It was a tiresome day. Mrs. Russell’s cordiality had evaporated overnight, and she was bored and yawning. She lay in a deck chair on the piazza, rustling through the Sunday papers, and talking to Angelica now and then with outrageously forced politeness. She had an air which Angelica knew of old; when one of her fits of ennui came on her, she all but pushed her bewildered guests out of the door.
But Angelica stayed until after supper. That was what she had planned to do, and what she was determined to do. She too sat on the piazza, with a Sunday paper, concealing her sullenness.
There wasn’t any supper, properly speaking. Annie was out, and Mrs. Russell said that their new custom was to help themselves from the ice-chest—a plan which might have been jolly if the people had been a little less hostile. They stood about in the immaculate kitchen with plates in their hands, Mrs. Russell yawning, the doctor subdued, Angelica severe, and Courtland embarrassed and aggrieved. Vincent wasn’t there. There was beer and cold chicken and ham and salad and tarts.
"And coffee if you want to make it," Mrs. Russell said; but no one did.
After this, Angelica took her leave. Courtland was suddenly deprived of his secretarial dignity and ordered peremptorily to drive her to the station, which he did in complete silence. He never ceased to resent this seesawing, by which he was one moment the promising young man being trained as a secretary and treated with immense, if not maternal, indulgence, and the next minute was a servant and a rather rudely treated one. He endured it with wonder and disgust.
Angelica was able now to gratify a long-cherished desire—she was traveling in the style which she had so much admired in suburban ladies. It was, of course, out of the question to expect Courtland to help her on the train. Nothing in the world could have induced him to do so; but at least she was able to alight from a motor, to buy three or four magazines and a box of sweets, and enter the train, thus burdened, with the proper air. She sat down near a window and opened a magazine.
A hand covered the page.
"Angie!" said a voice, and she looked up into Vincent’s laughing face.
She couldn’t repress a smile herself—a sudden throb of joy; that exquisite feeling of comradeship again.
"Are you glad to see me?" he asked.