“Lovely, indeed!” Mrs. Lenox answered heartily. “You have chosen the one word to be applied to Madeline Elton, both to her spirit and to her face—not thrilling, perhaps, but satisfying, which is better. She and Dick were inseparables through their childhood. It is rather a taken-for-granted affair, you know.”
“I guessed as much, though Dick never said anything.”
There was something so confidential and kindly in her manner that Norris forgot his awkwardness and felt moved to confidence in return.
“Dick was born to all good things,” he went on. “I sometimes wonder how that feels.” Then, seeing that she glanced at him inquiringly: “Dick always seems to me one who needs only to stand still, and Fortuna takes pains to hunt him up and offer him her choicest wares. Life looks to him more like a birthday party than like a battle-field. I say it not in envy, but with the awe of one who has had to scrabble and who sees endless scrabbling ahead. But I believe part of the charm that I feel about Dick is his manifest predestination to good luck.”
“One piece of his luck, if I am not mistaken, is in your coming here. There is no friend like a college friend for every-day wear,” she answered kindly.
“Well, I owe my position here to him,” Norris went on. “When he found that I had an uncle back in Connecticut who owned a share in the St. Etienne Star, he began to pull wires both at that end and this to get me a place on the editorial staff. I’m afraid that nothing but wires would have got it for me. So here I am making my first bow to society under the shadow of his cloak.”
“Of course you came here.”
“What, really, is Mr. Early?”
“Apostle, expounder of the universe, business man, prophet.”
Norris laughed.