"Not so loud," he said.
She sent out a ripple of laughter. "Well, you certainly are practical. That, I know."
"Do you?"
"Don't I?" She looked straight into his eyes and her laughter ceased.
Mrs. Vanderdyke joined them. "You have twenty minutes for a little rest before you dress for dinner, Beatrix. You must be tired after your hot drive."
"No, Mother, thanks," said Beatrix airily. "Pelham talked all the way here and was so merry and bright that the journey seemed short." But she went upstairs to the suite that he would never forget, and her little touch of sarcasm found its mark.
"Come into my room," said Mr. Vanderdyke, "and we'll smoke a cigarette."
Franklin followed him.
It was a curious room in which he presently found himself,—a room which gave a pathetic keynote to the character and life of the man who spent so many hours in it. Very large and lofty, it was crammed with ideas at which he appeared to have made a beginning, dabbled in and wearied of. There were leather-bound manuscript books in dozens, several of which had labels on the back,—"Notes on Old China," "Impressions of European Labor Conditions," "Butterflies," "Songs and Sonnets," "A Life of Russell Vanderdyke, Book I.," "Trout Streams," "The Improvement of Factories,"—it would have taken an hour to examine them all. The note of the dilettante was everywhere,—in the pieces of rare silver that were mixed with old pottery, Japanese lacquer, Jacobean chests, Oriental curios, ancient Bibles, first editions, faded prints, modern etchings, and one or two appalling examples of so-called Cubist work which appealed to Franklin merely as pervertism or the attempt of men who had never been taught to paint to illustrate delirium tremens. It was the room of a man of confirmed irresolution, of an inherited lack of grip, of an intellect that was as unconcentrated as a flight of pigeons. It showed a scattering of interest that could only belong to some-one who had never felt the splendid urge of achieving an object in the face of dire necessity. It provided the most unobservant eye with a complete history of an ambitious but vacillating life. It conveyed to workers the impression of many acres of dead-level ground long ago carefully staked out as a garden city, with neat boards indicating here an avenue, here a public library, here a country club, here a huge hotel, here a railroad station, all very neat and well weeded but without the fulfilment of one single promise.
Franklin didn't get the feeling of the room at once. It seemed to him to be rather intimate though somewhat uninhabitable. It was only while Mr. Vanderdyke was talking in his vague impersonal way that the pathetic incompleteness of it all came to him and hit him hard. Good Heavens, what if he, too, dwindled, for the same reason, into a similar dabbler! What if he, too, scattered away his life with the same kind of uselessness!