CHAPTER XXII
VILLA D'ORSAY
Adelaide did not reach home until the troubles with and through Charles Whitney were settled, and Arthur and Dory were deep in carrying out the plans to make the mills and factories part of the university and not merely its property. When Scarborough's urgent cable came, Dory found that all the steamers were full. Adelaide could go with him only by taking a berth in a room with three women in the bottom of the ship. "Impossible accommodations," thought he, "for so luxurious a person and so poor a sailor"; and he did not tell her that this berth could be had. "You'll have to wait a week or so," said he. "As you can't well stay on here alone, why not accept Mrs. Whitney's invitation to join her?"
Adelaide disliked Mrs. Whitney, but there seemed to be no alternative. Mrs. Whitney was at Paris, on the way to America after the wedding and a severe cure at Aix and an aftercure in Switzerland. She had come for the finishing touches of rejuvenation—to get her hair redone and to go through her biennial agony of having Auguste, beauty specialist to the royalty, nobility and fashion, and demimonde, of three continents, burn off her outer skin that nature might replace it with one new and fresh and unwrinkled. She was heavily veiled as she and Adelaide traveled down to Cherbourg to the steamer. As soon as she got aboard she retired to her room and remained hidden there during the voyage, seen only by her maid, her face covered day and night with Auguste's marvelous skin-coaxing mask. Adelaide did not see her again until the morning of the last day, when she appeared on deck dressed beautifully and youthfully for the shore, her skin as fair and smooth as a girl's, and looking like an elder sister of Adelaide's—at a distance.
She paused in New York; Adelaide hastened to Saint X, though she was looking forward uneasily to her arrival because she feared she would have to live at the old Hargrave house in University Avenue. Miss Skeffington ruled there, and she knew Miss Skeffington—one of those old-fashioned old maids whose rigid ideas of morality extend to the ordering of personal habits in minutest detail. Under her military sway everyone had to rise for breakfast at seven sharp, had to dine exactly at noon, sup when the clock struck the half hour after five. Ingress and egress for members of the family was by the side door only, the front door being reserved for company. For company also was the parlor, and for company the front stairs with their brilliant carpet, new, though laid for the first time nearly a quarter of a century before; for company also was the best room in the house, which ought to have been attractive, but was a little damp from being shut up so much, and was the cause of many a cold to guests. "I simply can't stand it to live by the striking of clocks!" thought Adelaide. "I must do something! But what?"
Her uneasiness proved unnecessary, however. Dory disappointed his aunt, of a new and interestingly difficult spirit to subdue, by taking rooms at the Hendricks Hotel until they should find a place of their own. Mrs. Ranger asked them to live with her; but Adelaide shrank from putting herself in a position where her mother and Arthur could, and her sister-in-law undoubtedly would, "know too much about our private affairs." Mrs. Ranger did not insist. She would not admit it to herself, but, while she worshiped Del and thought her even more beautiful than she was, and just about perfection in every way, still Madelene was more satisfactory for daily companionship. Also, Ellen doubted whether two such positive natures as Madelene's and Adelaide's would be harmonious under the same roof. "What's more," she reflected, "there may be a baby—babies."
Within a fortnight of Del's return, and before she and Dory had got quite used to each other again, she fixed on an abode. "Mrs. Dorsey was here this afternoon," said she, with enthusiasm which, to Dory's acute perceptions, seemed slightly exaggerated, in fact, forced, "and offered us her house for a year, just to have somebody in it whom she could trust to look after things. You know she's taking her daughter abroad to finish. It was too good a chance to let pass; so I accepted at once."
Dory turned away abruptly. With slow deliberation he took a cigarette from his case, lighted it, watched the smoke drift out at the open window. She was observing him, though she seemed not to be. And his expression made her just a little afraid. Unlike most men who lead purely intellectual lives, he had not the slightest suggestion of sexlessness; on the contrary, he seemed as strong, as positive physically, as the look of his forehead and eyes showed him to be mentally. And now that he had learned to dress with greater care, out of deference to her, she could find nothing about him to help her in protecting herself by criticising him.
"Do you think, Del," said he, "that we'll be able to live in that big place on eighteen hundred a year?"
It wasn't as easy for him thus to remind her of their limited means as it theoretically should have been. Del was distinctly an expensive-looking luxury. That dress of hers, pale green, with hat and everything to match or in harmony, was a "simple thing," but the best dressmaker in the Rue de la Paix had spent a great deal of his costly time in producing that effect of simplicity. Throughout, she had the cleanness, the freshness, the freedom from affectations which Dory had learned could be got only by large expenditure. Nor would he have had her any different. He wanted just the settings she chose for her fair, fine beauty. The only change he would have asked would have been in the expression of those violet eyes of hers when they looked at him.