II
The interior of Franklin Mills’s house was not so forbidding as Henderson had hinted in his talk with Bruce. It was really a very handsomely furnished, comfortable establishment that bore the marks of a sound if rather austere taste. The house had been built in the last years of Mrs. Mills’s life, and if a distinctly feminine note was lacking in its appointments, this was due to changes made by Mills in keeping with the later tendency in interior decoration toward the elimination of nonessentials.
It was only a polite pretense that Leila kept house for her father. Her inclinations were decidedly not domestic, and Mills employed and directed the servants, ordered the meals, kept track of expenditures and household bills, and paid them through his office. He liked formality and chose well-trained servants capable of conforming to his wishes in this respect. The library on the second floor was Mills’s favorite lounging place. Here were books indicative of the cultivated and catholic taste of the owner, and above the shelves were ranged the family portraits, a considerable array of them, preserving the countenances of his progenitors. Throughout the house there were pictures, chiefly representative work of contemporary French and American artists. When Mills got tired of a picture or saw a chance to buy a better one by the same painter, he sold or gave away the discard. He knew the contents of his house from cellar to garret—roved over it a good deal in his many lonely hours.
He came downstairs a few minutes before seven and from force of habit strolled through the rooms on a tour of inspection. In keeping with his sense of personal dignity, he always put on his dinner coat in the evening, even when he was alone. He rang and asked the smartly capped and aproned maid who responded whether his daughter was at home.
“Miss Leila went to the Country Club this afternoon, sir, and hasn’t come in yet. She said she was dining here.”
“Thank you,” he replied colorlessly, and turned to glance over some new books neatly arranged on a table at the side of the living-room. A clock struck seven and on the last solemn stroke the remote titter of an electric bell sent the maid to the door.
“Mr. and Mrs. Shepherd Mills,” the girl announced in compliance with an established rule, which was not suspended even when Mills’s son and daughter-in-law were the guests.
“Shep fairly dragged me!” Mrs. Mills exclaimed as she greeted her father-in-law. “He’s in such terror of being late to one of your feasts! I know I’m a fright.” She lifted her hand to her hair with needless solicitude; it was perfectly arranged. She wore an evening gown of sapphire blue chiffon,—an effective garment; she knew that it was effective. Seeing that he was eyeing it critically, she demanded to know what he thought of it.
“You’re so fastidious, you know! Shep never pays any attention to my clothes. It’s a silly idea that women dress only for each other; it’s for captious men like you that we take so much trouble.”
“You’re quite perfectly turned out, I should say,” Mills remarked. “That’s a becoming gown. I don’t believe I’ve seen it before.”
Her father-in-law was regarding her quizzically, an ambiguous smile playing about his lips. She was conscious that he never gave her his whole approval and she was piqued by her failure to evoke any expressions of cordiality from him. Men usually liked her, or at least found her amusing, and she had never been satisfied that Franklin Mills either liked her or thought her clever. It was still a source of bitterness that Mills had objected strongly to Shepherd’s marrying her. His objections she attributed to snobbery; for her family was in nowise distinguished, and Constance, an only child, had made her own way socially chiefly through acquaintances and friendships formed in the Misses Palmers’ school, a local institution which conferred a certain social dignity upon its patrons.
She had never been able to break down Mills’s reserves, and the tone which she had adopted for her intercourse with him had been arrived at after a series of experiments in the first year of her marriage. He suffered this a little stolidly. There was a point of discretion beyond which she never dared venture. She had once tried teasing him about a young widow, a visitor from the South for whom he had shown some partiality, and he hadn’t liked it, though he had taken the same sort of chaff from others in her presence with perfect good nature.
Shepherd, she realized perfectly, was a disappointment to his father. Countless points of failure in the relationship of father and son were manifest to her, things of which Shepherd himself was unconscious. It was Mills’s family pride that had prompted him to make Shepherd president of the storage battery company, and the same vanity was responsible for the house he had given Shepherd on his marriage—a much bigger house than the young couple needed. He expected her to bear children that the continuity of the name might be unbroken, but the thought of bearing children was repugnant to her. Still, the birth of an heir, to take the name of Franklin Mills, would undoubtedly heighten his respect for her—diminish the veiled hostility which she felt she aroused in him.
“Where’s Leila?” asked Shepherd as dinner was announced and they moved toward the dining-room.
“She’ll be along presently,” Mills replied easily.
“Dear Leila!” exclaimed Constance. “You never disciplined her as you did Shep. Shep would go to the stake before he’d turn up late.”
“Leila,” said Mills a little defensively, “is a law unto herself.”
“That’s why we all love the dear child!” said Constance quickly. “Not for worlds would I change her.”
To nothing was Mills so sensitive as to criticism of Leila, a fact which she should have remembered.
As they took their places Mills asked her, in the impersonal tone she hated, what the prospects were for a gay winter. She was on the committee of the Assembly, whose entertainments were a noteworthy feature of every season. There, too, was the Dramatic Club, equally exclusive in its membership, and Constance was on the play committee. Mills listened with interest, or with the pretense of interest, as she gave him the benefit of her knowledge as to the winter’s social programme.
They were half through the dinner when Leila arrived. With a cheerful “Hello, everybody,” she flung off her wrap and without removing her hat, sank into the chair Shepherd drew out for her.
“Sorry, Dada, but Millie and I played eighteen holes this afternoon; got a late start and were perfectly starved when we finished and just had to have tea. And some people came along and we got to talking and it was dark before we knew it.”
“How’s your game coming on?” her father asked.
“Not so bad, Dada. Millie’s one of these lazy players; she doesn’t care whether she wins or loses, and I guess I’m too temperamental to be a good golfer.”
“I thought Millie was pretty strong on temperament herself,” remarked Shepherd.
“Well, Millie is and she isn’t. She’s not the sort that flies all to pieces when anything goes wrong.”
“Millie’s a pretty fine girl,” declared Shepherd.
“Millicent really has charm,” remarked Constance, though without enthusiasm.
“Millie’s a perfect darling!” said Leila. “She’s so lovely to her father and mother! They’re really very nice. Everybody knocks Doc Harden, but he’s not a bad sort. It’s a shame the way people treat them. Mrs. Harden’s a dear, sweet thing; plain and sensible and doesn’t look pained when I cuss a little.” She gave her father a sly look, but he feigned inattention. “Dada, how do you explain Millie?”
“Well, I don’t,” replied Mills, with a broad smile at the abruptness of the question. “It’s just as well that everything and everybody on this planet can’t be explained and don’t have to be. I’ve come to a time of life when I’m a little fed up on things that can be reduced to figures. I want to be mystified!”
Leila pointed her finger at him across the table.
“I’ll say you like mystery! If there was ever a human being who just had to have the facts, you’re it! I know because I’ve tried hiding milliners’ bills from you.”
“Well, I usually pay them,” Mills replied good-humoredly. “Now that you’ve spoken of bills, I’d like to ask you——”
“Don’t!” Leila ejaculated, placing her hands over her ears with simulated horror. “I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to ask why I bought that new squirrel coat. Well, winter’s coming and it’s to keep me from freezing to death.”
“Well, the house is well heated,” Mills replied dryly. “The answer is for you to spend a little time at home.”
Leila was a spoiled child and lived her own life with little paternal interference. After Mills had failed utterly to keep her in school, or rather to find any school in which she would stay, he had tried tutors with no better results. He had finally placed her for a year in New York with a woman who made a business of giving the finishing touches to the daughters of the provincial rich. There were no lessons to learn which these daughters didn’t want to learn, but Leila had heard operas and concerts to a point where she really knew something of music, and she had acquired a talent that greatly amused her father for talking convincingly of things she really knew nothing about. He found much less delight in her appalling habit of blurting out things better left unsaid, and presumably foreign to the minds of well-bred young women.
Her features were a feminized version of her father’s; she was dark like him and with the same gray eyes; but here the resemblance ended. She was alert, restless, quick of speech and action. The strenuous life of her long days was expressing itself in little nervous twitchings of her hands and head. Her father, under his benignant gaze, was noting these things now.
“I hope you’re staying in tonight, Leila?” he said. “It seems to me you’re not sleeping enough.”
“Well, no, Dada. I was going to the Claytons’. I told Fred Thomas he might come for me at nine.”
“Thomas?” Mills questioned. “I don’t know that I’d choose him for an escort.”
“Oh, Freddy’s all right!” Leila replied easily. “He’s always asking me to go places with him, and I’d turned him down until I was ashamed to refuse any more.”
“I think,” said her father, “it might be as well to begin refusing again. What about him, Shep?”
“He’s a good sort, I think,” Shepherd replied after a hasty glance at his wife. “But of course——”
“Of course, he’s divorced,” interposed Constance, “and he hasn’t been here long. But people I know in Chicago say he was well liked there. What is it he has gone into, Shep?”
“He came here to open a branch of a lumber company—a large concern, I think,” Shepherd replied. “I believe he has been divorced, Father, if that’s what’s troubling you.”
“Oh, he told me all about the divorce!” interposed Leila imperturbably. “His wife got crazy about another man and—biff! Don’t worry, Dada; he isn’t dangerous.”