“Don’t you think, my dear,” suggested Mrs. Percy-Bartlett sweetly, as they arose from the table, “that you could endure just one evening of really good music?”
“You will have to let me off to-night, Harriet,” answered Percy-Bartlett coldly. “I have a committee meeting at the club. By the way,” he remarked as they entered the library, in the intellectual atmosphere of which he was in the habit of smoking his after-dinner cigar, “I had a letter to-day from a business friend of mine, a distant relative on my mother’s side, Samuel Stoughton of Norwich. He tells me that his son, Richard, who was graduated from Yale last year, has come to the city to take a place on the Morning Trumpet. He asks me to show him a little attention. And, really, I don’t see how I can get out of it.”
“Why should you want to?” asked Mrs. Percy-Bartlett, striking a few chords on the piano, and casting a questioning glance at her husband. “The Stoughtons are very nice people.”
“Oh, yes, of course. But then a newspaper man, don’t you know, may be all very well, but—really I can’t understand why Richard Stoughton, who was left a fortune, if I remember rightly, by his mother, should take up the drudgery of New York newspaper life.”
“Perhaps,” suggested Mrs. Percy-Bartlett, looking down at her white, symmetrical arms and tapering hands, “perhaps the young man wants to see all sides of life. Perhaps he wants to enlarge his horizon.”
“Humph,” exclaimed Percy-Bartlett, showing more of his ancestral testiness than was his wont; “I can’t understand such a motive. If running up and down the city until all hours of the night, making a nuisance of yourself, is enlarging one’s horizon, I should think a man of Stoughton’s position and education would prefer to remain narrow in his vision. But there is no accounting for tastes; and I must acknowledge that, of late years, a good many very nice fellows have gone into newspaper work. Well, we’ll ask Stoughton to dinner some night when we’re dining alone, and see what kind of a boy he is. Perhaps he’ll get over his attack of journalistic enthusiasm as he recovered from the mumps or measles. His father has done me some good turns in business, and has it in his power to do more. I’ll drop a note to Richard to-morrow and have him call at the office.”
Percy-Bartlett threw away his cigar and rose to go. The picture his wife presented was irresistibly attractive. He bent over and kissed her. It was an unusual outbreak of emotion on his part, and Mrs. Percy-Bartlett smiled up at him as he turned to leave the room.
“How late,” he asked as he reached the portière, “will your musical friends be here?”
“Oh, not late,” she answered; “come home by twelve and you will find them gone.”
* * * * *