emerged from it victorious. In that case, feminine weakness had yielded
to feminine strength. But now the gloomy thought assailed her that her
uncle, while closely resembling her mother in the matter of his liver,
had in the depths of his torpid nature a substratum of brutal masculine
resolution against which, should it fairly be set in array, she might
battle in vain. And the upshot of her meditations was the conviction
that her only chance of success lay in avoiding a battle by a radical
change of base.
An easy way, as she perceived, to effect such a change of base was to
marry Van Rensselaer Livingstone. Indeed, his proposal, a couple of days
after the yacht voyage ended, came so opportunely that she almost
was surprised into accepting it out of hand. But Dorothy was too well
balanced a young person to do anything hastily, even to get herself
out of a tight place; and while she held Livingstone’s proposal under
advisement--as a line of retreat kept open for use in case of urgent
necessity--she welcomed it less for the possibilities of a safer
position that it offered than for those which it suggested to her
fertile mind.
Marriage, she decided, was the only way by which she could score a final
victory over her uncle, and at the same time spike his guns; but it
did not necessarily follow that her marriage must be with Livingstone.
Indeed, as her coolly intelligent mind perceived, marrying an
unmanageable young man in order to be free of an unmanageable old one
would be simply walking out of the frying-pan into the fire--and that
was not at all the resolution of her difficulties that Dorothy sought.
The plan that now began to shape itself in her mind was one by which
both fire and frying-pan would be successfully avoided; and as the more
that she examined into it the more desirable it appeared to her, she
lost no time in carrying it into effect--whereby, in less than three
days’ time, she sent Mr. Van Rensselaer Livingstone away in such a rage
that he put to sea in the very face of a threatening north-easter, and
in a much shorter period she caused her uncle seriously to doubt the
evidence of his own senses.
At the end of his week of retirement, Mr. Port found himself in the
hale condition of a bilious giant refreshed with blue-pills. He looked a
little thinner than when he had started upon his ill-starred cruise, and
his usual ruddiness was not as yet fully restored; but he was in capital
condition, and a good deal more than ready for Miss Lee to come on.
He could not very well, in the nature of the case, start an offensive
campaign; but at the very first suggestion on Dorothy’s part of
the slightest desire to engage again in any of the various forms of
frivolous amusement by which she had made his life a burden to him, he
was all loaded and primed to go off with a bang that he believed would
settle her.
And, such is the perversity of human nature, Mr. Port presently became
not a little annoyed by Dorothy’s failure to supply the spark that was
to touch him off. In fact, her conduct was bewilderingly strange.
She drew away from the lively circle of which Mrs. Rattleton was the
animated centre and voluntarily associated herself with the elderly and
very respectable Philadelphians whoso acquaintance she previously had
so emphatically declined. Still further to Mr. Port’s astonishment, the
lady and gentleman especially singled out by Miss Lee as most in accord
with her newly-acquired tastes were the severe Mrs. Logan Rittenhouse
and that lady’s staid brother, Mr. Pennington Brown.
[Illustration: The severe Mrs. Logan Rittenhouse 074]
At the feet of the former, quite literally, she sat as a disciple in
crochet; and listened the while with every outward sign of interest to
the dull record of South Fourth Street scandals of the past and West
Walnut Street scandals of the present which this estimable matron
poured into her ears by the hour at a time. And in a quiet corner of the
veranda (Mr. Brown’s eyesight having failed a little, so that he found
reading rather difficult) she read aloud to the latter from _Watson’s
Annals_; and listened with a pleased satisfaction to his comments upon
her selections from this, the Philadelphia Bible, and to the numerous
anecdotes of a genealogical and antiquarian cast which thus were
recalled to his mind. Possibly the readings from _Watson_ were continued
in the afternoons--when Miss Lee and Mr. Brown regularly went down to
the Rocks. So extraordinary was all this that Mr. Port admitted frankly
to himself that he could make neither head nor tail of it; but he had an
inborn conviction that such an unnatural state of affairs was not likely
to last There was good Scriptural authority, he called to mind grimly,
for the assertion that the leopard did not change his spots nor the
Ethiopian his skin.