“But I don’t want to be a swallow,” said he, swinging his stick. “I cannot imagine anything more deadly dull than being a swallow. I enjoy my flights of imagination much more, I assure you. How well you look.”
She glanced up at him with an embarrassed little smile, her pretty teeth gleaming whiter than the single small pearl at her throat.
“It’s wonderful how New York agrees with you,” he declared, as they strode on past the white marble balustrade of the Stewart mansion, his eyes taking in at their ease the dimples in her rosy cheeks, and the full color of her lips. “Do you know there’re lots of girls here who’d give anything for your color. They’re faded out, poor little dears, with too much rich food and dancing; never get to bed until morning, and seldom out of it until noon. I never give a débutante more than six months to look as old as her chaperon.”
“I think we’d better cross here,” she said, as they reached Madison Square; “it’s shorter.”
“Careful,” said he.
His hand grasped her soft arm tenderly. She felt his strength as he guided her firmly between the passing carriages, his grip relaxing again to a gentle pressure that was almost a caress as they reached the opposite curbstone in safety.
“Thank you,” said she, a little flushed. His lighter prattle had subsided. On their way through the square they fell quickly into their bond of common sympathy—music—of which he knew and talked as fluently as a professional—a wider knowledge sadly lacking in Joe, whose limitations were confined to the tunes he could whistle. He filled her eager ears with a host of interesting remarks about the true value of the diminished seventh, explaining to her how it was often overdone meaninglessly, like many pyrotechnic displays in chromatic scales meant to épater the audience, and which no sane composer would think of letting run riot in his orchestration. “Meaningless pads,” he called them, and Sue clearly understood. By the time they had cut through Fourth Avenue and Union Square, he had explained to her the difference between the weird, cold harmonies of Grieg and the subtler passion of Chopin, carrying her on to the orchestral effects of Tschaikowsky, and how he produced them. Then in lighter vein he spoke of Planquette and his merry “Chimes of Normandy,” and of Planquette’s snug little villa among his pines and flower-beds on the Norman French coast, which he had been to and had had many a good day’s shooting from Planquette’s snipe-blind close by on the dune, in ear-shot of his piano—of what a genial host he was.
Sue strolled on by his side, absorbed as a child in the midst of a fairy-tale. By the time they reached Waverly Place, she had had the most delightful walk of her life. “How could he ever be lonely,” she thought, “with all those memories? Why had he not told her more of them before?” She began to feel sorry for her treatment of him that brilliant tragic evening at the Van Cortlandts’, and almost confessed it to him as they went up the stoop together and she opened the dingy black walnut door with its ground-glass panels, one of which depicted Fortune hugging a dusty sheaf of wheat, and the other, Mercury in full flight through a firmament of sand-blasted clouds. He followed her up the stairs. Nothing escaped him, neither the mat which Ebner Ford had placed himself in front of his threshold, with a deep “Welcome” branded on it in red letters, or the Rogers group which Mrs. Ford had generously given to the niche in the hallway, and which portrayed a putty-colored father reading the evening paper to the spellbound delight of his wife and five putty-colored children.
Mrs. Ford, who had just put her hat on and caught sight of them as they came up the stoop, rushed instantly to the piano; she flew at the most difficult part of her chef-d’œuvre, “The Storming of Sebastopol,” with a will, as if nothing had happened, as if Mr. Pierre Lamont was not only then actually ascending the stairs to her door, if he had not already reached it; whereas the delighted expectancy of that lady was so intense, that she mistook the loud pedal for the soft, opening a broadside from the English fleet at precisely the moment Sue opened the door. Her surprise as her small, pudgy hands left the keyboard in the position her “Manual for Beginners” decreed, can be imagined!
“Why, Mr. Lamont!” she exclaimed effusively, forgetting she had never met him, oblivious to her daughter’s hasty introduction. “How good of you to come.”