V
The visit to Bloomington was not particularly heartening. Roy was in a sullen humor when they talked to him in the hotel parlor. He wanted to drop the law course and go West, and they argued the matter most of the day, Grace alternating between despair at Roy’s stubborn indifference to every attempt to arouse his pride and ambition and admiration for her mother’s courage and forbearance in the most poignant sorrow of her life.
Grace finally left them together and took a walk that led her far from the campus. She had no heart for looking upon the familiar scenes or meeting the friends she had left there only a few months earlier. When she returned to the hotel Roy had been won to a more tractable humor; and when he left them it was in a spirit of submission, at least, to what he considered an ungenerous ordering of fate. Mrs. Durland insisted on carrying out the plan, with which she had left Indianapolis, of visiting the young woman who was now her daughter-in-law.
“She’s Roy’s wife,” she said when Grace tried to dissuade her. “I’ll feel better to see her. And it’s only right I should.”
She took the train for Louisville and Grace went home.
Grace’s thoughts were given a new direction early the next morning when Miss Beulah Reynolds appeared at Shipley’s shortly after the doors were opened.
“My dear child, the most astounding thing has happened!” the little woman declared immediately.
“Your house hasn’t burned down!” exclaimed Grace, amused by the little woman’s agitation.
“Worse! I’m to have a visitor,—that Mary Graham Trenton whose book we once talked about. I’ve just had a letter from an old friend in Boston warning me of the lady’s approach, and asking me to see the Indians don’t get her. I’ve wired her at Cleveland asking her to stay at my house—I could hardly do less.”
“I suppose not,” said Grace faintly, wondering why Miss Reynolds had come to her with the news.
“I’m asking some people to dinner the night the lady lectures—Tuesday—and I want you to come. Don’t look so scared! She may not be as terrible as she writes but I’m going to invite Dr. Ridgely, and my doctor and my lawyer with the hope that they’ll all get a shock. And I want you to come; you’ve read her stuff, and I’ll count on you to help keep the talk going.”
“Why, I don’t know—” Grace began, her mind in a whirl of conjecture.
“Come! That’s a dear child. Don’t go back on me; I need your moral support. At six thirty, then? We have to dine early on account of the lecture.”
“Why, yes; Miss Reynolds,” Grace answered faintly.
“By the little pink ear of Venus!” exclaimed Irene, coming upon Grace just as Miss Reynolds left. “What’s Little Old Ready-Money done to you?”
“Nothing,” Grace replied, her mind still in confusion. “She was just asking me to dinner.”
“From your looks I’d have guessed it was a funeral,” Irene replied, and Grace, pulling herself together, hurried away to meet an approaching customer.
Of late she had given little thought to Mrs. Trenton, and it had never occurred to her in her wildest dreams that she might meet Ward’s wife in the intimate contact of a dinner table. The prospect kept her in a state of excitement all day and at times she was strongly impelled to trump up some excuse for refusing to go to Miss Reynolds’s. But her earlier curiosity as to what manner of woman it was who bore Ward Trenton’s name was rekindled by the thought of meeting her. Trenton was in Syracuse and might not reach Indianapolis for a week or more. He had said that he had not, in the letter he had written to Mrs. Trenton from St. Louis, revealed the identity of the woman who had so strongly appealed to him. Mrs. Trenton would hardly suspect that a girl she met at a dinner party was the person her husband had described only vaguely and without indicating her habitat.
Grace decided against writing Trenton of the impending meeting till it was over. Having quieted her apprehensions she began dramatizing the scene at Miss Reynolds’s table and she reread “Clues to a New Social Order” against the possibility that Mrs. Trenton’s book might become a subject of discussion at the dinner. The thought of seeing her lover’s wife in this fashion while she herself remained unknown and unsuspected laid powerful hold upon her imagination.