He had to go down and he did. Nemesis lurked for him below. Had Bob realized what was going to happen he would have skipped back to his room. But, as it was, he assumed a bold front. He even said to himself, “Cheer up; the worst is yet to come.” It was.
CHAPTER V—TRIVIALITIES
Luncheon came and went, but nothing actually tragic happened at it. Bob didn’t make more than a dozen remarks that failed to add to his popularity. He tried to be agreeable, because that was his nature. That “even-tenor-of-his-way” condition made it incumbent on him—yes, made it his sacred duty to be bright and amiable. So it was “Hence, loathed Melancholy!” and a brave endeavor to be as jocund as the poet’s lines! Only those little unfortunate moments—airy preludes to larger misfortunes—had to occur, and just when he would flatter himself he was not doing so badly.
For example, when Mrs. Augustus Ossenreich Vanderpool said: “Don’t you adore dogs, Mr. Bennett?”
“No. I like them.” It became necessary to qualify that. “That is—not the little kind.”
The lady stiffened. Her beribboned and perfumed five-thousand-dollar toy-dogs were the idolized darlings of her heart. The children might be relegated to the nursery but the canines had the run of the boudoir. They rode with her when she went out in state while the French bonne took the children for an airing. “And why are the ‘little kind’ excluded from the realm of your approbation?” observed Mrs. Vanderpool coldly.
It was quite a contract to answer that. Bob wanted to be truthful; not to say too much or too little; only just as much as he was in honor bound to say. “I think people make too much fuss over them,” he answered at last. That reply seemed quite adequate and he trusted the lady would change the subject. But people had a way of not doing what he wanted them to, lately.
“What do you call ‘too much fuss’?” pursued the lady persistently.
Bob explained as best he could. It was rather a thankless task and he floundered a good deal as he went about it. He wasn’t going to be a bit more disagreeable than he could help, only he couldn’t help being as disagreeable as he had to be. The fact that Miss Gwendoline Gerald’s starry eyes were on him with cold curiosity did not improve the lucidity of his explanation. In the midst of it, she to whom he was talking, seemed somehow to detach herself from him, gradually, not pointedly, for he hardly knew just when or how she got away. She seemed just to float off and to attach herself somewhere else—to the bishop or to a certain judge Mrs. Ralston always asked to her house-parties that they might have a judicial as well as an ecclesiastical touch—and Bob’s explanation died on the thin air. He let it die. He didn’t have to speak truth to vacancy.
Then he tangoed, but not with Miss Gwendoline Gerald. He positively dared not approach that young lady. He didn’t tango because he wanted to, but because some one set a big music-box going and he knew he was expected to tango. He did it beautifully and the young lady was charmed. She was a little dark thing, of the clinging variety, and Dickie had gone with her some. Her father owned properties that would go well with Dickie’s—there’d been some talk of consolidation, but it had never come off. Papa was inclined to be stand-offish. Then Dickie began to get attentive to the little dark thing, though nothing had yet come of that either. Bob didn’t own any properties but the little dark thing didn’t mind that. At tangoing, he was a dream. Properties can’t tango.