“Never!” she exclaimed, horrified. “And I don’t sign my own name, so it’s useless to look.”
“You’re exasperating, Catherine!” he cried, and meant it. Then he laughed suddenly. “I’ll bet they’re radical—oh, radical! Tell me, Catherine,” he added maliciously, “when you’ve gone upstairs after my father has talked about Bolshevism at some length, do you sit down then and write your subversive stuff? A double life—that’s what you’re leading!”
She flushed at this and would say no more.
Yet Stacey’s persistent attempt to get at Catherine was not the result of mere curiosity, even the curiosity of affection. At heart he felt vaguely that she was immensely lonely in her isolation, in great need of sharing her grief for Phil with some one else. He would have her make such a friend of him as Phil had made him.
CHAPTER XXII
In 1910 Harriet Price, Ames’s mother and widow of John Price, who had been head of the Price Tractor and Motor Company, built a new house. In 1912 she died, and the mansion, together with many other good things, among them a controlling interest in the tractor company, passed to Ames, the only child.
The house, which was an immense square building of yellow stone in the Italian Renaissance style, occupied, with its grounds, an entire block in the best section of the fashionable boulevard. Stacey had always rather liked the exterior, though it was not Parkins and May but a Chicago firm of architects who had built the house. It was severe, commanding, less inharmonious in Vernon than most anachronisms, and the four great chimneys were really fine. Never having cared for the Prices, Stacey had seen the interior but once—at a large house-warming affair given in the winter of 1910, to which he had gone out of curiosity. It had struck him then as Chicago decorators’ stuff (which it was), proper, faultlessly in period, quite without character. He remembered perfectly the dreariness of his impression.
So now, when he entered the vast hall, his first glimpse of it made him aware of change.
“Mr. Carroll, sir?” asked the English butler. “Will you go upstairs, please? Mrs. Price is expecting you there, sir.”
“Yes,” said Stacey, “half a minute.” He walked quickly across the hall and stood for a moment at the entrance to the great drawing-room on the left. As he looked in he smiled, half appreciatively, half ironically. Change? Well, rather! To begin with, Marian—it was Marian, of course—had swept away pretty much everything that had been in that room when Stacey had first seen it. But, even supposing the discarded furniture and pictures to have been sold, he hardly thought the present relative bareness had saved Ames money. That long table, the Florentine chest, and the copy of a relief in marble with touches of blue and gold (Desiderio da Settignano?)—if it was a copy—h’m! He turned back. “All right,” he said to the butler. “I’ll go up.”