“And I hear he is dining at my daughter’s this evening.”
Mrs. Wayne had had a telephone message to that effect.
“I wondered, if you were alone—” Lanley hesitated. He had of course been going to ask her to come and dine with him, but a better inspiration came to him. “I wondered if you would ask me to dine with you.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Mrs. Wayne, “but I can’t. I have a boy coming. He’s studying for the ministry, the most interesting person. He had not been sober for three years when I took hold of him, and now he hasn’t touched a drop for two.”
He sighed. She said she was sorry, but he could see plainly enough that any reformed, or even more any unreformed, drunkard would always far surpass him in ability to command her interest. He did not belong to a generation that cleared things up with words; he would have thought it impertinent, almost ungentlemanly, to probe her attitude of mind about the scene at Adelaide’s; and he would have considered himself unmanly to make any plea to her on the ground of his own suffering. One simply supported such things as best one could; it was expected of one, like tipping waiters. He had neither the vocabulary nor the habit of mind that made an impersonal exposition of an emotional difficulty possible; but even had he possessed these powers he would have retained his tradition against using them. Perhaps, if she had been his sister or his wife, he might have admitted that he had had a hard day or that every one had moments of depression; but that was not the way to talk in a lady’s drawing-room. In the silence he saw her eyes steal longingly to her writing-table, deeply and hopelessly littered with papers and open books.
“I’m afraid I’m detaining you,” he said. The visit had been a failure.
“Oh, not at all,” she replied, and then added in a tone of more sincerity: “I do have the most terrible time with my check-book. And,” she added, as one confessing to an absurdly romantic ideal, “I was trying to balance it.”
“You should not be troubled with such things,” said Mr. Lanley, thinking how long it was since any one but a secretary had balanced his books.
Pete, it appeared, usually did attend to his mother’s checks, but of late she had not liked to bother him, and that was just the moment the bank had chosen to notify her that she had overdrawn. “I don’t see how I can be,” she said, too hopeless to deny it.
“If you would allow me,” said Mr. Lanley. “I am an excellent bookkeeper.”