“O Lily,” he answered, “don’t talk to me like that! I want some one to tell me I’m perfect, and, strangely enough, no one will.”
“I will,” she answered, with beaming good nature, “and I pretty near think so, too. But I can’t dine with you, Pete. Wouldn’t you like to go to my meeting?”
“I should perfectly hate to,” he answered, and went off crossly, to dine at his college’s local club. Here he found an old friend, who most fortunately said something derogatory of the firm of Benson & Honaton. The opinion coincided with certain phases of Wayne’s own views, but he contradicted it, held it up to ridicule, and ended by quoting incidents in the history of his friend’s own firm which, as he said, were probably among the crookedest things that had ever been put over in Wall Street. Lily would not have distracted his mind more completely. He felt almost cheerful when he went home about ten o’clock. His mother was still out, and there was no letter from Mathilde. He had been counting on finding one.
Before long his mother came in. She was looking very fine. She had on a new gray dress that she had had made for her by a fallen woman from an asylum, but which had turned out better than such ventures of Mrs. Wayne’s usually did.
She had supposed she and Mr. Lanley were to dine alone, an idea which had not struck her as revolutionary. Accustomed to strange meals in strange company—a bowl of milk with a prison chaplain at a dairy lunch-room, or even, on one occasion, a supper in an Owl Lunch Wagon with a wavering drunkard,—she had thought that a quiet, perfect dinner with Mr. Lanley sounded pleasant enough. But she was not sorry to find it had been enlarged. She liked to meet new people. She was extremely optimistic, and always hoped that they would prove either spiritually rewarding, or practically useful to some of her projects. When she saw Mrs. Baxter, with her jetty hair, jeweled collar, and eyes a trifle too saurian for perfect beauty, she at once saw a subscription to the working-girl’s club. The fourth person Mr. Wilsey, Lanley’s lawyer, she knew well by reputation. She wondered if she could make him see that his position on the eight-hour law was absolutely anti-social.
Mr. Lanley enjoyed a small triumph when she entered. He had been so discreet in his description of her to Mrs. Baxter, he had been so careful not to hint that she was an illuminating personality who had suddenly come into his life, that he knew he had left his old friend with the general impression that Mrs. Wayne was merely the mother of an undesirable suitor of Mathilde’s who spent most of her life in the company of drunkards. So when she came in, a little late as usual, in her long, soft, gray dress, with a pink rose at her girdle, looking far more feminine than Mrs. Baxter, about whom Adelaide’s offensive adjective “upholstered” still clung, he felt the full effect of her appearance. He even enjoyed the obviously suspicious glance which Mrs. Baxter immediately afterward turned upon him.
At dinner things began well. They talked about people and events of which Mrs. Wayne knew nothing, but her interest and good temper made her not an outsider, but an audience. Anecdotes which even Mr. Lanley might have felt were trivial gossip became, through her attention to them, incidents of the highest human interest. Such an uncritical interest was perhaps too stimulating.
He expected nothing dangerous when, during the game course, Mrs. Baxter turned to him and asked how Mathilde had enjoyed what she referred to as “her first winter.”
Mr. Lanley liked to talk about Mathilde. He described, with a little natural exaggeration, how much she had enjoyed herself and how popular she had been.
“I hope she hasn’t been bitten by any of those modern notions,” said Mrs. Baxter.