“Dominick!” she exclaimed, “you’re just the person I want to see. I was going to write to you. I’ve got lots to tell you.”
“Come along then and take lunch with me. I was on my way up to Bertrand’s when I saw you. They’ll give us a good lunch there and you can tell me all your secrets.”
The flower sellers, who had been listening with unabashed eagerness, realized that their prey was about to be ravished from them, and raised their voices in a chorus of wailing appeal. As Cornelia moved forward they moved round her, thrusting bouquets under her eyes in a last hope, the boy with the wilted pansies, on the brink of tears, hanging on the outskirts of the crowd. Cornelia might have forgotten him, but her eye, sweeping back for an absent moment, saw his face, bereft of all hope—a face of childish despair above his drooping pansies.
“Here, boy with the pansies,” she called, and sent a silver dollar through the air toward him, “that’s for you. Keep it and the flowers, too. I’ve too many now and can’t carry any more. Maybe he’ll sell them to some one else,” she said to Dominick, as they crossed the street. “He’s such a little boy to be earning his bread!”
They walked up the street toward Bertrand’s, a French restaurant which for years had enjoyed the esteem of the city’s gourmets. The wind was now very high. It tore at Cornelia’s clothes and made it necessary for Dominick to hold his hat on, his hand spread flat on the crown. A trail of blossoms, torn from the flowers each carried, sprinkled the pavement behind them. Cornelia, with her head down and her face toward her brother, shouted remarks at him, every now and then pausing in a stifle of laughter to struggle with her draperies, which at one moment rose rebellious, and at the next were wound about her in an umbrella-like sheath.
They had often met this way in the past, when the elder Mrs. Ryan’s wrath had been in its first, untameable freshness, and her son had seen her seldom. In those days of estrangement, Cornelia had been the tie between Dominick and his home. She loved her brother and was sorry for him, and had felt the bitterness of the separation, not alone as a family misfortune, but as a scandal over which mean people talked. Had it rested with her, she would long ago have overlooked the past and have opened the door to her sister-in-law. Not that she felt any regard or interest in Berny Iverson; her feeling for her was now, and always would be, largely composed of that undying unfriendliness and repugnance that the naturally virtuous woman feels for her sister with the tache. But Cornelia was of a younger and milder generation than her mother. She had not fought hard for what she had and, like Dominick, there was more of the sunny-tempered, soft-hearted Con Ryan in her than of the strong and valiant woman who had made him and given him his place in the world.
In the restaurant they found a vacant table in a corner, and Cornelia had to bottle up her good news while Dominick pondered over the bill of fare. She was impatient and drummed on the table with her fingers, while her eyes roamed about the room. Once or twice, she bowed to people that she knew, then let her glance pass in an uninterested survey over the bare walls and the long line of windows that gave on the street. The place had an austerely severe, unadorned air. Its bleakness of naked wall and uncovered stone floor added to the foreignness that was contributed by the strong French accent of the waiters, and the arrangement of a cashier’s desk near the door, where a pleasant-faced woman sat between a large bouquet of roses and a drowsy gray cat.
The orders given and the first stages of lunch appearing, Cornelia could at last claim her brother’s full attention. Planting her elbows on the table and staring at him, she said,
“I told you how awfully anxious I was to see you, and how I was going to write to you, didn’t I?”
Dominick nodded. He was buttering a piece of bread and showed no particular acceleration of curiosity at this query.