Tom had escaped to the golf links. Mortimer sat in the midst of the Irregular circle and smoked three cigars. He smiled when he spoke, which was seldom, and appeared appreciative of the determined efforts to be "nice" of these ladies who had called him Mortimer as soon as he arrived, and who made him fed more like a poor relation whose feelings must be spared, every moment.
Finally Alexina, who was on the verge of hysteria, dragged Joan from under the table, and the two carried him off to the tennis court.
In subsequent visits, now covering a period of three years, their gracious civil "kind" attitude had never varied, save only when their consciences hurt them for disliking him more than usual, and then they were not only heroic but fairly effusive in their efforts to be nice.
Nevertheless, it was quite patent to Alexina that he enjoyed smoking his after-dinner cigar on that old verandah whose sweet-scented vines had been planted in the historic sixties; or under the ancient oaks of the park where he dreamed aloud to her of sitting under similar oaks of England, the guest of Lady Barnstable or Lady Arrowmount, belles of the eighties who faithfully exchanged letters once a year with Maria Abbott and Coralie Geary.
From the family there was always the refuge of the tennis court and he played an excellent game. He also seemed to enjoy those dinners given them in certain other old Peninsula mansions, and if they were dull he was duller.
V
Alexina had admitted to herself some time since (never to that wretch,
Aileen Lawton) that he was rather dull, poor darling.
For a long time the aftermath of the earthquake and fire had supplied topics for conversation. For quite two years there had been an acutely painful interest in the Graft Prosecution, which, beginning with an attempt merely to bring to justice the political boss, his henchman the mayor, and his ignorant obedient board of supervisors, had unthinkably resolved itself into a declaration of war, with State's Prison as its goal, upon some of the most prominent capitalists in San Francisco.
The prosecution had been started by a small group of eminent citizens, bent upon cleaning up their city, notorious for graft, misgovernment, and the basest abuses of political power. They had assumed as a matter of course that those of their own class, who for years had expressed in private their bitter resentment against paying out small fortunes to the board of supervisors every time they wanted a franchise, would be only too glad to expose the malefactors.
But it immediately transpired that they had no intention whatever of admitting to the world that they had been guilty of corruption and bribery. They might have been "held up," forced to "come through," or renounce their great enterprises; helpless, in other words; but the law had technical terms for their part in the shameful transactions, and so had the public.