THE FULNESS OF LIFE
He, with his blithe young bosom warm,
Quite mad as any hatter,
Just pipes and jigs through every storm,
So what can winter matter!
John Hartley, "The Robin in Winter."
A great man? Impossible; he hasn't a dozen enemies!—"The Silver Poppy."
Those should have been happy days for Hartley, yet they were not. As to just why they were not he had decided to hold question with himself no longer. He was persuading himself to pick the flower, distrustful of his to-morrow.
He and Cordelia saw a great deal of each other, though he was puzzled often by the Indian Summer mood of tranquillity which seemed to have settled down upon her. Though no lightest word of love passed between them, she seemed to cling to him with a broken autumnal forlornness that touched him more than once as time went on.
Several days out of the week he dined with the Spauldings, and as the season advanced and the play-houses opened he saw himself more and more often a member of their merry little theater parties. They went once or twice to Cordelia's play, but her novel in its dramatized form was only a lukewarm success at its best, and was soon withdrawn. Yet going out "on the road" as "a New York triumph," it mysteriously took unto itself new life and prospered with sedate but substantial vigor.
Day by day Hartley's circle of acquaintances had enlarged—he became, in fact, a more or less popular young man—and he found it distinctly agreeable to catch an occasional smile from a carriage passing in the Park or on Riverside Drive, and to bow now and then to a familiar face on the crowded Avenue—there is only one. It was pleasant, too, to hold the reins and have Cordelia at his side in the Spauldings' spider phaeton, driving quietly home through the waning autumnal evenings after happy afternoons in the sun and open air.
What pleased him most, though, were their early morning rides in Central Park. Mrs. Spaulding had gladly enough placed her horses at his disposal—it was only too good of him to exercise the overfed beasts—and many were his merry canters along the bridle-paths, from which now and then he could catch glimpses of the crowded city that elbowed in on his solitude and gave him a thin, fragmentary feeling of truancy, like a summer runaway who had wandered into sound of the familiar old admonitory school-bell. Cordelia soon formed the habit of joining him in these rides, though for a girl from Kentucky and one who had always made much of her love of horseflesh, she was not a good rider. She explained this by the fact that she had fallen out of practise, for one thing, and for another, that since Firefly, her old Kentucky thoroughbred, had run away with her at home she always felt more or less nervous in the saddle. Hartley took her in hand, accordingly, and coached her at great pains and with much patience, and as she learned to sit more comfortably on her mount her strange fear melted away. As she discovered, too, that the daily gallop in the morning air was bringing more vigor to her limbs and a fresher color to her cheeks, her Southern dislike for all such active exercise soon passed away.