FROTHINGHAM’S abrupt change of tactics had been caused by a cablegram from Evelyn which reached him at the Barneys’ even as his diplomatic agent was in the heat and toil of the negotiations with Amzi Hooper. It read:
Break off everything and return. Have written you New York. Best possible news. Gwen sends love.
“Why didn’t she say what it was?” he wondered. And he decided that it must be news of too private a nature to be trusted to the telegraph station at Beauvais. Why had she written if he was to go at once? “I suppose,” he concluded, “she was afraid I mightn’t obey orders. ‘Gwen sends love’—that must mean that the news is about me and Gwen.”
But he had no uplifting of spirits—instead, he felt a sense of impending misfortune. He called up Lawrence’s office and told one of the clerks that he wished Lawrence to call him as soon as he came in. In a few minutes Lawrence was relating over the wire the favourable progress of the negotiation.
“It’s off,” said Frothingham. “I want nothing more to do with it. I’m glad it’s in good form for the break. I can drop it decently.”
This so delighted Lawrence that he laughed aloud. “Hooper’s certain to send for me,” he said. “I’ll give him the shock of his life.”
Frothingham cautioned him against any transgression of the most courteous politeness, then went down to luncheon—with Nelly, alone. While she was talking and he listening and looking, all in a flash he understood why the “best possible news” from home depressed him, why “Gwen sends love” did not elate him. He asked Nelly to take him to her school.
“Oh, you wouldn’t be interested,” she said.
But he insisted, and they set out immediately after luncheon. As they went—in a street car—she explained her work:
When her mother lay dying she said to the man beside whom she had worked for thirty-six years, mostly cloud and rain: “Henry, I don’t want a big, showy monument over me. If you should do something for me, build a school of some kind, a school where girls can be taught how to be useful wives and mothers, instead of spending their whole lives at learning.” And Nelly’s father had put by money, a large sum each year, until his daughter’s education was finished. Then he had said to her, “I want you to help me carry out your ma’s memorial.” And he turned over to her a mass of plans and hints and schemes which he had been accumulating for seven years. “Get up a plan,” he had said, “on the lines your ma would have liked. It’s a woman’s work—it’s your natural work. I’ll supply the money.” And after two years’ labour, one year of it abroad, she had perfected a scheme for a great school where several hundred girls could be instructed in all that a woman as a woman should know—housework, sewing, cooking, shopping, marketing, the elements of business and of art, the care of babies, the training and education of children. And she had so planned it that the girls could and should support themselves while they were learning.