He was honestly frightened, now. He didn’t see how he could ever escape from that atmosphere of doodabs and fanciness. That moment in the kitchen, that one glance they had exchanged, had shown him that being in love was a malady which grew worse with time.
He would inevitably ask Mimi to marry him, and if she refused him, life would be intolerable; and if she accepted him, they would have to have a home which would be filled with little lace doilies and antique plates, and his existence would be made dainty—and fancy.
Hughes had been brought up with Spartan simplicity by his very poor and very proud family in New Hampshire, and their ways were the ways he admired. He was not quite so fond of being poor, though, and had cured himself of that, but he still lived in Spartan style.
He had a furnished room, from which he had obliged the landlady to remove all those things she most admired; he ate his meals in a shining white restaurant where there were no tablecloths, and in his office he would permit no trace of luxury. He wouldn’t even have a private office; he sat out in plain view of his staff, upon a severely efficient chair, before a desk which was a model of neatness and order. That was how he liked things. And now, here he was, in love with Mimi!
What to do?
He thought of a plan.
II
There was one woman in the world whom Hughes admired without reservation, and that was his aunt, Kate Boles. He saw in her no flaw. She was a childless widow, living alone in the loneliest little cottage in the Berkshires; she had a hard life, and she gloried in it.
Not only did Aunt Kate live upon an almost impossibly small income, but she saved out of it, and when Hughes wanted to help her, she refused. She said she had a roof over her head, and enough to eat, and clothing to cover her decently, and that[Pg 402] she wanted nothing more. He thought this admirable.
She admired him, too. It was a part of her philosophy of life to believe that men could never be so noble as women, but, for a man, she thought her nephew remarkably good. So, when he asked her, she came down from her mountains, for the first time in many years.