II
On Shep’s account rather than because of any interest he felt in Constance, Bruce had twice looked in at the Shepherd Mills’s on Constance’s day at home.
Constance made much of the informality of her “days,” but they were, Bruce thought, rather dull. The girls and the young matrons he met there gave Mrs. Shep the adoration her nature demanded; the few men who dropped in were either her admirers or they went in the hope of meeting other young women in whom they were interested. On the first of these occasions Bruce had found Leila and Fred Thomas there, and both times George Whitford was prominent in the picture.
Thomas was not without his attractions. His cherubic countenance and the infantile expression of his large myopic blue eyes made him appear younger than his years. The men around the University Club said he had a shrewd head for business; the women of the younger set pronounced him very droll, a likely rival of Bud Henderson for humor. It was easy to understand why he was called Freddy; he had the look of a Freddy. And Bruce thought it quite natural that Leila Mills should fancy him.
Constance’s attempts to attract the artistic and intellectual on her Thursdays had been a melancholy failure; such persons were much too busy, and it had occurred to the musicians, literary aspirants and struggling artists in town that there was something a little patronizing in her overtures. Her house was too big; it was not half so agreeable as the Freemans’, and of course Freeman was an artist himself and Dale was intelligently sympathetic with everyone who had an idea to offer. As Bud Henderson put it, Dale could mix money and social position with art and nobody thought of its being a mixture, whereas at Constance’s you were always conscious of being either a sheep or a goat. Connie’s upholstery was too expensive, Bud thought, and her sandwiches were too elaborate for the plebeian palates of goats inured to hot ham in a bun in one-arm lunch rooms.
Gossip, like death, loves a shining mark, and Mrs. Shepherd Mills was too conspicuous to escape the attention of the manufacturers and purveyors of rumor and scandal. The parochial habit of mind dies hard in towns that leap to cityhood, and the delights of the old time cosy gossip over the back fence are not lightly relinquished. Bruce was appalled by the malicious stories he heard about people he was beginning to know and like. He had heard George Whitford’s name mentioned frequently in connection with Connie’s, but he thought little of it. He had, nevertheless, given due weight to Helen Torrence’s warning to beware of becoming one of Connie’s victims.
There was a good deal of flirting going on among young married people, Bruce found, but it was of a harmless sort. Towns of two and three hundred thousand are too small for flirtations that pass the heavily mined frontiers of discretion. Even though he had weakly yielded to an impulse and kissed Connie the night he drove her from the Freemans’ to Deer Trail, he took it for granted that it had meant no more to her than it had to him. And he assumed that on the earlier afternoon, when he met Connie and Whitford on the road, Whitford had probably been making love to Connie and Connie had not been unwilling to be made love to. There were women like that, he knew, not infrequently young married women who, when the first ardor of marriage has passed, seek to prolong their youth by re-testing their charm for men. Shepherd Mills was hardly a man to inspire a deep love in a woman of Connie’s temperament; it was inevitable that Connie should have her little fling.
On his way home from one of his afternoon tramps Bruce was moved to make his third call at the Shepherd Mills’s. It was not Connie’s day at home, but she had asked him to dinner a few nights earlier when it was impossible for him to go and he hadn’t been sure that she had accepted his refusal in good part. He was cold and tired—happily tired, for the afternoon spent in the wintry air had brought the solution of several difficult questions touching the Laconia memorial. His spirit had won the elation which workers in all the arts experience when hazy ideas begin to emerge into the foreground of consciousness and invite consideration in terms of the tangible and concrete.
He would have stopped at the Hardens’ if he had dared; lights shone invitingly from the windows as he passed, but the Mills house, with its less genial façade, deterred him. The thought of Millicent was inseparable from the thought of Mills....
He hadn’t realized that it was so late until he had rung the bell and looked at his watch under the entry light. The maid surveyed him doubtfully, and sounds of lively talk from within gave him pause. He was about to turn away when Constance came into the hall.
“Oh, pleasantest of surprises!” she exclaimed. “Certainly you’re coming in! There’s no one here but old friends—and you’ll make another!”
“If it’s a party, I’m on my way,” he said hesitatingly.
“Oh, it’s just Nellie Burton and George Whitford—nothing at all to be afraid of!”
At this moment Mrs. Burton and Whitford exhibited themselves at the living-room door in proof of her statement.
“Bully!” cried Whitford. “Of course Connie knew you were coming!”
“I swear I didn’t!” Constance declared.
“No matter if you did!” Whitford retorted.
Mrs. Burton clasped her hands devoutly as Bruce divested himself of his overcoat. “We were just praying for another man to come in—and here you are!”
“And a man who’s terribly hard to get, if you ask me!” said Constance. “Come in to the fire. George, don’t let Mr. Storrs perish for a drink!”
“He shall have gallons!” replied Whitford, turning to a stand on which the materials for cocktail making were assembled. “We needed a fresh thirst in the party to give us a new excuse. ‘Stay me with flagons’!”
“Now, Bruce,” drawled Constance. “Did I ever call you Bruce before? Well, you won’t mind—say you don’t mind! Shep calls you by your first name, why not I?”
“This one is to dear old Shep—absent treatment!” said Mrs. Burton as she took her glass.
“Shep’s in Cincinnati,” Constance was explaining. “He went down on business yesterday and expected to be home for dinner tonight—but he wired this forenoon that he has to stay over. So first comes Nellie and then old George blows in, and we were wishing for another man to share our broth and porridge.”
“My beloved hubby’s in New York; won’t you be my beau, Mr. Storrs?” asked Mrs. Burton.
“Bruce!” Constance corrected her.
“All right, then, Bruce! I’m Nellie to all the good comrades.”
“Yes, Nellie,” said Bruce with affected shyness. He regarded them amiably as they peppered him with a brisk fire of questions as to where he had been and why he made himself so inaccessible.
Mrs. Burton he knew but slightly. She was tall, an extreme blonde and of about Constance’s age. Like Constance, she was not of the older order of the local nobility. Her father had been a manufacturer of horsedrawn vehicles, and when the arrival of the gasoline age destroyed his business he passed through bankruptcy into commercial oblivion. However, the law of compensations operated benevolently in Nellie’s favor. She married Dick Burton, thereby acquiring both social standing and a sound financial rating. She was less intelligent than Constance, but more daring in her social adventures outside the old conservative stockade.
“George brought his own liquor,” said Constance. “We have him to thank for this soothing mixture. Shep’s terribly law-abiding; he won’t have the stuff on the place. Bruce, you’re not going to boast of other engagements; you’ll dine right here!”
“That’s all settled!” remarked Whitford cheerfully.
“If Bruce goes he takes me with him!” declared Mrs. Burton. “I’m not going to be left here to watch you two spoon. I’m some little spooner myself!”
“You couldn’t drive me from this house,” protested Bruce.
“There spoke a real man!” cried Constance, and she rang for the maid to order the table set for four.
Mrs. Burton, whom Bruce had met only once before, became confidential when Constance and Whitford went to the piano in the reception parlor, where Whitford began improvising an air to some verses he had written.
“Constance is always so lucky! All the men fall in love with her. George has a terrible case—writes poems to Connie’s eyes and everything!”
“Every woman should have her own poet,” said Bruce. “I couldn’t make a rhyme to save my life!”
“Oh, well, do me something in free verse; you don’t need even an idea for that!”
“Ah, the reality doesn’t need metrical embellishment!”
“Thanks so much; I ought to have something clever to hand back to you. Constance always know just what to say to a man. I have the courage, but I haven’t the brains for a first-class flirt.”
“Men are timid creatures,” he said mournfully. “I haven’t the slightest initiative in these matters. You are charming and the light of your eyes was stolen from the stars. Does that have the right ring?”
“Well, hardly! You’re not intense enough! You make me feel as though I were a freak of some kind. Oh, George——”
“Yes, Nellie——” Whitford answered from the piano.
“You must teach Bruce to flirt. His education’s been neglected.”
“He’s in good hands now!” Whitford replied.
“Oh, Bruce is hopeless!” exclaimed Connie, who was seated beside Whitford at the piano. “I gave him a try-out and he refused to play!”
“Then I give up right now!” Mrs. Burton cried in mock despair.
Bruce half suspected that she and Whitford had not met at Constance’s quite as casually as they pretended. But it was not his affair, and he was not averse to making a fourth member of a party that promised at least a little gaiety.
Mrs. Burton was examining him as to the range of his acquaintance in the town, and what had prompted him to settle there, and what he thought of the place—evoking the admission (always expected of newcomers) that it was a place singularly marked by its generous hospitality—when she asked with a jerk of the head toward Constance and Whitford:
“What would you do with a case like that?”
“What would I do with it?” asked Bruce, who had been answering her questions perfunctorily, his mind elsewhere. Constance and Whitford, out of sight in the adjoining room, were talking in low tones to the fitful accompaniment of the piano. Now and then Constance laughed happily.
“It really oughtn’t to go on, you know!” continued Mrs. Burton. “Those people are serious! But—what is one to do?”
“My dear Nellie, I’m not a specialist in such matters!” said Bruce, not relishing her evident desire to discuss their hostess.
“Some of their friends—I’m one of them—are worried! I know Helen Torrence has talked to Constance. She really ought to catch herself up. Shep’s so blind—poor boy! It’s a weakness of his to think everyone perfectly all right!”
“It’s a noble quality,” remarked Bruce dryly. “You don’t think Shep would object to this party?”
“There’s the point! Connie isn’t stupid, you know! She asked me to come just so she could keep George for dinner. And being a good fellow, I came! I’m ever so glad you showed up. I might be suspected of helping things along! But with you here the world might look through the window!”
“Then we haven’t a thing to worry about!” said Bruce with finality.
“It’s too bad,” she persisted, “that marriage isn’t an insurance of happiness. Now George and Constance are ideally suited to each other; but they never knew it until it was too late. I wish he’d go to Africa or some far-off place. If he doesn’t there’s going to be an earthquake one of these days.”
“Well, earthquakes in this part of the world are never serious,” Bruce remarked, uncomfortable as he found that Constance’s friend was really serious and appealing for his sympathy.
“You probably don’t know Franklin Mills—no one does, for that matter—but with his strict views of things there’d certainly be a big smash if he knew!”
“Well, of course there’s nothing for him to know,” said Bruce indifferently.
The maid came in to announce dinner and Constance and Whitford reappeared.
“George has been reciting lovely poetry to me,” said Constance. “Nellie, has Bruce kept you amused? I know he could make love beautifully if he only would!”
“He’s afraid of me—or he doesn’t like me,” said Mrs. Burton—“I don’t know which!”
“He looks guilty! He looks terribly guilty. I’m sure he’s been making love to you!” said Constance dreamily as though under the spell of happy memories. “We’ll go in to dinner just as we are. These informal parties are always the nicest.”