"I BELIEVE it's the first time in a month that I've heard Nona laugh," Stanley Heuston said with a touch of irony—or was it simply envy?
Nona was still in the whirlpool of her laugh. She struggled to its edge only to be caught back, with retrospective sobs and gasps, into its central coil. "It was too screamingly funny," she flung at them out of the vortex.
She was perched sideways, as her way was, on the arm of the big chintz sofa in Arthur Wyant's sitting-room. Wyant was stretched out in his usual armchair, behind a crumby messy tea-table, on the other side of which sat his son and Stanley Heuston.
"She didn't hesitate for more than half a second—just long enough to catch my eye—then round she jerked, grabbed hold of her last word and fitted it into a beautiful new appeal to the Mothers. Oh—oh—oh! If you could have seen them!"
"I can." Jim's face suddenly became broad, mild and earnestly peering. He caught up a pair of his father's eye-glasses, adjusted them to his blunt nose, and murmured in a soft feminine drawl: "Mrs. Manford is one of our deepest-souled women. She has a vital message for all Mothers."
Wyant leaned back and laughed. His laugh was a contagious chuckle, easily provoked and spreading in circles like a full spring. Jim gave a large shout at his own mimicry, and Heuston joined the chorus on a dry note that neither spread nor echoed, but seemed suddenly to set bounds to their mirth. Nona felt a momentary resentment of his tone. Was he implying that they were ridiculing their mother? They weren't, they were only admiring her in their own way, which had always been humorous and half-parental. Stan ought to have understood by this time—and have guessed why Nona, at this moment, caught at any pretext to make Jim laugh, to make everything in their joint lives appear to him normal and jolly. But Stanley always seemed to see beyond a joke, even when he was in the very middle of it. He was like that about everything in life; forever walking around things, weighing and measuring them, and making his disenchanted calculations. Poor fellow—well, no wonder!
Jim got up, the glasses still clinging to his blunt nose. He gathered an imaginary cloak about him, picked up inexistent gloves and vanity-bag, and tapped his head as if he were settling a feathered hat. The laughter waxed again, and Wyant chuckled: "I wish you young fools would come oftener. It would cure me a lot quicker than being shipped off to Georgia." He turned half-apologetically to Nona. "Not that I'm not awfully glad of the chance—"
"I know, Exhibit dear. It'll be jolly enough when you get down there, you and Jim."
"Yes; I only wish you were coming too. Why don't you?"
Jim's features returned to their normal cast, and he removed the eye-glasses. "Because mother and Manford have planned to carry off Lita and the kid to Cedarledge at the same time. Good scheme, isn't it? I wish I could be in both places at once. We're all of us fed up with New York."