He had been seeing a great deal of Miss Mason during the past three months. He had gone with Pendleton to make their party call in due form and he had found her on that occasion more friendly and more intimate. It was a Sunday afternoon, and she was alone with Lance. Her mother and father, she said, had gone out for a walk in the Silver Lake woods—which Vincelle thought a very peculiar thing for an elderly couple to do, above all, on a Sunday afternoon, when respectable people were best invisible. There were a good many things about this family which he could not approve of; Lance was one of these. That thin sunburnt young man in spectacles with his gloomy face and didactic air jarred upon him beyond reason. He had observed too, that Lance had been reading to his cousin, in cosy intimacy, before the fire in the library.
But Claudine had been remarkably kind to him, and gentle and friendly. Moreover, Lance had had the decency to remove himself and his big book. Pendleton, of course, monopolized the talk, with his flippant nonsense, but Gilbert felt that that did him no harm. He felt that he, sitting in silence, with only a word now and then, a sensible word, mind you, appeared more manly, and he was right! He touched the heart of the lively young lady; she felt suddenly rather sorry for him, and because he was stupid she fancied him more honest than others. She quite cordially invited him to come again.
He did, and this time alone. He didn’t even mention the fact to Pendleton, and when Pendleton learned of it he took it amiss.
“I introduced you there,” he said, “I didn’t think you’d go behind my back that way, Vincelle.”
“I was invited,” said Gilbert, “and I went. I didn’t know the family was your private property. I didn’t know I had to account to you for every—”
“Damn unfriendly, I call it!” said Pendleton.
Gilbert smiled scornfully.
If their friendship had been a more genuine one, this would have caused a serious quarrel; but it was a forced sort of friendship, simply brought about by propinquity. They had grown up together, gone to the same school, the same dancing school, they moved in the same set. They had no respect for each other; Gilbert despised the other’s frivolity and lack of money-making ability, and Pendleton looked upon Gilbert as a surly and ungenerous young boor. After their brief disagreement about Miss Mason they went on as usual, except that they were wary about the Staten Island visits. They went down there at different times, never again together, and each took what advantage he could get.
The unhappy Gilbert had suffered much, and perhaps learned a little. He had been dreadfully humiliated. Once Claudine had asked him to ride with her and he had been forced to admit that he didn’t ride. Her astonished face ...! And he hadn’t read any of those books she knew so affectionately.
He had, when younger and slimmer, played tennis, but of late years since he had become so engrossed in business, his great recreation had been poker. As for books, he liked reading as much as the next man, provided they were entertaining books. And he liked music, too; not operas, but not trashy stuff, either; he liked Schubert’s Serenade, and Traumerei, and things like that.... He hadn’t Pendleton’s talent for picking up information, for knowing something about everything, but when he heard Pendleton talking so glibly, he consoled himself by remembering that he had had an education exactly like his, of precisely the same length and the same price. So Pendleton couldn’t really know any more than he did, no matter how he talked.