The little visit to Jasper Grierson's library was not prolonged beyond the invalid's strength; but notwithstanding its brevity there were inert currents of antagonism evolved which Margery, present and endeavoring to serve as a lightning-arrester, could neither ground nor turn aside.
For Griswold there was an immediate recrudescence of the unfavorable first impression gained at the Hotel Chouteau supper-table. He recalled his own descriptive formula struck out as a tag for the hard-faced, heavy-browed man at the end of the café table—"crudely strong, elementally shrewd, with a touch, or more than a touch, of the savage: the gray-wolf type"—and he found no present reason for changing the record.
Thus the convalescent debtor to the Grierson hospitality. And as for the Wahaskan money lord, it is to be presumed that he saw nothing more than a hollow-eyed, impractical story-writer (he had been told of the manuscript found in Griswold's hand-baggage), who chanced to be Margery's latest and least accountable fad.
Griswold took away from the rather constrained ice-breaking in the banker's library a renewed resolve to cut his obligation to Jasper Grierson as short as possible. How he should begin again the mordant struggle for existence was still an unsolved problem. Of the one-thousand-dollar spending fund there remained something less than half: for a few weeks or months he could live and pay his way; but after that.... Curiously enough, the alternative of another attack upon the plutocratic dragon did not suggest itself. That, he told himself, was an experiment tried and found wanting. But in any event, he must not outstay his welcome at Mereside; and with this thought in mind he crept down-stairs daily after the library episode, and would give Margery no peace because she would not let him go abroad in the town.
"Not to-day, but to-morrow," she said, finally, when there was no longer any good reason for denying him. "Wait until to-morrow, and if it's a fine day, I'll drive you in the trap."
"But why not to-day?" he complained.
"'How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless'—what shall I say; patient, or guest, or—friend?" she laughed, garbling the quotation to fit the occasion.
"Shakespeare said 'child,'" he suggested mildly.
"And so shall I," she gibed—but the gibe itself was almost a caress. "Sometimes you remind me of an impatient boy who has been promised a peach and can't wait until it ripens. But if you must have a reason why I won't drive you this afternoon, you may. We are going to have a tiny little social function at Mereside this evening, and I want you to be fresh and rested for it."
"Oh, my dear Miss Margery!" protested the convalescent, reluctant to his finger-tips; "not to meet your friends! I am only your poor charity patient, and——"