“Or far above it,” I suggested.
“I suppose I'll have to ask her over to visit me,” he went on. “A fine hypocrite I'll feel.”
“You can make it one of the conditions of your gift that she is not to thank you or speak of it,” said I. “I fear your face would betray us, if she ever did.”
“An excellent idea!” he exclaimed. Then, as he shook hands with me in farewell: “You will win her yet—if you care to.”
As I steamed up the Sound, I was tempted to put in at Dawn Hill's harbor. Through my glass I could see Anita and Alva and several others, men and women, having tea on the lawn under a red and white awning. I could see her dress—a violet suit with a big violet hat to match. I knew that costume. Like everything she wore, it was both beautiful in itself and most becoming to her. I could see her face, could almost make out its expression—did I see, or did I imagine, a cruel contrast to what I always saw when she knew I was looking?
I gazed until the trees hid lawn and gay awning, and that lively company and her. In my bitterness I was full of resentment against her, full of self-pity. I quite forgot, for that moment, her side of the story.
XXVIII. BLACKLOCK SEES A LIGHT
It was next day, I think, that I met Mowbray Langdon and his brother Tom in the entrance of the Textile Building. Mowbray was back only a week from his summer abroad; but Tom I had seen and nodded to every day, often several times in the same day, as he went to and fro about his “respectable” dirty work for the Roebuck-Langdon clique. He was one of their most frequently used stool-pigeon directors in banks and insurance companies whose funds they staked in their big gambling operations, they taking almost all the profits and the depositors and policy holders taking almost all the risk. It had never once occurred to me to have any feeling of any kind about Tom, or in any way to take him into my calculations as to Anita. He was, to my eyes, too obviously a pale understudy of his powerful and fascinating brother. Whenever I thought of him as the man Anita fancied she loved, I put it aside instantly. “The kind of man a woman really cares for,” I would say to myself, “is the measure of her true self. But not the kind of man she imagines she cares for.”
Tom went on; Mowbray stopped. We shook hands, and exchanged commonplaces in the friendliest way—I was harboring no resentment against him, and I wished him to realize that his assault had bothered me no more than the buzzing and battering of a summer fly. “I've been trying to get in to see you,” said he. “I wanted to explain about that unfortunate Textile deal.”