Three weeks later, when Margaret came to review the course of events
which had strangely led to the almost unbelievable fact of her
betrothal to Daniel Leitzel, she realized that the "turn for the
worse," as she called it, had come to her upon watching Mr. Leitzel
with Harriet's children on that evening after the automobile ride which
had made her spiritually ill. Squatting on the floor with the three
babies gathered about him, he had actually become human and tender and
self-forgetful; and he had exhibited a cleverness in entertaining and
fascinating the bright, eager children that had evoked her admiration
and almost her liking.
She had not come downstairs until just a half-hour before dinner, and
as she had entered the library, dressed in a low-necked, short-sleeved
summer gown of pale pink batiste, she had noted, without much interest,
Mr. Leitzel's countenance of vivid pleasure as, from his place on the
floor, unable to rise because of the children sprawling all over him,
he had gazed up at her. But when, after watching him play for a
half-hour with the babies, she had presently relieved him of the
youngest to give it its bottle, she really began to feel, before the
ardent look he fixed upon her as she sat holding the hungry, drowsy
infant to her heart, a faint stirring of her blood.
"The Madonna and the Child!" he had said adoringly, and Margaret was
astonished to find herself blushing; to discover that _this_ man could
bring the faintest warmth to her cheeks!
In the course of that evening, during dinner and later when the
children had been taken to bed by Harriet, and Mr. Leitzel was again,
as on the previous night, left on her hands, she could not be
indifferent to the novel experience of finding herself the object of a
fixity and intensity of admiration which, from a man so self-centred,
suggested the possession on her part of an unsuspected power.
Even his occasional conversational _faux pas_ did not break the
peculiar spell he cast upon her by his devotion.
"Have you read many of these books?" he asked her, glancing at the
shelves near him. "Here are about twenty books all by one man--James.
Astonishing! What does he find to write about to such an extent?"
"They are the works of the two Jameses, the brothers Henry and William,
the novelist and the psychologist, you know; only, Uncle Osmond
insisted upon cataloguing Henry, also, with the psychologists."
"The James brothers? I've heard more about Jesse than about the other
two. Jesse was an outlaw, you remember. The other two, then, were
respectable?"
"'Respectable?' Henry and William James? I'm sure they would hate to
be considered so!"