CHAPTER XXIII
‟HOW in the world did that cunning little wife of his ever fall in love with him?” Frederic’s companion inquired, watching the emerging procession of the dining party. “He always looks as if he had something else on his mind when he’s with women—as if he didn’t think they’re worth talkin’ to. She looks about half his age. Of course you can’t tell, though; everybody uses so much makeup nowadays. They say she belongs to awf’ly important people in New York and never liked it here because she couldn’t get enough music. You didn’t answer my question: Aren’t they ever goin’ to get married? I mean your cousin Harlan and that big Miss Shelby. How in the world do they find anything to say to each other? Gosh, if I kept a man hangin’ on that long I’d certainly be talked out! How in the world can two people stand seein’ each other all the time like that?”
“I can comprehend the gentleman’s half of it,” said the gallant Frederic. “I believe Miss Shelby goes abroad for a few months now and then to make her own share of the association more endurable.”
Martha had been at home only a week, in fact, after one of these excursions; though she did not make them for the reason set forth by Frederic Oliphant, who was now much given to the reading of eighteenth-century French memoirs and the polishing of his diction. She went, she airily explained to Harlan, to gather materials that would enable her to defend the Renaissance; but as he drove home with her from the dinner at the Country Club, this evening, he observed that the materials she had gathered impressed him as “about as deep into the twentieth century as mechanics and upholsterers were able to go.” His allusion was to the expensive closed car she had brought from Paris;—her old bit of hickory, impossible to be bent an atom’s width in business, yielded with no more than a faint squeak when his daughter was lavish with herself. “Spend what you plague-taken want to,” he said, “so long as you don’t ask me to ride in the devilish contrapshun!”
“He says he’ll stick to his horses and our old carriage until they’re ‘chased off the road,’ ” Martha told Harlan, on this homeward drive. “It doesn’t seem to me that’s so far ahead. Why hasn’t Dan ever done anything about the motor-car factory he was going to build?”
“He has,” Harlan said, and laughed. “In talk he has, that is! He’s been talking about it for years, almost as much as he has about Ornaby.”
“Then why doesn’t he——”
“Still dancing on the tight-rope!” Harlan laughed. “He’s got his car line through the Addition—I understand your father explodes completely whenever it’s mentioned to him—but Dan’s spending fortunes on new streets and sewers and what not. He’s actually trying to open a big tract still farther out, north of Ornaby; and I don’t believe he’s able to keep money in his hands long enough to go into building cars. You’d think he’s building them though, if you’d listen to him! He talks about the ‘Ornaby Car’ to everybody; I suppose he believes it’s a lucky name. He has got his Addition booming though—no question. He’s making the countryside more and more horrible every day. It’s much worse than it was last year.”
“How is it horrible?”
“I could tell you, but it’s ten to one that if I merely told you, you’d become Ornaby’s defender—you’re so everlastingly its defender! I’d rather show you, if you’d take me as a passenger in this jewelled palanquin of yours to-morrow.”