“You forget,” smiled Miss Maggie. “Frank Blaisdell is a retired business man. He has begun to take some pleasure in life now.”
“Humph!” muttered Mr. Smith, as he turned to go into his own room.
Mr. Smith called on the Frank Blaisdells that evening. Mr. Blaisdell took him out to the garage (very lately a barn), and showed him the shining new car. He also showed him his lavish supply of golf clubs, and told him what a “bully time” he was having these days. He told him, too, all about his Western trip, and said there was nothing like travel to broaden a man’s outlook. He said a great deal about how glad he was to get out of the old grind behind the counter—but in the next breath he asked Mr. Smith if he had ever seen a store run down as his had done since he left it. Donovan didn’t know any more than a cat how such a store should be run, he said.
When they came back from the garage they found callers in the living-room. Carl Pennock and Hibbard Gaylord were chatting with Mellicent. Almost at once the doorbell rang, too, and Donald Gray came in with his violin and a roll of music. Mellicent’s mother came in also. She greeted all the young men pleasantly, and asked Carl Pennock to tell Mr. Smith all about his fishing trip. Then she sat down by young Gray and asked him many questions about his music. She was so interested in violins, she said.
Gray waxed eloquent, and seemed wonderfully pleased—for about five minutes; then Mr. Smith saw that his glance was shifting more and more frequently and more and more unhappily to Mellicent and Hibbard Gaylord, talking tennis across the room.
Mr. Smith apparently lost interest in young Pennock’s fish story then. At all events, another minute found him eagerly echoing Mrs. Blaisdell’s interest in violins—but with this difference: violins in the abstract with her became A violin in the concrete with him; and he must hear it at once.
Mrs. Jane herself could not have told exactly how it was done, but she knew that two minutes later young Gray and Mellicent were at the piano, he, shining-eyed and happy, drawing a tentative bow across the strings: she, no less shining-eyed and happy, giving him “A” on the piano.
Mr. Smith enjoyed the music very much—so much that he begged for another selection and yet another. Mr. Smith did not appear to realize that Messrs. Pennock and Gaylord were passing through sham interest and frank boredom to disgusted silence. Equally oblivious was he of Mrs. Jane’s efforts to substitute some other form of entertainment for the violin-playing. He shook hands very heartily, however, with Pennock and Gaylord when they took their somewhat haughty departure, a little later, and, strange to say, his interest in the music seemed to go with their going; for at once then he turned to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Blaisdell with a very animated account of some Blaisdell data he had found only the week before.
He did not appear to notice that the music of the piano had become nothing but soft fitful snatches with a great deal of low talk and laughter between. He seemed interested only that Mr. Blaisdell, and especially Mrs. Blaisdell, should know the intimate history of one Ephraim Blaisdell, born in 1720, and his ten children and forty-nine grandchildren. He talked of various investments then, and of the weather. He talked of the Blaisdells’ trip, and of the cost of railroad fares and hotel life. He talked—indeed, Mrs. Jane told her husband after he left that Mr. Smith had talked of everything under the sun, and that she nearly had a fit because she could not get one minute to herself to break in upon Mellicent and that horrid Gray fellow at the piano. She had not supposed Mr. Smith could talk like that. She had never remembered he was such a talker!
The young people had a tennis match on the school tennis court the next day. Mr. Smith told Miss Maggie that he thought he would drop around there. He said he liked very much to watch tennis games.