Chapter XV
When Eleanor Van Antwerp had uttered the words "If Bobby approves," she had given voice to a purely conventional formula; for when, in the eight years of their married life, had Bobby not approved of anything that she might chance to desire? She did not suppose for a moment that he would object to her asking Elizabeth Van Vorst, or any one under the sun, to spend the winter, and when, the next morning, she paid him a visit in his den, where he was supposed to be transacting important business, and proved to be enjoying a novel and a cigar, she was still, as she asked his permission to carry out her new plan, merely paying a graceful concession to the perfunctory and outworn theory of his supremacy. Bobby listened placidly, puffing at his cigar, his clear-cut, clean-shaven profile, outlined against the window-pane seeming absolutely impassive in the gray light of the autumn day. But when she concluded, and was waiting, all aglow with her own enthusiasm, for his answer, he turned his blue eyes towards her with an unusually thoughtful look.
"Well," she said, impatiently, as he still declined to commit himself, "what do you think?"
"What do I think," he repeated, slowly, "of your asking Elizabeth Van Vorst to spend the winter?"
"Why, yes, I don't want to do it, dear, of course, unless you approve."
"Well, then," said Bobby, calmly, "if you ask my candid opinion, I think it would be a mistake. I—I'd rather you didn't Eleanor, really I would."
"Bobby," Eleanor Van Antwerp stared at her husband in incredulous amazement. "Bobby, you don't mean to say that you don't want me to ask her?"
"That's about it." Bobby paused and reflectively knocked the ashes from his cigar. "You see," he went on, argumentatively "this is the way I look at it. The girl is good-looking, and all that, and it's very nice for you to see something of her up here, and I'm only too glad, for it's awfully sweet of you, darling, to come here on my account, and I've always been sorry that there wasn't some woman whom you could be friends with. But to ask a girl to spend the winter, and introduce her to people, is—is a responsibility; and if you want to ask any one—why, I'd rather it were some girl whom I know all about—that's all."
It was not often that Bobby made such a long speech. His wife could hardly hear him to the end of it. "But, my dear Bobby" she exclaimed, breaking in upon his last words, "you know all about Elizabeth Van Vorst!"