"You have as many homes as a great English noble."
"But they are not castles; they are only houses; and a man alone, as I am, has no home. This was my father's town house; he was in the Senate before me, but you see that it is an old barn compared with the splendid modern houses in Washington. Then the home, in my native State, is where I was born, but I have lived there very little. After I left the university I travelled for some years, and then went into public life, and that has kept me pretty close to Washington. My own home is too far away to go to for the week-end, so I have this little place a hundred miles away in the mountains. I don't know exactly how I happened to acquire the ranch. I went into a land purchase with some friends of mine, and the first thing I knew was that I had a ranch, and I don't yet quite understand how I came by it. I didn't know what to do with it, but I went out there, and found it a gloriously lonely place, with an adobe house and a courtyard, stuck up on the side of the mountain. The people out there told me to stock the place--I have the title to a good part of the big valley--I got a manager, and, strange to say, I haven't been swindled. Every year or two I try to go out there for six weeks. It's a superb climate and I live on horseback, as I did when I was a boy. I should like so much to show you the ranch which I found in my pocket one day."
Alicia smiled and shook her head.
"There is so much to see, and one can't stay in America for ever: it is so expensive."
Senator March looked at her with secret pity. He thought what a nasty freak of Fate it was that this exquisite creature should want what he would so easily have given her, but could not.
Alicia Vernon, with a woman's subtlety, noticed and liked this attitude of the American toward women--the eternal readiness to give. It was distinctly different from that of the Englishman, who is strictly just to his womankind, but is not expected to be generous, and the normal woman hates justice as much as she loves generosity. Alicia, with a sigh, recalled the storms concerning money in which her married life with Guy Vernon had been passed, and the laborious subterfuges which she was forced to employ to keep her father from knowing the exact state of her finances. And here were two Americans, strangers to her, and with oceans of money, who were as ready to give it to a wife as they would give sugar-plums to children!
Colegrove determined to see more of his charming vis-à-vis, and went up boldly to General Talbott and asked permission to call on him. General Talbott, the kindliest of men under his English reserve, cordially invited him.
It was a remarkably pleasant dinner to everybody, with one exception--Sir Percy Carlyon. His pride, his self-respect, his self-love, suffered cruelly every moment that Lucy Armytage was in the company of Alicia Vernon. He had taken Lucy in to dinner, and he could not but see the advance she had made, even in the short time, in tact and self-possession. Not a self-conscious word or look escaped her as she sat talking charming nothings to the man whose lips had been upon hers only the night before, and no one would have dreamed that Sir Percy Carlyon was upon any different footing with her than any other woman at the dinner.
The next week was the week of Grand Opera. Senator March took a box for the whole week, and three nights during that week Alicia Vernon and her father were his guests. As Mrs. Vernon sat in the shadow of the box, listening to the enchanting voice of one of the greatest tenors in the world, it dawned upon her mind how privileged was the position of an American woman where men were concerned. The social customs, which permitted men to lie almost at the feet of a woman, were entirely new to her, and when this was done with the tact and high breeding of Senator March, he appealed to the craving for luxury in her which had been her undoing. He had asked her to name which operas in the week's repertoire she would like to hear, and when she had made her selection he called in his carriage for her and her father, and she found a beautiful bouquet waiting for her in the opera box and a supper after the performance.
Whither Senator March was drifting was plain to everybody except himself. He had grown accustomed to consider himself as a bachelor for life. He did not, himself, know the cause of his bachelorhood. Few women pleased him thoroughly, and he had put off from year to year the search for the other half of his being, and suddenly he found himself a middle-aged man. He disliked the idea of an inequality in age and felt no desire to make any of the sparkling young girls he knew Mrs. Roger March, and the women who were suitable in age did not often retain the power to please his æsthetic sense. He had no fancy for widows and did not care to be the object of a woman's second love. When he heard Alicia Vernon's history, however, it occurred to him that a woman's second husband might possibly be her first love.