Infatuation
not altogether withered, and under extraordinary circumstances could
even be moved.
"My poor Bob," she said, holding the lapels of his coat, and looking up
at him; "do you not know that Phyllis may meet a man to-day at dinner,
and to-morrow at tea, and the day after drive with him for an hour in
the Park--and then what's father or mother or anything in the world if
she loves him? Bob, dear, just get it out of your head that you are
going to keep Phyllis. When the right man comes you will no more count
to her than--than that chair!--Oh, yes, of course, every girl loves her
father in a way--but you have only been keeping her heart warm--and once
it's set on fire--good-by! And, Bob, dear, listen, is it not common
sense to let her see the right kind of young men; to sift them and weigh
them a bit? Is it a marriage-market to admit none but those who are
presentable and well-bred and come of nice people? Is that a
show-window? No, it's giving a girl a chance to choose--the chance I
wish to Heaven I'd had. We simply try to get the nicest man there is,
and you are more apt to get a prize from a hundred than from six!"
"That applies just as much to Carthage as to Washington."
"Bob, you don't know what you've been risking. Your whole way of living
is utterly crazy. Why, anybody--_anybody_ could come here, and make
love to her, and carry her off under your nose--some awful commercial
traveler or cheap pianist with frowzy hair--Oh, Bob, girls are such
fools--such crazy, crazy fools!"
"Phyllis isn't."
"Was I?"
"No, I don't think you were."
"But didn't I marry Sam Fensham?"
"I don't see that that--"
Sally laughed; and it was not a pleasant laugh to hear in its
self-revelation. Sam was notoriously more successful as a treasury
official than as a husband.
"Bob, she has to go to Washington with me, and you must put your hand in
your pocket, and do things handsomely."
"Against her will?"
Again Sally laughed, more harshly and cynically than before.
"Just you ask her," she said.
That night Mr. Ladd did so, and saw with a sinking heart the
electrifying effect it had on her.
Go! Why, she'd jump out of her shoes to go, and wasn't daddy the
dearest, darlingest, adorablest person in the world to propose it! And
Aunt Sally's kindness--wasn't it wonderful! She would meet senators and
ambassadors, and dance in the White House with lovely barons and counts,
and try out her French on a real Frenchman and see if he could
understand it!--A winter in Washington! What could be more exciting,
more delirious!
Mr. Ladd affected to share her delight, and manfully concealed his true
feelings, which were altogether bitter and sad. But he was a brave old
fellow, and knew how to take his disappointments smilingly. Besides,
what claim had he to resist the inevitable? What right? What
justification? He would have bitten his tongue out before he would have
reproached her, or marred, by the slightest word, her overflowing and
girlish exuberance. It was only as they kissed each other good night
that the pent-up appeal came.
"Don't forget your old dad in the shuffle," he said. "It's--it's going
to be very hard for him without you, Phyllis."
Her instant contrition was very sweet to him, very comforting and dear.
In fact, he had to struggle pretty desperately to allay the storm of
tenderness he evoked.--No, no, he wanted her to go to Washington. It
was the right thing to do--the only thing to do. A girl ought to see
something of the big world before she married and settled down.--Oh,
every girl said that to herself, but you couldn't get away from the fact
that they were made for men, and men for them, and a father just held
the fort till the Golden Young Man arrived.
How they laughed, with tears in their eyes! How infinitely precious was
the love that bound them together! Dad was never to be lost in the
shuffle--never, never; and he was to write every day, and she was to
write; and if it were a hundred Washingtons she'd come straight back to
him if he were lonely, for to her there was only one real Golden Young
Man, and that was her darling, darling father.
Yet as Mr. Ladd shut the study door, and returned to his seat beside the
lamp, he knew in spite of himself that he had said good-by. His
guardianship was over; near, now, was that unknown man, that unknown
rival, for whose pleasure he had lavished twenty years of incessant care
and devotion. Though Ladd was hardly a believer, the wish came out with
the fervency of a prayer: "Oh, my God, let him be worthy of her!"
*CHAPTER III*
She did write every day; sometimes the merest snippets, sometimes long,
graphic letters, full of the new life and the new people. Her debut had
been an immense success. Eddie Phelps, a horrid, tallowy, patronizing
person, but socially a dictator, had put the stamp of his approval on
her, and she had managed to receive it and not burst--which, if Papa
only knew it, was a very remarkable feat. But, anyway, she had been
hall-marked "sterling," and was enjoying herself furiously. And the
young men were so different from Carthage, so much more polished and
elegant--and pertinacious. Washington young men simply didn't know what
"No" meant, and it was like shoveling snow to get rid of them. But Aunt
Sarah was a regular White Wings, and the poor, the detrimental, and the
fast--every one, in fact, who wasn't a first-class _parti_ with
references from his last place--got carted away before he knew what had
struck him.
And Aunt Sally! "Why, Papa, we didn't know her at all. She is as young
as I am, and twice as eager, and dances her stockings through every
other night. Washington is divided between the people who hate her, and
the people who love her, and they put a tremendous zip into either end
of it. What she really wants is to marry me at the cold end, and
strengthen her position as she calls it; and though I say it, who
shouldn't, the cold-end young men are coming in fast. When one proposes
to me, she calls it a scalp, and looks, oh, so pleased! But if I see
any of them working up to that I try to stop him in time, though it's
awfully exciting just the same. That's why I've only three scalps to
report instead of about eight. Oh, Papa, what fun it is!"
In time her letters began to change, and there were little signs of
disillusionment. One was almost a tract on worldliness, in which she
talked about Vanity Fair, and dancing on coffins, and the inner hunger
of the soul. There were also increasing references to J. Whitlock
Pastor, always coupled with "ideals." J. Whitlock Pastor was quite a
remarkable young man of thirty, with "a beautiful austerity," and "fine
mind." His people were immensely wealthy, and immensely
fashionable--even in Carthage there was a sacredness about the name of
Pastor--and Phyllis said there was something splendid in his taking up
forestry as a life work, and devoting himself to it, heart and soul,
when he had been born--not with a silver spoon--but with a bird's-egg
diamond in his mouth.
If there was anything to be said against J. Whitlock Pastor, it was that
he was almost too good to be true. He wanted to leave the world better
for his having been, and all that--and seemed to have what might be
called an excruciating sense of duty. "A very quiet and rather a sad
man," wrote Phyllis, "whom one might easily mistake for a muff if one
hadn't seen him on horseback. He rides superbly, and I never saw a
ring-master in a circus who could come anywhere near him."
All this worked up to a telegram that reached Mr. Ladd a few weeks
later: "I accepted him last night, and, Papa, please come on quick and
bless us."
Mr. Ladd hastened to Washington as speedily as his affairs would allow,
which was five days later, and arrived just in time to dress for the
introductory dinner at Mrs. Pastor's--J. Whitlock's mother's. He tried
to imagine he was delighted, and caught his daughter in his arms with
the enthusiasm of a stage parent. But Phyllis was so pale, so calm, so
undemonstrative that he hardly knew what to make of her. He put her
cool indifference down to Washington training, but still it puzzled and
troubled him. It was so unlike a girl who had met her fate--so unlike
another pair of lovers that had been so much in his head that
day--Genivieve de Levancour, and a certain Bob Ladd. The contrast gave
him a certain sense of foreboding.
In the carriage she was very silent, and nestled against him like a
tired child. He repeated his congratulations; he strove again to be
delighted; joked, not without effort, about the exalted position of the
Pastors, and what a come-down it was for them to marry such poor white
trash as the Ladds. Then it occurred to him that perhaps this jarred
upon her! "Forgive me, Phyllis," he said humbly. "I--I hardly know what
I am saying. I--I guess I'm trying to hide what this recalls to
me--what this means to me."
She pressed his hand, and snuggled it against her cheek, but still
shrouded herself in reserve.
"Papa," she said suddenly, "you'd stick to me through thick and thin,
wouldn't you? Whatever I did--however foolish or silly I might be,
you'd always love me, wouldn't you?"
"By God, yes," he answered, "though why on earth you should ask--"
"Only to make sure," she exclaimed, brightening. "Just to be certain
that my old-dog father hadn't changed. Now say bow-wow, just to show
that you haven't!"
Mr. Ladd, very much mystified, and not at all comfortable in his mind,
obediently bow-wowed. It set Phyllis off in a peal of laughter, and it
was with apparent hilarity that both descended at the Pastor's front
door.
Whitlock's mother received them in the drawing-room. She was a stately,
gray-haired woman, with a subdued voice, and a graciousness that was
almost oppressive. Her guests had hardly been seated, when J. Whitlock
himself appeared, and excused himself, with faultless and somewhat
unnecessary courtesy, for not having been found awaiting their arrival.
Mr. Ladd saw before him a tall, thin young man, of a polished and
somewhat cold exterior, with a dryness of expression that was positively
parching. Like one of those priceless enamels of the Orient, one felt
that J. Whitlock Pastor had been roasted and glazed, roasted and glazed,
roasted and glazed until the substance beneath had become but a matter
of conjecture. The enamel was magnificent--but where was the man? Mr.
Ladd, with a choking sense of disappointment, began to suspect there was
none.
J. Whitlock opened the proceedings much as the czar might have opened a
Duma. He recited a neat, dry, commonplace little address of welcome,
and sounded a key-note of constraint and formality that was rigorously
maintained throughout the evening. The address was seconded by the
empress-dowager, and then it was Mr. Ladd's turn to swear loyalty to the
throne, and burst into cheers. He did so as well as he could, but it
was a poor, lame attempt; and when, almost in despair, he went up to J.
Whitlock, and impulsively wrung the Imperial hand, the very atmosphere
seemed to shiver at the sacrilege.
A frigid dinner followed in a dining-room of overpowering magnificence.
There was a high-class conversation to match, interrupted from time to
time by a small British army--small in number--but prodigal of inches,
and calves, and chest-measure--who stealthily pounced on plates,
obtruded thumbs, and stopped breathing when they served you. Mr. Ladd,
smarting with an inexplicable resentment, compounded of jealousy, scorn
and chagrin, writhed in his chair, and tugged at his mustache, and gazed
from his daughter to his prospective son-in-law with melancholy wonder.
Yet Phyllis seemed to be perfectly contented, sitting there so demure,