It was patent, however, that she felt herself entitled to physical comforts after the labors of her day. There were half a dozen easy-chairs and a big divan covered with cushions. The carpet and cushions were red, but although the room was delightfully comfortable and homelike it might have been a bachelor's, so entirely were lacking all the little devices of femininity. The only ornaments in the room were an odd assortment of Tyrolese pipes and Indian baskets. On a shelf above the divan, however, were many books, and Gwynne ran his eye over them. They included masterpieces of the modern Russian, German, French, and Italian schools; only three or four volumes of English criticism. A set of shelves opposite was filled with the standard English and American histories, essays, and novels, many of them old and bound in calf. The upper shelf was devoted entirely to the Russian novelists, and the bindings were new.
When Isabel came down, looking very pretty in a blue evening frock, simple enough to make her guest feel at ease in his travelling-clothes, but carefully selected with an eye to effect, she sent him up to her room to make his own simple toilet.
"I suppose I should furnish a spare room," she remarked. "But if I did I should have Paula—my adopted sister—and her family here whenever they happened to want to come, which would be always when I didn't want them. But you won't mind."
Gwynne made a wry face as he sat down before the dressing-table that he might reflect his visage while he brushed his hair. Nevertheless, he cast about a curious and apologetic eye, in the belief that a woman's bedroom must reveal some secret of her personality. This bedroom was so simple and girlish that it gave him a vague sense of pleasure. The windows and dressing-table were covered with white muslin, and there was a canopy of the same above the little brass bedstead. The flounces were so full and fluffy that he held his knees back nervously lest he should disturb a puff. There was no other furniture in the room but two rocking-chairs, and the only color was in the blue Japanese rugs scattered over the white matting, and in two immense bows above the dressing-table and bed. He decided, as he ran down the stairs to the warm room below, that she understood both taste and comfort, and looked forward to his own lonely ranch-house with more equanimity than when he had paid the bill.
IV
There were two miles between Rosewater and Old Inn, but although Isabel rode briskly and was sensible as ever of the keen buoyant quality of the morning air that so often filled her with a pagan indifference to the human side of life, her thoughts were with the pleasant evening by her fireside, the supper in the low raftered room which once had been the office of the hotel—a supper of fried chicken, transparent asparagus, and soda biscuit, which Gwynne had disposed of with a school-boy's enthusiasm—the hundred and one impersonal topics they had discussed in a cloud of smoke before the logs, until Abe, the second hired man—who was to drive Gwynne in to Rosewater—had opened the kitchen door three times and coughed. Not since Isabel's return to California had she sat at a fireside and talked to anybody; nor, indeed, with the exception of her father in his lucid intervals, and her uncle in his rare moments of expansion, had she ever talked with any one that covered the large range of her own interests. Gwynne had snapped the lock on his unquiet spirit, but in that comfortable domestic environment, half lying in an easy-chair, with his gaze travelling indolently between the fire and the animated face of his cousin, he had talked of her favorite books and told her much of lands she had never visited. He had transferred himself to the buggy with a grumble of disgust, and begged her to come for him early in the morning. He refused to pay his first visit to his ranch without her; and she had promised that Abe should go early for his saddle-horse and meet her at the hotel.
Pleasurable as the evening had been, Isabel was not in a sentimental frame of mind; she was stirred at the prospect of a companion, and wondered that she had been content in her solitude so long. Solitude and complete liberty might be indispensable elements in her ideal of mortal existence, but desultory companionship might be as necessary to intensify them.
It was nearly a year since her return, and outside of the bank parlor and Judge Leslie's office, she had held naught but business converse with any man. Nor with any woman. Although Rosewater society offered her nothing and she was glad to live out of town, still she liked her old school friends and had expected them to call on her. But weeks had passed and not one of them had paid her the mere civilities. She met them sometimes on Saturday afternoons, when all the world of Rosewater shopped on Main Street, and they invariably greeted her with effusion, and assured her they were "going out soon." Finally, busy and absorbed as she was, she fell a prey to curiosity. She knew that the young men had always rather feared her, as she had a forbidding reputation in the way of "bookishness"; and as most of them had either left Rosewater or married, in the four years of her absence, she had expected nothing from them. But the girls? The young married women, who had been her comrades at the High School? Did they resent her three years abroad and the sense of superiority implied? It was patent from their manner that they resented nothing. Did they disapprove of her becoming so energetic a business woman? It was true that the girls of California's country towns, except when forced by poverty to work, were the laziest mortals on earth. But nothing could exceed their good-nature and entire indifference. Isabel might have started a race-track or opened a livery-stable and they would have vaguely admired, and been thankful that themselves were as God made them. Her friend Anabel Colton was in the south with an ailing child, and Mrs. Leslie was with her, or the problem would have been quickly solved.
One morning she met the beauty of Rosewater on Main Street, Miss Dolly Boutts, a girl who had been half grown when she left, but one of her own rapturous admirers. Main Street was crowded, but Miss Boutts rushed up and kissed her, protesting that she had been trying for two months to get out to see her. Isabel guided her firmly to an ice-cream table in the candy store, and while Miss Boutts, who was a superb specimen of animal beauty with a corresponding appetite, disposed of two saucers of the delectable and a plate of cakes, Isabel dived to the heart of the mystery.