The Bent Twig

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

She now took her place by the side of their host, and thought, looking at his outdoor aspect, that her guess at what to wear had been better than Aunt Victoria's or Molly's. For the question of what to wear had been a burning one. Pressure had been put on her to don just a lacy, garden-party toilette of lawn and net as now automatically barred both Aunt Victoria and Molly from the proposed expedition to the woods. Nobody had had the least idea what was to be the color of the entertainment offered them, for the great significance of the affair was that it was the first time that Page had ever invited any one to the spot for which he evidently felt such an unaccountable affection. Aunt Victoria had explained to Sylvia, "It's always at the big Page estate in Lenox that he entertains, or rather that he gets his mother to do the absolutely indispensable entertaining for him." Morrison said laughingly: "Isn't it the very quintessence of quaintness to visit him there! To watch his detached, whimsical air of not being in the least a part of all the magnificence which bears his name. He insists, you know, that he doesn't begin to know his way around that huge house!" "It was his father who built the Lenox place," commented Mrs. Marshall-Smith. "It suited his taste to perfection. Austin seems to have a sort of Marie-Antoinette reaction towards a somewhat painfully achieved simplicity. He's not the man to take any sort of pose. If he were, it would be impossible not to suspect him of a little pose in his fondness for going back to his farmer great-grandfather's setting." Guided by this conversation, and by shrewd observations of her own, Sylvia had insisted, even to the point of strenuousness, upon wearing to this first housewarming a cloth skirt and coat, tempering the severity of this costume with a sufficiently feminine and beruffled blouse of silk. As their car had swung up before the plain, square, big-chimneyed old house, and Page had come to meet them, dressed in khaki-colored forester's garb, with puttees, Aunt Victoria had been generous enough to admit by an eye-flash to Sylvia that the girl knew her business very well. There was not, of course, Sylvia reflected, the slightest pretense of obscurity between them as to what, under the circumstances, her business was.

All this lay back of the fact that, as Sylvia, her face bright with spontaneous interest in pine plantations and lumbering operations, stepped to the side of the man in puttees, her costume exactly suited his own.

From the midst of a daring and extremely becoming arrangement of black and white striped chiffon and emerald-green velvet, Molly's beautiful face smiled on them approvingly. For various reasons, the spectacle afforded her as much pleasure as it did extreme discomfort to her grandfather, and with her usual masterful grasp on a situation she began to arrange matters so that the investigation of pine plantations and lumber operations should be conducted en tête-à-tête. "Mrs. Marshall-Smith, you're going to stay here, of course, to look at Austin's lovely view! Think of his having hidden that view away from us all till now! I want to go through the house later on, and without Austin, so I can linger and pry if I like! I want to look at every single thing. It's lovely—the completest Yankee setting! It looks as though we all ought to have on clean gingham aprons and wear steel-rimmed spectacles. No, Austin, don't frown! I don't mean that for a knock. I love it, honestly I do! I always thought I'd like to wear clean gingham aprons myself. The only things that are out of keeping are those shelves and shelves and shelves of solemn books with such terrible titles!"

"That's a fact, Page," said Morrison, laughing. "Molly's hit the nail squarely. Your modern, economic spasms over the organization of industrialism are out of place in that delightful, eighteenth century, plain old interior. They threw their fits over theology!"

The owner of the house nodded. "Yes, you know your period! A great-great-grandfather of mine, a ministerial person, had left a lot of books on the nature of the Trinity and Free Will and such. They had to be moved up to the attic to make room for mine. What books will be on those shelves a hundred years from now, I wonder?"

"Treatises on psychic analysis, on how to transfer thought without words, unless I read the signs of the times wrong," Morrison hazarded a guess.

Molly was bored by this talk and anxious to get the walkers off. "You'd better be starting if you're going far up on the mountain, Austin. We have to be back for a tea at Mrs. Neville's, where Sylvia's to pour. Mrs. Neville would have a thing or two to say to us, if we made her lose her main drawing card."

"Are you coming, Morrison?" asked Page.

"No, he isn't," said Molly decidedly. "He's going to stay to play to me on that delicious tin-panny old harpsichordy thing in your 'best room.' You do call it the 'best room,' don't you? They always do in New England dialect stories. Grandfather, you have your cards with you, haven't you? You always have. If you'll get them out, Felix and Arnold and I'll play whist with you."

Only one of those thus laid hold of, slipped out from her strong little fingers. Arnold raised himself, joint by joint, from his chair, and announced that he was a perfect nut-head when it came to whist. "And, anyhow," he went on insistently, raising his voice as Molly began to order him back into the ranks—"And, anyhow, I don't want to play whist! And I do want to see what Page has been up to all this time he's kept so dark about his goings-on over here. No, Molly, you needn't waste any more perfectly good language on me. You can boss everybody else if you like, but I'm the original, hairy wild-man who gets what he wants."