III
The next day at noon Grace went to a trust company where she kept an account that represented the aggregate of small gifts of cash she had received through a number of years at Christmas and on her birthdays. As she waited at the window for her passbook, Bob Cummings crossed the lobby on his way to the desk of one of the officers. She wondered how he would greet her if they met, and what her attitude toward him ought to be in view of the break between her father and Isaac Cummings. She found a certain mild excitement as she pondered this, her eyes occasionally turning toward Cummings as he leaned against the railing that enclosed the administrative offices of the company. Grace had always liked and admired him; and it had hurt her more than she ever confessed that after the removal of the Cummingses from the old neighborhood Bob had gradually ceased his attentions. Perhaps his family had interfered as her mother had hinted; but it made no difference now that he had married and passed completely out of her ken.
Cummings had finished his errand and was walking quickly toward the door when he caught sight of her.
“Hello, Grace! I’m mighty glad to see you,” he said cordially. “Why—” He checked himself and the smile left his face abruptly as he remembered that their friendly status had changed since their last meeting.
Grace relieved his embarrassment promptly by smilingly putting out her hand.
“I’m very glad to see you, Bob,” she said. “It’s really been a long time, almost three years!”
“Just about,” he answered slowly.
“Old Father Time has a way of romping right on!” she remarked lightly.
They were in the path of customers intent upon reaching the cages and she took a step toward the door when he said, glancing toward a long bench at the side of the room, “If you’re not in a rush let’s sit down a minute. There’s something I’d like to say to you.”
“Oh, very well,” she assented, surprised but not displeased.
He was the son of a man who had dismissed her father from the concern in which their names had long been identified; but in so public a place there could be no harm in talking to him. Her old liking for him at once outweighed any feeling she had against his father. He was a big boy when she was still a small girl and he was her first hero. He was always quiet, thoughtful and studious, with a chivalrous regard for the rights and feelings of others. They had been chums, confiding their troubles to each other. It was to her that he had revealed his succession of boyish ambitions, and she had encouraged his fondness for music when other youngsters twitted him for taking piano lessons like a girl. He had never thought he would like business; he wanted to be a musician, with the leadership of an orchestra as his ultimate goal. It was because his brother Merwin had from an early age shown a refractory spirit that the parental authority had thwarted Bob’s aspirations; one of the sons at least had to go into the business and Bob was now a vice-president of the reorganized Cummings Manufacturing Company.
“I’ve been hoping for a chance to see you, Grace. It’s not easy to speak of it but I want you to know I’m sorry things turned out as they did. About your father and the business, I mean. You must all of you feel pretty hard about it. I hope it doesn’t mean any change in your plans for finishing at the university. I know how you’d counted on that.”
“I’ve given it up; I’m home to stay,” she answered. “But you needn’t feel badly about it. Of course it must have been necessary—about father and the business, I mean.”
He was embarrassed by her cheerful acceptance of the situation, and stammered, leaving one or two sentences unfinished before he got hold of himself.
“I want you to know I did all I could to prevent the break. It seemed a pity after your father and mine had been together so long. But for some time the plant had needed an active superintendent; just trusting the foremen of the shops wouldn’t serve any longer, and you won’t mind my saying it but your father never liked executive work. I suggested another way of handling it that would have made Mr. Durland a vice-president and free to go on with his experiments, but I couldn’t put it through. I did my best; honestly I did, Grace!”
There was the old boyish eagerness in this appeal. He regarded her fixedly, anxious for some assurance that she understood. She understood only too well that her father had become an encumbrance, and that in plain terms the company couldn’t afford to keep him at his old salary any longer. It was unnecessary for Bob to apologize; but it was like him to seize the first possible moment to express his sympathy. She had always felt the gentleness in him, which was denoted in his blue eyes, which just now shone with the reflection of his eagerness to set himself right with her. He turned his hat continually in his hands—they were finely shaped, with long supple fingers. At the base of his left thumb there was a scar, almost imperceptible, the result of a slash with a jack knife one day in the Durland yard where he had taken her dare to bring down a particular fine spray of blossoms from an old cherry tree. In his anxiety to deliver it unbroken on the bough he had cut himself. She remembered her consternation at seeing the injury, his swaggering attempt to belittle it; his submission to her ministrations as she tied it up with a handkerchief. She was twelve then; he sixteen. He saw the direction of her eyes, lifted the hand and with a smile glanced at the scar. She colored as she realized that he had read her thoughts.
“That was centuries ago,” he said. “We did use to have good times in your back yard! Do you remember the day you tumbled out of the swing and broke your arm? You didn’t cry; you were a good little sport.” And then, his eyes meeting hers, “You’re still a mighty good sport!”
“If I never have anything worse than a broken arm to cry over I’ll be lucky,” she answered evasively.
There was no excuse for lingering; he had expressed his regret at her father’s elimination from Cummings-Durland, and it served no purpose to compare memories of the former friendly relation between the young people of the two families, which were now bound to recede to the vanishing point. But he seemed in no haste to leave her. She on her side was finding pleasurable sensations in the encounter. He had been her first sweetheart, so recognized by the other youngsters of the neighborhood, and they had gone to the same dancing class. And he had kissed her once, shyly, on a night when the Cummingses were giving a children’s party. This had occurred on a dark corner of the veranda. It had never been repeated or referred to between them, but the memory of it was not without its sweetness. She was ashamed of herself for remembering it now. She wondered whether he too remembered it. And there had been those later attentions after the Cummingses had moved away that had encouraged hopes in her own breast not less than in her mother’s that Bob’s early preference might survive the shock of the Cummingses’ translation to the fashionable district, with its inevitable change of social orientation.
Ethel and her mother had questioned the happiness of his marriage, and her mind played upon this as she sat beside him, feeling the charm he had always had for her and wondering a little about the girl he had married whom she had never seen and knew of only from the talk at home. But two years was not long enough; it was ridiculous to assume that he wasn’t happy with his wife.
“We certainly had a lot of fun over there,” he was saying. “I suppose the park fountain plays just the same and the kids still sail their boats in the pond.”
“Yes, and go wading and fall in and have to be fished out by the policeman! But we can’t be kids always, Bob!”
“No; that’s the worst of it!” he said with a tinge of dejection.
“I’m all grown up now and have a job. I’m a working girl!”
“No!” he exclaimed incredulously. “And Roy——”
“Oh, Roy’s to finish his law course; he’ll be through in June.”
“That’s too bad, Grace!” he exclaimed. “It’s you who ought to have stayed on! You’re the very type of girl who ought to go to college. It would have made all the difference in the world to you! And Ethel—is she at work too?”
“Yes; she’s in an insurance office and I’m in Shipley’s!” she went on smiling to relieve his evident discomfiture. “I’m in the ready-to-wear and I’ll appreciate any customers you send my way. Call for Number Eighteen!”
“Why, Grace! You don’t mean it! You have no business doing a thing like that. You could do a lot better.”
“Well, I didn’t just see it. I’m an unskilled laborer and haven’t time to fit myself for teaching, stenography or anything like that. You get results quicker in a place like Shipley’s. That is, I hope to get them if I’m as intelligent as I think I am!”
“I’m terribly sorry, Grace. I feel— I feel— as though we were responsible, father and I; and we are, of course. There ought to have been some other way for you; something more——”
“Please don’t! That’s the way mother and Ethel talk.”
She rose quickly, feeling that nothing was to be gained by continuing the discussion of matters that were irrevocably settled. And, moreover, his distress was so manifest in his face that she feared the scrutiny of passers-by.
“Good-bye, Bob,” she said. “I’m awfully glad I met you. Please don’t trouble at all about what can’t be helped. I haven’t any hard feeling—not the slightest.”
“I don’t like it at all,” he said impatiently.
He kept beside her to the entrance, where she gave him a nod and smile and hurried away. She was troubled at once for fear she hadn’t expressed cordially enough her appreciation of his sympathy. Very likely they would never meet again; there was no reason why they should. He had merely done what was perfectly natural in view of their old friendship, made it clear that he was sorry her father had been thrust out of the company of which he had been one of the founders. She was unable to see anything in the interview beyond a wish on his part to be kind, to set himself right. And it was like Bob to do that.