Mr. Coleman Van Duyn lurched heavily up the wide steps that led to the main corridor of the Potowomac apartments and took the elevator upstairs. He asked for mail and sat down at the desk in his library with a frowning brow and protruding jowl. Affairs down town had not turned out to his liking this morning. For a month everything seemed to have gone wrong. He was short on stocks that had struck the trade-winds, and long on others that were hung in the doldrums; his luck at Auction had deserted him; his latest doctor had made a change in his regimen; a favorite horse had broken a leg; and last, but not by any means the least, until this afternoon Fate had continued to conspire to keep him apart from Miss Jane Loring.
They had met casually several times at people’s houses and once he had talked with her at the Suydam’s, but the opportunities for which he planned obstinately refused to present themselves. He had finally succeeded in persuading her to ride with him to-day, and after writing a note or two, he called his man and dressed with particular care. Mr. Van Duyn’s mind was so constructed that he could never think of more than one thing at a time; but of that one thing he always thought with every dull fiber of his brain, and Miss Loring’s indifference to his honorable intentions had preyed upon him to the detriment of other and, perhaps, equally important interests.
Mr. Van Duyn was large of body and ponderous of thought, and his decisions were only born after a prolonged and somewhat uncertain period of gestation. It took him an hour to order his dinner, and at least two hours to eat (and drink) it. And so when at the age of five and thirty he had reached the conclusion that it was time for him to marry, he had set about carrying his resolution into effect with the same solemn deliberation which characterized every other act of his life. He had been accustomed always to have things happen exactly as he planned them, and was of the opinion, when he followed the Lorings to Canada, that nothing lacked in the proposed alliance to make it eminently desirable for both of the parties concerned. Matches he knew were no longer made in Heaven and an opportunist like Henry K. Loring could not long debate upon the excellence of the arrangement.
Miss Loring’s refusal of him up at camp, last summer, had shocked him, and for awhile he had not been able to believe the evidence of his ears, for Mrs. Loring had given him to understand that to her at least he was a particularly desirable suitor. When he recovered from his shock of amazement, his feeling was one of anger, and his first impulse to leave the Loring camp at once. But after a night of thought he changed his mind. He found in the morning that Miss Loring’s refusal had had the curious effect of making her more desirable, more desirable, indeed, than any young female person he had ever met. He was in love with her, in fact, and all other reasons for wanting to marry her now paled beside the important fact that she was essential to his well being, his mental health and happiness. He did not even think of her great wealth as he had at first done, of the fortune she would bring which would aid materially in providing the sort of an establishment a married Van Duyn must maintain. In his cumbrous way he had decided that even had she been penniless, she would have been necessary to him just the same.
He had stayed on at camp, accepting Mrs. Loring’s advice that it would not be wise to take her refusal seriously. She was only a child and could not know the meaning of the honor he intended to confer. But in New York her indifference continued to prick his self-esteem, and for several weeks he had been following her about, sending her flowers and losing no chance to keep his memory green.
And so, he examined his shiny boots with a narrowing and critical eye, donned a favorite pink silk shirt and tied on a white stock into which he stuck a fox-head pin. He had put on more flesh in the last three years than he needed, and his collar bands were getting too tight; but as he looked in the mirror of his dressing-stand, he was willing to admit that he was still the fine figure of a man—a Van Duyn every inch of him. It was in the midst of this agreeable occupation that Mr. Worthington entered, a corn-flower in his buttonhole and otherwise arrayed for conquest. Van Duyn looked over his shoulder and nodded a platonic greeting.
“Tea-ing it, Bibby?”
“Oh, yes. Might as well do that as sit somewhere. Just stopped in on my way down.” Worthington’s apartment was above. And then, “Lord Coley, you are filling out! Riding?”
“No,” grinned the other, “going to pick strawberries on the Metropolitan Tower. Don’t I look like it?”
Worthington smiled. Van Duyn’s playfulness always much resembled that of a young St. Bernard puppy.