The speaker did look rather cadaverous. Linda realized it now. It was a strange thing to have in any degree a sense of compassion for him: this masterful man on whom her father leaned, the man who alone in all the world had a hundred times without a word put her in the wrong, and whom as often she had fervently wished she might never see again. She had chafed against that chain of her father's reliance which bound herself as well. There was no escaping King, and when in her busy college life she thought of him at all, it was as a presumptuous creature who was continually making good his presumption; and what could be more exasperating than that?
King was a self-made man, one with few connections in Chicago, one of whom was Linda's voice teacher, Mrs. Porter. The girl never had exactly understood this relationship, but the fact that some of Mrs. Porter's blood ran in his veins constituted Bertram's only redeeming trait in the eyes of that lady's adorer. Now as she regarded him, staring with discontented eyes at the rug, a sense came over her for the first time that King was a lonely figure. It was all very well for a man in health to live at the University Club and have his mind and life entirely wrapped up in business; but when eating and sleeping became difficult and the brain was over-weary, the evenings might seem rather long to him.
"It serves a young man right," thought Linda, "when he will bind himself on the wheel of business and act as if there was not one thing in the world worth having but money!" Hadn't she seen to what such a course had brought her father? She spoke:—
"There's a lot of nonsense in all this kow-towing to business," she said. "Why do men make such slaves of themselves?"
"So their women can have a house like this, several gowns like yours, and a motor like the one you're going out in," responded King dully.
Linda's rosy lips curled. "Fred Whitcomb's motor is last year's model."
Her companion smiled.
"There, you see!" he remarked. "There's nothing for me to do but to keep on hustling so you can always have the latest."
Color flashed over Linda's face, but she shrugged carelessly.
"Oh, of course," she retorted, "everything is Eve's fault."