II
Nathan was a little taken aback when he saw his mother and sister. Mrs. Forge had lost height and weight; she was a poor, pucker-faced, broken-down, little old lady. Nathan knew her to be fifty-three. She looked seventy. He felt a heart-stab when he saw her clothing, it was so poor and threadbare and out of taste. And Edith!
Edith was now the “mother of seven!” Verily! She had grown into a tall, awkward, raw-boned woman with a coarse face, sloppy cornflower hair and a hat which resembled a cross between a basket of flowers and a fried egg. The broken status of her corsets was immediately noticeable when she had removed her outer cloak, and her skirt hung lower in the rear than in the front. She was messy—alongside Madelaine—and looked as though she had hurriedly dropped a gummy baby in a clothes basket while she threw on any clothes lying handy to come to her brother’s “swell weddin’.”
Mrs. Forge clung to Nathan hysterically when she met him on the station platform. And she wept openly when Madelaine took her unceremoniously in her arms and kissed her. They went to the Worthy for rooms and dinner.
Madelaine waited in the ladies’ parlor while Nathan went up with his relatives. Edith first entered the room which Nathan had reserved as though her footfalls profaned the very carpets.
“My Gawd, what class!” she cried blankly. “Nat, is she worth a million dollars—on the level?”
Nathan laughed. That was the only feature of the forthcoming alliance to mar his perfect happiness. Madelaine was worth a million dollars. It was awkward.
“I guess so,” he responded carelessly.
“You guess so! My Gawd, don’t you know? I should think that’d be the first thing——”
“I’ll have to go back and stay with Madelaine,” the brother interrupted. “Come down as soon as you’re ready.” He counted out money. “Take this, mother. And to-morrow morning buy yourself something out of the ordinary for clothes. Please! I wish it!”
When he had gone, Edith flounced down on the bed, discovered the resiliency of the springs, and bobbed up and down, testing them.
“She’s a cuckoo, Ma!” declared the daughter, anent Madelaine. “But I bet a hat right now there ain’t goin’ to be much family visitin’ back and forth! Lord, if she ever come into my shack, and Joe and all the kids piled in to give her the once-over, somebody’d have to stick their feet out the window to leave room to breathe. She’d take more gorgeous space than all the rest of us put together, includin’ a wardrobe trunk!”
“I think she’s a dear,” announced Mrs. Forge. “She’s so democratic.”
“I’d give ten dollars to know what she sees in Nat, though. Huh! It warn’t so awful long ago we was all takin’ Saturday night baths up in Paris and undressin’ together in the kitchen because the upstairs rooms was cold. A million bucks! Can you beat it, Ma! Wonder how much her hat cost?”
They went down into the Worthy dining room. Madelaine chose a table beside a north window. Mrs. Forge and Edith promptly put on their “manners.”
Mother and daughter—absolutely dumb in the presence of a colored waiter and a million-dollar-bride-to-be—said they guessed they wasn’t a bit hungry, and yet at each of Nat’s suggestions from the menu they nodded their heads avidly. Madelaine tried her best to put the two at their ease, but it was a sorry business. Mrs. Forge and Edith “knew how to behave in company,” which was to act as stiff and unnatural and wooden as possible and assume that every one in the dining room was watching them like jewelry thieves.
The Indian summer night was lazily warm. The windows were open. Over in the southwest corner a group of Dartmouth alumni men were holding a reunion supper.
“My stars!” whispered Mrs. Forge to Nathan, “they’re drinkin’ licker! You don’t drink licker, do you, Nathan?”
Nathan affirmed that he did not drink “licker” and then he turned his head away and looked out of the window upon his left as the college men broke into roistering song.
Outside on the curbing a young man stopped and gazed up into the room.
“Madge,” said Nathan thickly, “one night, several years ago, I stood outside like that, and looked up at a fellow and girl sitting here just like this——”
A quick exclamation. Madelaine had overturned a water glass.
“Was that you, Nathan?” she cried, astounded. “So that’s where you saw me first? Well, foolish boy, just for that, the title of your damage-making little old poem was ‘Girl-Without-a-Name.’ And I was conceited enough to think it was written for me, and no one else.”
“Perhaps,” said Nathan gravely, “it was! Who knows?”
Edith was rather glad to see Madelaine tip over her water glass. It just went to prove that even The Best People, Millionairesses, those who Had Money, did such things. She cast a glance at her mother as much as to say, “You see! She isn’t such a Thingumbob after all. She tips over her water glass at table!”