Dick showed all the manly indignation of an elder brother.
"You don't know what you're talking about, Bess," he said in the husky voice he had acquired. He had not changed; he bore himself importantly, wore a scowl, dressed extravagantly, and always in the extreme of the prevailing fashion; he seemed to have an intuition in such matters; he wore a new collar or a new kind of cravat two weeks in advance of the other young men in town, and they did not seem to follow him so much as he seemed to anticipate them. He lunched at the club, and Elizabeth divined that he spent large sums of money, and yet he was constant in his work; he was always at the Trust Company's office early; he did not miss a single day. No, Dick had not changed; nothing had changed, and this thought only increased Elizabeth's discontent, or vague uneasiness, or vague dissatisfaction, or whatever it was.
"I don't know what it is," she confided to Marriott the first time she saw him. "I ought to be of some use in the world, but I'm not--Oh, don't say I am," she insisted when she caught his expression; "don't make the conventional protest. It's just as I told you before I went away, I'm useless." She glanced over the drawing-room in an inclusive condemnation of the luxury represented by the heavy furniture, the costly bric-à-brac, and all that. Her face wore an expression of weariness. She knew that she had not expressed herself. What she was thinking, or, rather, what she was feeling was, perhaps, the disappointment that comes to a spirited, imaginative, capable girl, who by education and training has developed ambitions and aspirations toward a real, full, useful life, yet who can do nothing in the world because the very conditions of that existence which give her those advantages forbid it. Prepared for life, she is not permitted to live; an artificial routine called a "sphere" is all that is allowed her; she may not realize her own personality, and, in time, is reduced to utter nothingness.
"By what right--" she resumed, but Marriott interrupted her.
"Don't take that road; it will only make you unhappy."
"Before I went abroad," she went on, ignoring the warning, "I told you that I would do something when I came back--something to justify myself. That's selfish, isn't it?" She ended in a laugh. "Well, anyway," she resumed, "I can look up the Koerners. You see the Koerners?"
"I haven't tried that case yet," Marriott said with a guilty expression.
"How dreadful of you!"
"Reproach me all you can," he said. "I must pay some penance. But, you know--I--well, I didn't try it at the spring term because Ford wanted to go to Europe, and then--well--I'm going to try it right away--soon."
The next morning, as Marriott walked down town, he determined to take up the Koerner case immediately. It was one of those mild and sunny days of grace that Nature allows in the mellow autumn, dealing them out one by one with a smile that withholds promise for another, so that each comes to winter-dreading mortals as a rare surprise. The long walk in the sun filled Marriott with a fine delight of life; he was pleased with himself because at last he was to do a duty he had long neglected. He sent for Koerner, and the old man came on a pair of new yellow crutches, bringing his wife and his enormous pipe.