"But why worry?" asked Dolly, when Alice told her. "Speak to Robert about it. He will place him within twenty-four hours."
"I can't very well ask a favor of that kind from Mr. Kimberly, Dolly."
"What nonsense! Why not?"
Alice could not say precisely why. "After my own husband hasn't found a way to place him!" she exclaimed.
Dolly did not hesitate. "I will attend to it. Give me his address. Football, did you say? Very good."
Within a week the young man wrote Alice--from the Orange River refineries, where he was, he picturesquely said, knee-deep in sugar--that he had actually been before the sugar magnate, Robert Kimberly himself, adding with the impetuous spelling of a football man, that the interview had been so gracious and lasted so long he had grown nervous about the time Mr. Kimberly was giving him.
Kimberly never referred to the matter nor did Alice ever mention it to him. It was merely pleasant to think of. And in such evidences as the frequent letters from her protégé she read her influence over the man who, even the chronicle of the day could have told her, had she needed the confirmation, extorted the interest of the world in which he moved; and over whom, apparently, no woman other than herself could claim influence.
She came tacitly to accept this position toward Kimberly. Its nature did not compromise her conscience and it seemed in this way possible both to have and not have. She grew to lean upon the thought of him as one of the consoling supports in her whirling life--the life in which reflection never reached conclusion, action never looked forward to result, and denial had neither time nor place.
The pursuit of pleasure, sweetened by that philanthropy and the munificent almsgiving which was so esteemed by those about her, made up her life. Alice concluded that those of her circle severely criticised by many who did not know them, did much good. Their failings, naturally, would not condemn them with critics who, like herself, came in contact with them at their best.
Some time after the placing of the young college man, Alice, running in one morning on Dolly found her in tears. She had never before seen Dolly even worried and was at once all solicitude. For one of the very few times in her life, it appeared, Dolly had clashed with her brother Robert. Nor could Alice get clearly from her what the difference had been about. All that was evident to Alice was that Dolly was very much grieved and mortified over something Kimberly had said or done, or refused to say or do, concerning a distinguished actress who upon finishing an American tour was to be entertained by Dolly.