It had always been Vickers’s boast that he had never worked for any one but his own father, and, as he usually added, not very long for him. To find himself sitting on a high stool in a dark office, copying Emmons’s letters for him, struck him as supremely ridiculous. In South America he had been a person of some importance, and the contrast amused, even while it annoyed him.
The work was not hard, but the hours, he noticed, were long. It was after six, on this first day, before he reached home. The sound of voices in the drawing-room warned him of visitors, and, like the true home-coming American, he stole quietly upstairs to his own room.
About seven, Plimpton knocked on his door, to say that Miss Lee would be glad to speak to him for a few minutes in the drawing-room, before dinner.
Vickers was an optimist. A thousand agreeable possibilities occurred to him. He dressed quickly—he had had time for a little shopping on his way uptown, and was able to appear in the conventional evening dress of the Anglo-Saxon.
He found Nellie occupied with some flowers which had just come for her in the long pink pasteboard box of a New York florist. She was clipping the stems and arranging them in a tall vase.
“Oh, Bob,” she said, without turning from her occupation, and the charm of her pose contrasted oddly with her tone, “I wanted to warn you not to trouble your father with this idea of your being some one else. It would probably destroy his returning faith in you, and I don’t think he would even get the amusement from it that I did.”
“Ah, he has not such a sense of humor as that merry fellow Emmons. You did not tell me it was he whom my absence has kept you from for a year. No wonder you resented it!”
“I always think,” Nellie observed with the utmost detachment, “that a person who is not very strong in morals ought to have particularly good taste to make up. I don’t think your last remark was conspicuous for either.”
“My dear Nellie,” said Vickers, “if I had promised to marry Emmons, I should never hear the word taste again without a blush.”
“We won’t discuss Mr. Emmons.”