THE Professor happened to come home earlier than usual one bright
October afternoon. He left the walk and cut across the turf, intending
to enter by the open French window, but he paused a moment outside to
admire the scene within. The drawing-room was full of autumn flowers,
dahlias and wild asters and goldenrod. The red-gold sunlight lay in
bright puddles on the thick blue carpet, made hazy aureoles about the
stuffed blue chairs. There was, in the room, as he looked through the
window, a rich, intense effect of autumn, something that presented
October much more sharply and sweetly to him than the coloured maples
and the aster-bordered paths by which he had come home. It struck him
that the seasons sometimes gain by being brought into the house, just as
they gain by being brought into painting, and into poetry. The hand,
fastidious and bold, which selected and placed--it was that which made
the difference. In Nature there is no selection.
In a corner, beside the steaming brass tea-kettle, sat Lillian and
Louie, a little lacquer table between them, bending, it seemed, over a
casket of jewels. Lillian held up lovingly in her fingers a green-gold
necklace, evidently an old one, without stones. “Of course emeralds
would be beautiful, Louie, but they seem a little out of scale--to
belong to a different scheme of life than any you and Rosamond can live
here. You aren’t, after all, outrageously rich. When would she wear
them?”
“At home, Dearest, with me, at our own dinner-table at Outland! I like
the idea of their being out of scale. I’ve never given her any jewels.
I’ve waited all this time to give her these. To me, her name spells
emeralds.”
Mrs. St. Peter smiled, easily persuaded. “You’ll never be able to keep
them. You’ll show them to her.”
“Oh, no, I won’t! They are to stay at the jeweller’s, in Chicago, until
we all go down for the birthday party. That’s another secret we have to
keep. We have such lots of them!” He bent over her hand and kissed it
with warmth.
St. Peter swung in over the window rail. “That is always the cue for the
husband to enter, isn’t it? What’s this about Chicago, Louie?”
He sat down, and Marsellus brought him some tea, lingering beside his
chair. “It must be a secret from Rosie, but you see it happens that the
date of your lecture engagement at the University of Chicago is
coincident with her birthday, so I have planned that we shall all go
down together. And among other diversions, we shall attend your
lectures.”
The Professor’s eyebrows rose. “Bus-man’s holiday for the ladies, I
should say.”
“But not for me. Remember, I wasn’t in your classes, like Scott and
Outland. I’d give a good deal if I’d had the chance!” Louie said
somewhat plaintively. “So you must make it up to me.”
“Come if you wish. Lectures seem to me a rather grim treat, Louie.”
“Not to me. With a wink of encouragement I’ll go on to Boston with you
next winter, when you give the Lowell lectures.”
“Would you, really? Next year’s a long way off. Now I must get clean.
I’ve been working in my other-house garden, and I’m scarcely fit to have
tea with a beautiful lady and a smartly dressed gentleman. What am I to
do about that garden in the end, Lillian? Destroy it? Or leave it to the
mercy of the next tenants?”
As he went upstairs he turned at the bend of the staircase and looked
back at them, again bending over their little box. Mrs. St. Peter was
wearing the white silk crêpe that had been the most successful of her
summer dresses, and an orchid velvet ribbon about her shining hair. She
wouldn’t have made herself look quite so well if Louie hadn’t been
coming, he reflected. Or was it that he wouldn’t have noticed it if
Louie hadn’t been there? A man long accustomed to admire his wife in
general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude,
unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of
another man.
Lillian’s coquetry with her sons-in-law amused him. He hadn’t foreseen
it, and he found it rather the most piquant and interesting thing about
having married daughters. It had begun with Scott--the younger sister
was married before the elder. St. Peter had thought that Scott McGregor
was the sort of fellow Lillian always found tiresome. But no; within a
few weeks after Kathleen’s marriage, arch and confidential relations
began to be evident between them. Even now, when Louie was so much in
the foreground, and Scott was touchy and jealous, Lillian was very
tactful and patient with him.
With Louie, Lillian seemed to be launching into a new career, and
Godfrey began to think that he understood his own wife very little. He
would have said that she would feel about Louie just as he did; would
have cultivated him as a stranger in the town, because he was so unusual
and exotic, but without in the least wishing to adopt anyone so foreign
into the family circle. She had always been fastidious to an
unreasonable degree about small niceties of deportment. She could never
forgive poor Tom Outland for the angle at which he sometimes held a
cigar in his mouth, or for the fact that he never learned to eat salad
with ease. At the dinner-table, if Tom, forgetting himself in talk,
sometimes dropped back into railroad lunch-counter ways and pushed his
plate away from him when he had finished a course, Lillian’s face would
become positively cruel in its contempt. Irregularities of that sort put
her all on edge. But Louie could hurry audibly through his soup, or kiss
her resoundingly on the cheek at a faculty reception, and she seemed to
like it.
Yes, with her sons-in-law she had begun the game of being a woman all
over again. She dressed for them, planned for them, schemed in their
interests. She had begun to entertain more than for years past--the new
house made a plausible pretext--and to use her influence and charm in
the little anxious social world of Hamilton. She was intensely
interested in the success and happiness of these two young men, lived in
their careers as she had once done in his. It was splendid, St. Peter
told himself. She wasn’t going to have to face a stretch of boredom
between being a young woman and being a young grandmother. She was less
intelligent and more sensible than he had thought her.
When Godfrey came downstairs ready for dinner, Louie was gone. He walked
up to the chair where his wife was reading, and took her hand.
“My dear,” he said quite delicately, “I wish you could keep Louie from
letting his name go up for the Arts and Letters. It’s not safe yet. He’s
not been here long enough. They’re a fussy little bunch, and he ought to
wait until they know him better.”
“You mean someone will blackball him? Do you really think so? But the
Country Club----”
“Yes, Lillian; the Country Club is a big affair, and needs money. The
Arts and Letters is a little group of fellows, and, as I said, fussy.”
“Scott belongs,” said Mrs. St. Peter rebelliously. “Did he tell you?”
“No, he didn’t, and I shall not tell you who did. But if you’re tactful,
you can save Louie’s feelings.”
Mrs. St. Peter closed her book without glancing down at it. A new
interest shone in her eyes and made them look quite through and beyond
her husband. “I must see what I can do with Scott,” she murmured.
St. Peter turned away to hide a smile. An old student of his, a friend
who belonged to “the Outland period,” had told him laughingly that he
was sure Scott would blackball Marsellus if his name ever came to the
vote. “You know Scott is a kid in some things,” the friend had said.
“He’s a little sore at Marsellus, and says a secret ballot is the only
way he can ever get him where it wouldn’t hurt Mrs. St. Peter.”
While the Professor was eating his soup, he studied his wife’s face in
the candlelight. It had changed so much since he found her laughing with
Louie, and especially since he had dropped the hint about the Arts and
Letters. It had become, he thought, too hard for the orchid velvet in
her hair. Her upper lip had grown longer, and stiffened as it always did
when she encountered opposition.
“Well,” he reflected, “it will be interesting to see what she can do
with Scott. That will make rather a test case.”