“Or lunatics out of Bloomingdale—as these ‘reformers’ usually are,” my father added, softening the remark with his indulgent smile.
“Oh, well,” Delane murmured, his attention flagging, “I daresay we’re well enough off as we are.”
“Especially,” added Major Detrancy with a playful sniff, “with the punch in the offing, as I perceive it to be.”
The punch struck the note for my mother’s withdrawal. She rose with her shy circular smile, while the gentlemen, all on their feet, protested gallantly at her desertion.
“Abandoning us to go back to Mr. Elsmere—we shall be jealous of the gentleman!” Colonel Ruscott declared, chivalrously reaching the door first; and as he opened it my father said, again with his indulgent smile: “Ah, my wife—she’s a great reader.”
IV
“YOU’LL admit,” Mrs. Delane challenged me, “that Hayley’s perfect.”
Don’t imagine you have yet done with Mrs. Delane, any more than Delane had, or I. Hitherto I have shown you only one side, or rather one phase, of her; that during which, for obvious reasons, Hayley became an obstacle or a burden. In the intervals between her great passions, when somebody had to occupy the vacant throne in her bosom, her husband was always reinstated there; and during these inter-lunar periods he and the children were her staple subjects of conversation. If you had met her then for the first time you would have taken her for the perfect wife and mother, and wondered if Hayley ever got a day off; and you would not have been far wrong in conjecturing that he seldom did.
Only these intervals were rather widely spaced, and usually of short duration; and at other times, his wife being elsewhere engaged, it was Delane who elder-brothered his big boys and their little sister. Sometimes, on these occasions—when Mrs. Delane was abroad or at Newport—Delane used to carry me off for a week to the quiet old house in the New Jersey hills, full of Hayley and Delane portraits, of heavy mahogany furniture and the mingled smell of lavender bags and leather—leather boots, leather gloves, leather luggage, all the aromas that emanate from the cupboards and passages of a house inhabited by hard riders.