The Real Adventure
"Well, it isn't," she told him. "It's yours. And those people down there
were asked to meet you. And you've got just about seven minutes to get
presentable in. Go into Martin's bathroom and take off those horrible
clothes. I'll send Walters in to lay out some things of Martin's."
She came up to him and, at arm's length, touched him with cautious
finger-tips. "And do, please, there's a dear boy," she pleaded, "hurry
as fast as you can, and then come down and be as nice as you can"--she
hesitated--"especially to Hermione Woodruff. She thinks you're a wonder
and I don't want her to be disappointed."
"The widdy?" he asked. "Sure I'll be nice to her."
She looked after him rather dubiously as he disappeared in the direction
of her husband's room.
She'd have felt safer about him if he had seemed more subdued as a
result of his escapade. There was a sort of hilarious contentment about
him that filled her with misgivings.
Well, they were justified!
But the maddening thing was, she had afterward to admit, that the
disaster had been largely of her own contriving. She had been caught in
the net of her own stratagem--hoist by her own petard.
She had made it a six-couple dinner in order to insure that the talk
should be by twos rather than general, and she had spent a good
half-hour over the place-cards, getting them to suit her.
Hermione had to be on Martin's right hand, of course. She was just back
in the city after an absence of years, and everybody was rushing her.
She put Violet Williamson, whom Martin was always flirting with in a
harmless way, on his left, and Rod to the right of Hermione. At Rodney's
right, she put a girl he had known for years and cared nothing whatever
about, and then Howard West--who probably wasn't interested in her
either, but would be polite because he was to everybody. Frederica
herself sat between Carl Leaventritt of the university--a great
acquisition, since whatever you might think of him as an empirical
psychologist, there was no doubt of his being an accomplished
diner-out--and Violet's husband, as he vociferously proclaimed himself,
John Williamson, an untired business man who, had their seasons
coincided, could have enjoyed a ball game in the afternoon and stayed
awake at the opera in the evening. Doctor Randolph's pretty wife she
slid in between Leaventritt and Howard West, and, in happy ignorance of
what the result was going to be, she put Randolph himself between Violet
and Alice West. He was a young, up-to-the-minute mind and nerve doctor.
It was an admirable plan all right, the key-note of it being, as you no
doubt will have observed, the easy unforced isolation of Rodney and the
rich widow. Before that dinner was over, they ought to be old friends.
And, for a little while, all went well. Rodney came down almost within
the seven minutes she had allowed him, looking much less dreadful than
she had expected, in her husband's other dress suit, and not forgetful,
it appeared, of the line of behavior she had enjoined on him; namely,
that he was to be nice to Hermione Woodruff.
From her end of the table, she saw them apparently safely launched in
conversation over the hors-d'oeuvre, took a look at them during the soup
to see that all was still well, then let herself be beguiled into a
conversation with John Williamson, whom she liked as well as Martin did
Violet. She never thought of the objects of her matrimonial design again
until her ear was caught by a huge seven-cornered word in her brother's
voice. He couldn't be saying it to Hermione; no, he was leaning forward,
shouting at Doctor Randolph, who apparently knew what he meant and was
getting visibly ready to reply in kind.
According to Violet Williamson's account, given confidentially in the
drawing-room afterward, it was really Hermione's fault. "She just
wouldn't let Rodney alone--would keep talking about crime and Lombroso
and psychiatric laboratories--I'll bet she'd got hold of a paper of his
somewhere and read it. Anyway, at last she said, 'I believe Doctor
Randolph would agree with me.' He was talking to me then, but maybe that
isn't why she did it. Well, and Rodney straightened up and said, 'Is
that Randolph, the alienist!' You see he hadn't caught his name when
they were introduced. And that's how it started. Hermione was game--I'll
admit that. She listened and kept looking interested, and every now and
then said something. Sometimes they'd take the trouble to smile and say
'Yes, indeed!'--politely, you know, but other times they wouldn't pay
any attention at all, just roll along over her and smash her flat--like
what's his name--Juggernaut."
"You don't need to tell me that," said Frederica. "All I didn't know was
how it started. Didn't I sit there and watch for a mortal hour, not able
to do a thing? I tried to signal to Martin, but of course he wasn't
opposite to me and ..."
"He did all he could, really," Violet answered her. "I told him to go to
the rescue, and he did, bravely. But what with Hermione being so miffy
about getting frozen out, and Martin himself being so interested in what
they were shouting at each other--because it was frightfully
interesting, you know, if you didn't have to pretend you understood
it--why, there wasn't much he could do."
In the light of this disaster, she was rather glad the men lingered in
the dining-room as long as they did--glad that Hermione had ordered her
car for ten and took the odd girl with her. She made no effort to resist
the departure of the others, with reasonable promptitude, in their
train. When, after the front door had closed for the last time, Martin
released a long yawn, she told him to run along to bed; she wanted to
talk with Rodney, who was to spend the night while his own clothes were
drying out in the laundry.
"Good night, old chap," said Martin in accents of lively commiseration,
"I'm glad I'm not in for what you are."
CHAPTER IV
ROSALIND STANTON DOESN'T DISAPPEAR
Rodney found a pipe of his that he kept concealed on the premises,
loaded and lighted it, sat down astride a spindling little chair that
looked hardly up to his weight, settled his elbows comfortably on the
back of it, and then asked his sister what Martin had meant--what was he
in for?
Frederica, curled up in a corner of the sofa, finished her own train of
thought aloud, first.
"She's awfully attractive, don't you think? His wife, I mean. Oh, James
Randolph's, of course." She turned to Rodney, looked at him at first
with a wry pucker between her eyebrows, then with a smile, and finally
answered his question. "Nothing," she said. "I mean, I was going to
scold you, but I'm not."
"Why, yes," he admitted through his smoke. "Randolph's wife's a mighty
pretty woman. But I expect that lets her out, doesn't it?"
Frederica shook her head. "She's a good deal of a person, I should say,
on the strength of to-night's showing. She kept her face perfectly
through the whole thing--didn't try to nag at him or apologize to the
rest of us. I'd like to know what she's saying to him now."
Then, "Oh, I was furious with you an hour ago," she went on. "I'd made
such a nice, reasonable, really beautiful plan for you, and given you a
tip about it, and then I sat and watched you in that thoroughgoing way
of yours, kicking it all to bits. But somehow, when I see you all by
yourself, this way, it changes things. I get to thinking that perhaps my
plan was silly after all--anyhow, it was silly to make it. The plan was,
of course, to marry you off to Hermione Woodruff."
He turned this over in his deliberate way, during the process of
blowing two or three smoke rings, began gradually to grin, and said at
last, "That was some plan, little sister. How do you think of things
like that? You ought to write romances for the magazines, that's what
you ought to do."
"I don't know," she objected. "If reasonableness counted for anything in
things like that, it was a pretty good plan. It would have to be
somebody like Hermione. You can't get on at all with young girls. As
long as you remember they're around, you're afraid to say anything
except milk and water out of a bottle that makes them furious, and then
if you forget whom you're talking to and begin thinking out loud,
developing some idea or other, you--simply paralyze them.
"Well, Hermione's sophisticated and clever, she's lived all over the
place; she isn't old yet, and she was a brick about that awful husband
of hers--never made any fuss--bluffed it out until he, luckily, died. Of
course she'll marry again, and I just thought, if you liked the idea, it
might as well be you."
"I don't know," said Rodney, "whether Mrs. Woodruff knows what she wants
or not, but I do. She wants a run for her money--a big house to live in
three months in the year, with a flock of servants and a fleet of
motor-cars, and a string of what she'll call cottages to float around
among, the rest of the time. And she'll want a nice, tame, trick husband
to manage things for her and be considerate and affectionate and
amusing, and, generally speaking, Johnny-on-the-spot whenever she wants
him. If she has sense enough to know what she wants in advance, it will
be all right. She can take her pick of dozens. But if she gets a
sentimental notion in her head--and I've a hunch that she's subject to
them--that she wants a real man, with something of his own to do,
there'll be, saving your presence, hell to pay. And if the man happened
to be me ...!"
Frederica stretched her slim arms outward. Thoughtful-faced, she made no
comment on his analysis of the situation, unless a much more observant
person than Rodney might have imagined there was one in the deliberate
way in which she turned her rings, one at a time, so that the brilliant
masses of gems were inside, and then clenched her hands over them.
He had got up and was ranging comfortably up and down the room.
"I know I look more or less like a nut to the people who've always known
us--father's and mother's friends, and most of their children. But I
give you my word, Freddy, that most of them look like nuts to me. Why,
they live in curiosity shops--so many things around, things they have
and things they've got to do, that they can't act or think for fear of
breaking something.
"Why a man should load himself up with three houses and a yacht, a
stable of motor-cars, and God knows what besides, when he's rich enough
to buy himself real space and leisure to live in, is a thing I can't
figure out on any basis except of defective intelligence. I suppose
they're equally puzzled about me when I refuse a profitable piece of law
work they've offered me, because I don't consider it interesting. All
the same, I get what I want, and I'm pretty dubious sometimes whether
they do. I want space--comfortable elbow room, so that if I happen to
get an idea by the tail, I can swing it around my head without knocking
over the lamp."
"It's a luxury though, Rod, that kind of spaciousness, and you aren't
very rich. If you married a girl without anything ..."
He broke in on her with that big laugh of his. "You've kept your sense
of humor pretty well, sis, considering you've been married all these
years to a man as rich as Martin, but don't spring remarks like that, or
I'll think you've lost it. If a man can't keep an open space around him,
even after he's married, on an income, outside of what he can earn, of
ten or twelve thousand dollars a year, the trouble isn't with his
income. It's with the content of his own skull."
She gave a little shiver and snuggled closer into a big down pillow.
"You will marry somebody, though, won't you, Roddy? I'll try not to nag
at you and I won't make any more silly plans, but I can't help worrying
about you, living alone in that awful big old house. Anybody but you