She dragged him toward the centre-table, grasped his wrist, and forced
him to make several dabs and passes at the fatal newspaper, which still
lay there with a bland impassivity between drop-light and book-rack.
"That's how we dash off our little sketches," she declared.
"Goodness, Jane!" cried Alice, "you've almost upset the whole inkstand!"
"And what else is there?" cried Jane, whose mood was mounting higher. She
clamped her hand on her disordered bang. "Why, of course! He
fences!--aha!"
To this address Truesdale allowed himself to respond. He had no wish to
obtrude his musical and artistic doings upon his father until a more
definite _modus vivendi_ had been brought about; but he could no longer
lend himself passively to being made an absurdity by the over-enthusiasm
of his sister. Fencing, now, was a manly art of which his father might
not disapprove.
"On guard!" he cried. With his right hand he snatched up a paper-cutter
from the table, curled up his left arm behind him, threw one of his long
legs out in front and landed it with a _flump_! on the floor five feet
ahead of his initial stand-point.
"Hurray!" cried Jane, shrilly. "What other girls do you know who've got a
brother like this?" She snatched up a brass-edged ruler that had lain
alongside the paper-cutter. Mrs. Rhodes started back; Alice's husband,
who had come in to lead the homeward march to Riverside Park, paused
astonished on the threshold.
"On guard!" echoed Jane in turn. With a _flump!_ of her own she threw
herself into an imitation of the angular crouch that her brother had
assumed. "Go it!" she called, and began to hack at the paper-cutter with
her ruler.
Save for the clash of weapons there was a complete silence. Suddenly
Truesdale reversed his position. Jane did the same, bringing a sudden and
unaccustomed weight upon her other foot. Her knee cracked loudly.
Everybody heard it. Rosy snickered.
Jane crossed the room and sat down in a shady corner. In that ten seconds
she felt ten years older.
"Where's pa?" she asked her mother in a sour tone, after Alice and her
aunt had left the house. "I do hope"--crossly--"that the next time you
let any of those wretched old women take anything away you'll have them
pay for it in advance."
"I guess your father isn't bothering much about a bedstead and a few old
chairs," retorted her mother. "If you want to know what he's thinking
about, it's that Belden again."
"Belden?"
"Yes. He has decided finally to let your father put on those two extra
stories, and what do you think he wants in exchange? He wants to make the
firm over into a stock company. He's fixing a place for that boy of
his--that's what."
"Well, haven't we got a boy, too?" retorted Jane, severely. She went out,
and gave the door a loud slam behind her.
But David Marshall, back again in the bay-window, was thinking neither of
the sinuosities of Mother Van Horn, nor of the aggressions of his junior
partner, nor even of the just-concluding courses of the annual
game-dinner. His thoughts had slipped back into the early times; he and
Sue Lathrop (the Mrs. Granger Bates of to-day) were sitting together in
the old, long-vanished Metropolitan Hall listening to the "Nightingale
Serenaders," and the year was 'fifty-seven.