XI
THEY sat down at table, and, as Crane looked at his guests, he had little hope that even Lefferts' cheerful facility could save the situation. Circumstances would be too much against him. Even the poet himself could hardly be at his best, having just arrived in the hope of dining with his lady-love to find she had been spirited away by an irate mother. This in itself was enough to put a pall on most men; yet, of the three guests, Lefferts seemed by far the most hopeful. Tucker was already sullen and getting more sullen every moment. Crane knew the signs of his lawyer's bearing—the irritable eye that would meet no one's directly, the tapping fingers, the lips compressed but moving. Tucker was one of those people cursed by anger after the event. His nature, slow moving or overcontrolled, bore him past the real moment of offense without explosion; but with the crisis over, his resentment began to gain in strength and to grow more bitter as the opportunity for action receded more and more into the past. Crane knew now that Tucker was reviewing every phrase that had passed between them; every injury, real or fancied, that he had ever received at Crane's hands; these he was summoning like a sort of phantom army to fight on his side. No, Tucker was not a guest from whom any host could expect much genial interchange that evening.
Reed, on the other hand, was too unconscious. Placid, good-natured, confident in his own powers to arrange any little domestic difficulties that might have arisen, he sat down, unfolded his napkin, and turned to Lefferts in answer to the inquiry about real estate which Lefferts had just tactfully addressed to him.
"The great charm of this section of the country," he was saying, "is that from the time of its earliest settlement it has been in the hands of a small group of—" At this instant Jane-Ellen entered with the soup. Reed, who had expected to see Smithfield, stopped short, and stared at her with an astonishment he did not even attempt to disguise. Lefferts, following the direction of his eyes and seeing Jane-Ellen for the first time, mistook the subject of Reed's surprise.
"Oh," he said, as the girl left the room, "is this 'the face that launched a thousand ships'?"
Tucker, who was perhaps not as familiar with the Elizabethan dramatists as he should have been, replied shortly that this was the cook.
"A very beautiful little person," said Lefferts, imagining, poor fellow, that he was now on safe ground.
"I own," said Tucker, "that I have never been able to take much interest in the personal appearance of servants."
"You sometimes behave as if you did, Tuck," remarked his host.
"If you are interested in beauty," observed Lefferts, "I don't see how you can eliminate any of its manifestations, particularly according to social classes."