THE EDDY
A Novel of Today
BY CLARENCE L. CULLEN
Illustrations by
CH. WEBER DITZLER
G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
_Copyright, 1910, By_
G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY
_The Eddy_
[Illustration: LOUISE]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. 7
II. 31
III. 55
IV. 77
V. 102
VI. 125
VII. 145
VIII. 169
IX. 195
X. 218
XI. 237
XII. 257
XIII. 281
XIV. 305
XV. 326
XVI. 348
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Louise _Frontispiece_
Laura, a woman of thirty-five, had the slender
yet well-rounded structural sinuosities of a girl
of twenty 20
He'd go over to the house on the drive and get the
thing over with 182
"But, why did you never tell me, mother?" 192
He squeaked like a rat; then he went down like a log 324
THE EDDY
CHAPTER I
"If only she were a boy!"
Mrs. Treharne almost moaned the words.
She tugged nervously at her absurdly diaphanous boudoir jacket, vainly
attempting to fasten it with fluttering, uncontrolled fingers; and she
shuddered, though her dressing-room was over-warm.
Heloise, who was doing her hair, juggled and then dropped a flaming red
coronet braid upon the rug. The maid, a thin-lipped young woman with a
jutting jaw and an implacable eye, pantomimed her annoyance. Before
picking up the braid she glued the backs of her hands to her
smoothly-lathed hips. Mrs. Treharne, in the glass, could see Heloise's
drab-filmed grey-blue eyes darting sparks.
"I shall resume," croaked the maid in raucous French, "when Madame is
through writhing and wriggling and squirming."
Laura Stedham--she was relaxing luxuriously in the depths of a chair
that fitted her almost as perfectly as her gown--smiled a bit wickedly.
"Forgive me if I seem catty, Tony," said Laura in her assuaging
contralto, "but it is such a delight to find that there is some one else
who is bullied by her maid. Mine positively tyrannizes over me."
"Oh, everybody bullies me," said Mrs. Treharne, querulously, holding
herself rigid in order not to again draw Heloise's wrath. "Everybody
seems to find it a sort of diversion, a game, to browbeat and hector and
bully-rag me."
"Surely I don't, afflicted one--do I?" Laura tacked a little rippling
laugh to the question.
"You do worse, my dear--you laugh at me," plaintively replied the fading
woman huddled before the glass. She was haggard as from a trouble that
has been unsuccessfully slept upon, and her mouth--not yet made into a
crimson bow through Heloise's deft artistry--was drawn with discontent.
"Heaven on high, if only she were a boy!" she broke out petulantly
again, after a little pause.
This time there was genuine enjoyment in Laura's laugh.
"Don't scowl, Antoinette--I know I am a beast for laughing," she said,
abandoning her chair and lissomely crossing the room to glance at some
new photographs on a mantel. "But, really, you say that so often that it
sounds like the refrain to a topical song. 'If only she were a boy--If
only she were a boy!'--don't you catch the rhythm of it? I wonder,
Tony, how many times I have heard you give utterance to that phrase
during the past few years--just?"
"You haven't heard me say it any oftener than I've meant it, my dear--be
very sure of that," said Mrs. Treharne, without a symptom of a smile.
Her sense of humor was embryonic, and Laura's laughter and words,
obviously meant merely in mitigation, jarred upon her. "And a remark is
none the less true for being repeated, is it?" she went on in her
plaintive monotone. "I _do_ wish Louise had been born a boy. You would,
too, if you were in my place. You know you would."
"But, dear Tony, it is such a futile, such a dreadfully childish wish,"
said Laura, striving to erase the smile from her face. "It is like
wishing for the fairy prince, or the magic carpet, or the end of the
rainbow. Worry makes wrinkles, dear. That may sound bromidic, but it's
true. Why worry yourself through all the years with wishing so
impossible--I was going to say so insane--a wish? Not only that--forgive
me for saying it, dear, won't you?--but it is rather a grisly wish, too;
and so unfair to the girl, really. Don't you think--don't you know--that
it is?"
"Don't scold, Laura--please," said Mrs. Treharne, almost in a whimper.
"You don't know what a miserable mess I am in. You haven't given me
time to tell you. Louise is coming home immediately."
"For the holidays, naturally," said Laura. "Why shouldn't the poor child
come home for the holidays? It will be the first time she has had her
holidays at home since she went away to school--nearly four years, I
think--isn't it?"
"I hope you are not meaning that for a reproach," accused the haggard
lady, now being corseted by the lusty-armed Heloise. "You are in a
shocking humor today; and I did so depend upon you for advice and
comfort, if not consolation, when I 'phoned you to come over."
"Oh, I am in a lark's humor," protested Laura, smiling as she rested a
gloved hand upon one of the milky shoulders of her troubled friend. "But
you puzzle me. Why should you make such a catastrophe of it, such a
veritable cataclysm, because your pretty and agreeable and, as I recall
her, quite lovable daughter announces that she is coming home for the
holidays? Enlighten me, dear. I seem not to discern the point of your
problem."
"Problem isn't the word for it!" repined the unhappy lady, upon whose
nearly knee-length stays Heloise now was tugging like a sailor at a
capstan. "Louise coolly announces--I had her letter yesterday--that she
is not returning to Miss Mayhew's school; that she is coming to remain
with me for good."
"Well?" said Laura, murdering the smile that strove to break through her
visible mask.
"'Well?'" wailed Mrs. Treharne. "Is that all you have to say--'well'?
Can't you see how impossible, how utterly out of the question, how----"
"Her quitting school now, you mean?" said Laura. "Really, I think you
should be pleased. Her announcement shows that Louise is a woman--a girl
of nineteen who has spent nearly four years at a modern finishing school
no longer is a young person, but a woman--that she is a woman with a
sense of humor. It is very human, very indicative of the possession of
the humorous sense, to tire of school. I did that, myself, a full year
before I was through. All of the king's horses could not have dragged me
back, either. I hated the thought of graduation day--the foolish,
fluttery white frocks, the platitudes of visitors, the moisty weepiness
of one's women relatives, the sophomoric speechifying of girls who were
hoydens the day before and would be worse hoydens the day after, the
showing off of one's petty, inconsequential 'accomplishments'--I loathed
the thought of the whole fatuous performance. And so I packed and left a
full year in advance of it, resolved not to be involuntarily drawn into
the solemn extravaganza of 'being graduated.' That, no doubt, is
Louise's idea. She is a girl with a merry heart. You should be glad of
that, Antoinette."
Laura was simply sparring with the hope of getting her friend's mind off
her problem. She knew very well the nature of the problem; none better.
The idea of a girl just out of school being plumped into such an
environment as that enveloping the Treharne household perhaps was even
more unthinkable to Laura that it was to the girl's mother, a woman who
had permitted her sensibilities to become grievously blunted with what
she termed the "widening of her horizon." But Laura, not yet ready with
advice to meet so ticklish a situation, sought, woman-like, to divert
the point of the problem by seizing upon one of its quite minor
ramifications. Of course it was not her fault that she failed.
"Laura," said Mrs. Treharne, dismissing her maid with a gesture and
fumblingly assembling the materials on her dressing table wherewith to
accomplish an unassisted facial make-up, "your occasional assumption of
stupidity is the least becoming thing you do. Why fence with me? It is
ridiculous, unfriendly, irritating." She daubed at her pale wispy
eyebrows with a smeary pencil and added with a certain hardness: "You
know perfectly well why I dread the thought of Louise coming here."
Laura, at bay, unready for a pronouncement, took another ditch of
evasiveness.
"I wonder," she said in an intended tone of detachment, "if you are
afraid she has become a bluestocking? Or maybe a frump? Or, worse still,
what you call one of the anointed smugs? Such things--one or other of
them, at any rate--are to be expected of girls just out of school, my
dear. Louise will conquer her disqualification, if she have one. Her
imagination will do that much for her. And of course she has
imagination."
"She has eyes, too, no doubt," said Mrs. Treharne, drily. "And you know
how prying, penetrating the eyes of a girl of nineteen are. You know
still better how poorly this--this ménage of mine can stand such
inspection; the snooping--wholly natural snooping, I grant you--of a
daughter nearly a head taller than I am, whom, nevertheless, I scarcely
know. Frankly, I don't know Louise at all. I should be properly ashamed
to acknowledge that; possibly I am. Moreover, I believe I am a bit
afraid of her."
Laura assumed a musing posture and thus had an excuse for remaining
silent.
"Additionally," went on Mrs. Treharne, a little hoarsely, "a woman, in
considering her daughter's welfare, must become a trifle smug herself,
no matter how much she may despise smugness in its general use and
application. What sort of a place is this as a home for Louise? I am
speaking to you as an old friend. I am in a fiendish predicament. Of
course you see that. And I can't see the first step of a way out of it.
Can you?"
"For one thing," said Laura, mischievously and with eyes a-twinkle, "you
might permanently disperse your zoo."
Mrs. Treharne laughed harshly.
"One must know somebody," she said, deftly applying the rouge
rabbit's-foot. "One can't live in a cave. My own sort banished me. I am
_declassée_. Shall I sit and twiddle my thumbs? At least the people of
my 'zoo,' as you call it, are clever. You'll own that."
"They are freaks--impossible, buffoonish, baboonish freaks," replied
Laura, more earnestly than she had yet spoken. "You know I am not
finical; but if this raffish crew of yours are 'Bohemians,' as they
declare themselves to be--which in itself is _banal_ enough, isn't
it?--then give me the sleek, smug inhabitants of Spotless Town!"
"You rave," said Mrs. Treharne, drearily. "Let my zoo-crew alone. We
don't agree upon the point."
"I thought you had your queer people--your extraordinary Sunday evening
parties--I came perilously near saying rough-houses, Tony--in mind in
bemoaning Louise's return home," said Laura, yawning ever so slightly.
"Oh, I'd thought of that, of course," said Mrs. Treharne, artistically
adding a sixteenth of an inch of length to the corners of her eyes with
the pencil. "But my raffish crew, as you call them, wouldn't harm her.
She might even become used to them in time. She hasn't had time to form
prejudices yet, it is to be hoped. You purposely hit all around the real
mark. Louise is nineteen. And you know the uncanny side-lines of wisdom
girls pick up at finishing schools nowadays. Since you maliciously force
me to mention it point-blank, in Heaven's name what will this daughter
of mine think of--of Mr. Judd?"
"Now we are at the heart of the matter," answered Laura. "Heart, did I
say? Fancy 'Pudge' with a heart!" There was little mirth in her laugh.
"You must not call him that, even when you are alone with me, Laura,"
said Mrs. Treharne, petulantly. "I am in deadly fear that some time or
other he will catch you calling him that. You know how mortally
sensitive he is about his--his bulk."
"Well might he be," said Laura, drily enough. "Is there any particular
reason why your daughter should have to meet Judd? Except very
occasionally, I mean?"
"How can it be avoided?" asked Mrs. Treharne, helplessly. "Hasn't he the
run of the house? You don't for an instant suppose that, even if I
implored him, he would forego any of his--his privileges here?"
"I am not so imbecile as to suppose any such a thing," said Laura, with
a certain asperity. "But the man might exhibit a bit of common decency.
He knows that Louise is coming?"
"I haven't told him," said Mrs. Treharne, fluttering to her feet from
the dressing table. "You will hook me, Laura? I don't want to call
Heloise. She only pretends that she doesn't understand English, and she
knows too much already. No, I haven't told him yet. He resents the idea
of my having a daughter, you know. He will be here directly to take me
out in the car. I shall tell him when we are going through the Park.
Then nobody but the chauffeur and I will hear him growl. I know in
advance every word that he will say," and the distraught woman looked
wan even under her liberal rouge.
Laura impulsively placed an arm around her friend's shoulder.
"Tony," she said, gravely, "why don't you show the brute the door?"
"Because it is his own door--you know that," said Mrs. Treharne, her
eyes a little misty.
"Then walk out of it," said Laura. "This isn't the right sort of thing.
I don't pose as a saint. But I could not endure this. Come with me. Let
Louise join you with me. You know how welcome you are. I have
plenty--more than plenty. You shouldn't have permitted Judd to refuse to
let you continue to receive the allowance George Treharne provided for
Louise. That wasn't fair to yourself. It was more unfair to your
daughter. You shouldn't have allowed her to get her education with
Judd's money. She is bound to find it out. She would be no woman at all
if that knowledge doesn't cut her to the quick. But this is beside the
mark. I have plenty. She is a dear, sweet, honest girl, and she is
entitled to her chance in the world. I am sure I don't need to tell you
that. What chance has she in this house? The doors that are worth while
are closed to you, my dear. You know I say that with no unkind intent.
It is something you yourself acknowledge. The same doors would be closed
to your daughter if she came here. She could and would do so much better
with me. Neither you nor she would be dependent. We are too old friends
for that. And I know George Treharne. He would renew the allowance that
you permitted Judd to thrust back at him through yourself and his
lawyer. Leave this place, this sort of thing, once and forever. I want
you to--for your own sake and your daughter's."
Mrs. Treharne wept dismally, to the sad derangement of her
elaborately-applied make-up. But she wept the tears of self-pity, than
which there are none more pitiful. The reins of a great chance, for
herself and her daughter, were in her hands. Perhaps it was the
intensity of her perturbation that did not permit her to hold them. Very
likely it was something else. But, at any rate, hold them she did not.
"You are a dear, Laura," she said, fighting back her tears for the sake
of her make-up. "It was what I might have expected of you. Of all the
friends I used to have, you are the only one who never has gone back on
me. But you must see how impossible it all is. I am in over my head. So
what would be the use?"
"You speak for yourself only, Antoinette," said Laura, a little coldly.
"What of your daughter?"
"Oh, if only she were a boy!" the wretched woman harped again.
Laura Stedham removed her arm from her friend's shoulder and shrugged a
bit impatiently.
"That refrain again?" she said, the warmth departing from her tone. "I
must be going before I become vexed with you, Tony. Your own position
would be quite the same in any case--if you had a son instead of a
daughter, I mean. For my part, I fail to perceive any choice between
being shamed in the eyes of a son of in the eyes of a daughter. True, a
son would not have to tolerate so humiliating a situation. A son could,
and unquestionably would, clap on his hat the moment he became aware of
the state of things here, and stamp out, leaving it all behind him. A
son could and would shift for himself. But a girl--a girl just out of
school--can't do that. She is helpless. She is at the mercy of the
situation you have made for her. I fear you are completely losing your
moorings, Tony. When is Louise arriving?"
"Tonight," replied Mrs. Treharne, who had subsided into a sort of apathy
of self-pity. "At nine something or other. I shall meet her at the
station in the car."
Laura turned a quizzical, slitted pair of eyes upon her friend, now busy
again with her tear-smudged make-up.
"Not in Judd's car, surely, Tony?" she said, in earnest expostulation.
"Why do that? Why not let the girl in upon your--your tangled affairs a
little more gradually? How could she help wondering at the extravagant,
vulgar ornateness of Judd's car? For of course she knows perfectly well
that your own finances are not equal to such a whale of a machine as
that."
"It will not take her long to find out everything," said Mrs. Treharne,
a little sullenly. "She need not be uncommonly observant to do that.
And you remember how embarrassingly observant she was even as a child."
"Give her a chance to observe piecemeal, then," said Laura, laconically.
"I shall be with you at the station. One of my poor accomplishments, you
know, is the knack of ameliorating difficult situations. And I was
always so fond of the child. I am stark curious to see how she has
developed. She was a starchy Miss of fifteen when last I saw her. We'll
fetch her home in a taxicab. That will be better. It is arranged, then?"
"Everything that you suggest is as good as arranged,' Laura," replied
Mrs. Treharne, with a wan smile. "Your gift of persuasion is
irresistible--I wish I knew the secret of it. It is extremely good of
you to want to meet the child. If I could only meet her with--with such
clean hands as--well, as I should have!"
"Never mind--there'll be a way out of it," said Laura, cheerily. "I am
off."
She grazed the adeptly-applied artificial bloom of the other woman's
cheek with her lips.
As they stood side by side in the juxtaposition of a caress--they were
friends from girlhood--the contrast between the two women was
sufficiently striking. Laura Stedham, a woman of thirty-five, had the
slender yet well-rounded structural sinuosities of a girl of twenty who
passes all her days in the open air--minus the indubitable blowsiness
which some open-air young women can't help but reveal to the dissecting
eye. Unusually tall, she had the gliding grace of movement which so many
women of uncommon stature lack. Even in the cluttered dressing room of
her friend she made nothing of the obstacles that barred her path, but,
walking always with a sort of nervous swiftness, passed around them to
her point of destination--a mantel, a table, a hanging picture--with a
threading ease of locomotion that made it seem oddly doubtful if she
were dependent upon the ground at all for a base. There are tall women
who, if they do not collide with stationary objects when they undertake
a tour of a room, at least arouse the fear that they will infallibly do
so. Laura possessed an eye for the measurement of distances, and the
litheness perfectly to follow her measurement. Her complexion was that
of a woman to whom a long tramp, even in the city, in the mist or in the
blinding rain, was not a task, but a delight. Her hair, all her own, yet
worn in the final perverse mood of exaggeration of the coiffure
"artist," was of an incredible burnished black, in unusual contrast with
her full, kindling, Celtic-grey eyes. A certain irregularity in the
outline of her features--especially of her nose, which, far from being
aquiline, was too short by the merest fraction--lent a certain piquancy
to her expression, even when her face was in repose. She had the habit,
growing rare in a world of social avoidances and white lies, of looking
the person addressing her straight in the eye. It was not an impaling,
disquieting gaze, but one that fairly demanded truthfulness and candor;
a gaze unconsciously calculated to cause the liar to stutter in the
manufacture of his lie.
[Illustration: LAURA, A WOMAN OF THIRTY-FIVE, HAD THE SLENDER YET
WELL-ROUNDED STRUCTURAL SINUOSITIES OF A GIRL OF TWENTY.]
Mrs. Treharne, four years older than Laura, had the somewhat hollow-eyed
plumpness of an indoor woman who wars fiercely but hopelessly and
unequally upon ever-threatening _embonpoint_. Her triumphs over the
enemy never were better than drawn battles; she was compelled to devote
at least three hours a day to her determined, almost hysterical warfare
upon the natural process of accretion, solely that she might not gain;
long before she had abandoned hope of achieving the fragility of outline
she pined for. The nostrums she employed in this incessant conflict had
made her fragile, however, in at least one respect: her health; besides
imparting a certain greenish-yellow tint to her skin which made her
make-up box almost as necessary a part of her equipment as the hands
wherewith she applied the mitigating tints. Five years before she had
been a fresh-skinned, clear-eyed, naturally pretty woman of a somewhat
inconsequential type; but the necessity--the hideous duty, as she
deemed it--of banting without cessation or intermission had left her
merely her regular features upon which artificially to create the
illusion of a youthfulness she was far from feeling. With the final
touch added for an appearance in a company, she still looked dainty,
certainly of impeccable grooming. But she had learned to be uneasy under
the scrutiny of eyes that she felt to be unfriendly, and she had become
exceptionally partial to veils. Her hair, originally a light,
unaggressive red, had been "done over" into a sort of vivid, brittle
"Titian." There were occasional reddish gleams in her slightly furtive,
small eyes of hazel. She had a child's foot, and she was inordinately
proud of her tiny, waxy, too-white hands. In a company she smiled
continuously in order to display her teeth, which were perfectly
assembled and of an almost porcelain whiteness. Mrs. Treharne was called
a pretty woman even by those who perhaps entertained unexpressed
misgivings as to how she might look at her rising hour.
After Laura had gone Mrs. Treharne tried, before her glass, the effect
of a smile--somewhat frozen and quickly obliterated--upon her carefully
studied and artfully executed make-up mask; then sighed drearily as she
sank into a chair and began polishing her nails upon her palms.
"Of course Laura is right, as usual--it wouldn't help matters
particularly if Louise were a boy," she mused with puckered brows. "A
boy might be longer in finding out how affairs stood here; but when he
did find out--what a storm, what heroics, what juvenile reproaches, what
a stagey to-do there would be! Perhaps, after all, it is as well that
Louise is--Louise. She can adapt herself to--to things as they are. She
must. There's no other way. She can't have lost the tact she possessed
as a child. I wish I knew her better, so that I could have some sort of
an idea just what to expect from her. I hope she understands the good
sense of closing one's eyes to things that can't be improved by looking
at them. Perhaps I shall be lucky enough to marry her off quickly. That
would be almost too easy a solution for me, with my vile luck, to
expect."
She rang for Heloise to have her furs in readiness.
"It was thoroughly decent of Laura," she thought on, finger at lip, "to
advise me to bolt all this and take refuge with her. But I haven't the
nerve--that's the plain truth of it. How could I ask Treharne to renew
the allowance? What a triumph it would be for him if I were to do that!
He would be too Quixotic to view it as a triumph, but that wouldn't
alleviate my humiliation in asking him. And what would the three or four
thousand a year be in comparison with--"
"The car is at the door, Madame," announced Heloise, appearing with the
sables. Mrs. Treharne smiled at herself before the glass to smooth out
the wrinkles of her musing, tripped lightly down the stairs, and was
humming blithely when she nodded indulgently at the ponderous,
shaggy-furred man who was waiting to help her into the huge,
over-lavish, pulsing car.
"You take your time, don't you?" grumbled Judd, his breath vaporing into
broken clouds in the raw December air. "Does that monkey-chattering maid
of yours sleep all the time, or has she a case on with the butler? I've
been tooting here for ten minutes."
His tone was snarling, and his thin lips were drawn away from gnarled
teeth. Judd was one of those physical anomalies, a man of Falstaffian
girth with sharp, peaked, predatory features. He pulled off his fur cap
to readjust it before stepping into the car, showing a head wholly bald
except for crinkly wisps of mixed red and gray hair at the sides and
back. There was a deep crease at the back of his neck where the scant
hair left off, and his deep-set, red-rimmed little watery-blue eyes were
alert and suspicious.
Mrs. Treharne laughed so carelessly that it almost seemed as if she
deliberately sought to intensify his irritation.
"Still in your villanous humor?" she asked him, a taunt in her tone. "I
believe this is one of the days--they grow rather frequent--when you
should be allowed--required, I should say--to ride alone."
"Well, that's easy enough to do," grumbled Judd in a voice curiously
high-pitched for so vast a man. "See here, perhaps you are conceited
enough to think--"
Very deliberately, and still smiling, Mrs. Treharne rose to leave the
car. Judd looked blankly nonplussed.
"Oh, stop this infernal nonsense, Tony," he said in a tone tinged with
alarm. Then his ruddy face expanded into a grin behind which there
seemed to be little mirth. "D'ye know, I believe you would be cat enough
to step out, before we start, and--"
"No names, if you please," Mrs. Treharne interrupted, choppily.
"Decidedly I shall leave the car if you feel that it is impossible for
you to behave yourself like a human being. I have ceased to extract
enjoyment from your growling humors."
It was a tone she might have taken in addressing a menial. Obviously,
however, it was the tone required for the proper subjugation of Judd. He
exuded a falsetto laugh and patted her hand, at the same time motioning
the chauffeur to start.
"I don't complain of your hellish moods, do I, Tony?" he asked her,
still chuckling unpleasantly. "In fact, I believe I rather like the feel
of your claws. All the same, there may come a day when--"
"When I shall enjoy the sight of your back," calmly interrupted the
apparently complaisant woman at his side. "Speed the day!"
Judd's face took on a half-chagrined, half-worried look. It generally
did when Mrs. Treharne was operating upon him what she privately called
her "system." This "system," in essence, consisted in her invariable
habit of quarreling with him and reducing him to abjectness by more or
less veiled threats of abandoning him to a lonesome fate whenever she
had something to ask of him, or to tell him, that she knew quite well
would arouse his surliness. It was a neatly-devised balancing method,
and Mrs. Treharne as well understood the vital advantage of striking the
first blow as she apprehended the extent of her power over him.
"I say, Tony," said Judd, patting her gloved hands again, "you wouldn't
really cut and run just because--"
"Spare me your elephantine sentimentalities, please," she put in, a
little less indifferently. "You were never ordained for that sort of
thing. Anyhow, I would like a sane word or two with you. I've something
to tell you."
"It's money, of course," said Judd, sulkily, leaving off patting her
hands with ludicrous suddenness. "More damned extravagance, eh?"
"No, it's neither money nor extravagance, beautifully as those two words
trot in tandem," she said, airily, yet with a new soothing note in her
tone. "It is this: Louise is coming home. At once. Tonight."
"The devil she is!" blurted Judd. "What for? Who sent for her? How long
is she going to stay? What's it all about?"
"One question at a time, please," Mrs. Treharne replied, looking
indifferently out toward the bleak river as they shot by Claremont. It
was a palpably assumed air of indifference; but Judd, unskilled at
penetrating feminine subtlety, did not discern the nervousness
underlying her careless manner. "My daughter is coming home because she
wants to. Nobody sent for her. She is not going back to school. She
announces that in her letter to me; and she is old enough to know her
mind and to be entitled to freedom of action. She is remaining
permanently with me."
She had expected him to storm upon hearing the news in full. Judd,
however, was an individual who owed a considerable part of his immense
success as a man of affairs to his studied and carefully-elaborated
habit of never doing the obvious.
He leaned back in the car and half-screened his turkey-like eyes with
their small, veinous lids. Mrs. Treharne, surprised at his silence, went
on hastily:
"I am wretchedly disturbed over it. I know that I have no fit home to
offer her. I know that I have completely undermined her chance in life.
But what can I do? She can't live alone. And she merely brings the
difficulty to a head by coming now. She must come home some time, of
course. The child has not spent her holidays or her summer vacations
with me for four years. Always she has been pushed about among school
friends, who, glad as they and their people may have been to have her,
surely must have wondered why she did not come home."
Judd fluttered his eyelids and leaned forward in his seat.
"I understand perfectly, of course," he said with a sort of leer. "I
understand, you understand, we understand, they understand, everybody
understands. Then what are you making such a devil of a rumpus about it
for?"
"Well," said Mrs. Treharne, making the mistake, in dealing with Judd, of
falling into a slightly apologetic tone, "I thought that perhaps you
might----"
"Wait a minute, Antoinette," interrupted Judd with suave brutality,
leaning back again among the cushions and once more half-closing his
eyes. "It doesn't matter a damn what I think. I can stand it if you can.
She isn't my daughter, you know. She's your daughter. I suppose she has
been taught to mind her own business? Very well. I can stand the
situation if you can."
The slur cut like a rattan, as Judd, perceiving a rare advantage,
thoroughly intended that it should. He made it worse by patting her
hands as he spoke. She hated him with an almost virtuous intensity as he
uttered the sneer. But she said no more about her daughter's impending
arrival during the remainder of the ride.