In this world, men and women tried to increase happiness. They worked with ideas; many ideas and many people striving to embody them in form. Often in the mornings, after Anne had watched Roger vanish round the corner of the street far below, she continued to stand on the porch of the little cottage they had found on a rocky crag that rose from the grass-grown cobbles to a view of the bay and Tamalpais. It was like her inner life here, high above the confusions of her mother's muddled thinking, her father's petulance, Belle's brutal experience. Above the confusion of The Niche, the unironed laundry, the unreasoned bursts of Hilda's extravagances, the intrusion of uninteresting gossip. The three white-painted rooms with their sweep of bay and hills, close to the stars at night, walled from the city below by the spicy fragrance of a tangled garden, was another world.
Anne dreaded anything that might disturb its peace. No discordant note must enter the full day, when alone in her new home, she made it beautiful, or prepared for the guests Roger like to ask to dinner; nor the pleasant evenings when she and Roger read or talked before the fire, or went to the many meetings included in Roger's duty as Wainwright's secretary.
But, at the end of two months, when Anne realized that this guarding of her new peace had excluded her family, that neither Belle nor her father had seen the place at all, and her mother only once, she was ashamed and decided to ask all three to dinner the first night Belle could take off and to make a little celebration of the occasion. On the next Thursday evening, when Roger was at a conference with Hilary Wainwright, Anne went especially to arrange the night.
"Well! I was just wishing you'd phone or something!" Hilda hurried half-way down the stairs to meet Anne and walked back with her arm about her daughter's waist. "It was kind of lonesome to-night and I was just thinking of running down to Mrs. Welles for a minute, but this is the night she goes to church and it didn't seem worth while. I am glad." Hilda hugged her effusively; for, although Anne had made it a rule to go home once a week, if only for a few moments late in the afternoon, Hilda greeted each visit with such amazed admiration that Anne had been able to include it among the many responsibilities of her new life.
For Hilda was now very deeply impressed with Roger's importance as the private secretary of a millionaire. Millionaire philanthropists had not existed in Hilda's knowledge of the social structure and Roger's close connection with one filled her with awe. The status of Hilary Wainwright in the financial world had done much, also, to reconcile James. And when, one day, shortly after Anne's marriage, he had chanced to see Roger in earnest talk with the president of the Coast Electric, James Mitchell had accepted Roger, in no generous apology to Anne for his attitude the last night before her marriage, but in a thinly veiled eagerness to know all about the schemes of the great man.
Anne despised herself for yielding to this curiosity, but it was so much pleasanter when things moved smoothly, that she catered just a little to him. She admitted him, without apparent consciousness of his real purpose, to the projects of Hilary Wainwright for increasing the total of human happiness. She threw off carelessly such phrases as: "welding of classes," "the larger democracy," "the obligations of wealth"; phrases which James Mitchell heard with satisfaction, as he might have observed the social minutiæ of a class above him. As working theories he did not visualize them at all, but it gave him a feeling of Roger and Anne—hence vaguely himself—moving in high places.
To-night he was specially interested, for the papers were full of some scheme of Wainwright's for getting sugar more cheaply to the market from his plantations in Hawaii. In the office, James Mitchell had spoken with authority upon the subject that very afternoon, and had enjoyed the respectful attention of the other clerks.
He accepted the invitation with such unusual grace that Anne was ashamed for him; but when, a little later, as she said good-by to her mother in the hall and Hilda whispered: "It will be a great occasion for us, Annie. I never saw him so delighted," Anne forgave him. Her mother had so few pleasures and this mood of her father's was almost as great an event as the dinner itself. "I don't believe he remembers a word he said that night," Hilda went on in the same confidential whisper as she went with Anne down the stairs. "Anyhow he's never said another thing about objecting and now—everything's going to be lovely. I feel it in my bones. But three extra to dinner! I'm afraid it will make a lot of extra work for you."
"Now, mamma, don't be silly. Besides, you haven't the least idea what a fine cook I am."
"I don't doubt it a bit. Any one who can get up a dinner for a millionaire! Goodness, I should be scared to death."