McVeigh, with his toothpick in full operation, looked at her, admiring and half comprehending, for the first time feeling himself an outsider. She caught his eye, read its meaning, and with the quick tact of a delicate nature, said:
“It’s Mrs. Cornelius Ryan in San Francisco. She has a ball to-night and I was going, but I came up here with papa instead. I don’t care for balls.”
“Sort of late to be primping up for a ball,” said McVeigh, restoring the toothpick to his pocket and pushing back his chair. “I’ll go and have a look at the horses. And, Governor, if you’ll be ready in fifteen minutes I’ll be round at the porch waiting.”
Cannon nodded, and, as the driver clumped off over the board floor, said to his daughter,
“I wonder if Dominick Ryan’ll be there—at the ball, I mean. His mother’s made up her mind not to recognize the woman he’s married, and to freeze her out, but I wonder if she’ll have the nerve not to ask her to-night.”
“I don’t see how she could do that,” said the girl. “This is one of the largest balls ever given in San Francisco. She can’t leave her son out, and she couldn’t ask him without his wife.”
“Couldn’t she?” said the old man, with a narrowing of his eyes and a knowing wag of his head. “You don’t know Delia Ryan. I do. I’ve known her forty years, ever since she was first married and did washing on the back porch of her shanty in Virginia City. She was a good deal of a woman then, a strong, brainy woman, and she’s the same to-day, but hard as nails. I’ll bet a hat she hasn’t asked Dominick’s wife to that ball.”
“What do you suppose he’ll do?” asked the daughter, somewhat aghast at this glimpse of the Ryan family skeleton.
“Don’t ask me such conundrums. I’m glad I’m not in it, that’s all I know. When two women lock horns I’m ready to step quietly down and out. I never to my knowledge saw Dominick’s wife, but I’ve heard about her, and take it she’s a pretty hard kind of a proposition. They say she married the boy for money and position, and hasn’t got either. Delia, who has the money, hasn’t given them a cent since the marriage; made up her mind, people say, to force Mrs. Dominick out. She doesn’t seem to have done it, and I guess it’s been sort of aggravating to her. Just the same I’d like to know if she’s had the nerve not to send the woman an invitation to the ball. That would be pretty tough.”
“I’ve never seen either Dominick or his wife,” said the girl. “It seems odd when I know Mrs. Ryan and Cornelia so well. But he married the year I came back from Europe, and he’s never been anywhere since. I don’t believe he ever goes to his mother’s. There’s Mr. McVeigh in the doorway; we’d better be going.”