There was more food, interspersed with more dancing. Later Winona, after many sidewise perkings of her brown head, discovered Merle and Patricia Whipple at a neighbouring table. She nodded and smiled effusively to them. Patricia returned her greeting gayly; Merle removed a shining cigarette holder of remarkable length and bowed, but did not smile. He seemed to be aloof and gloomy.
"He's got a lot on his mind," said Wilbur, studying his brother respectfully.
Merle's plenteous hair, like his cigarette holder, was longer than is commonly worn by his sex, and marked by a certain not infelicitous disorder. He had trouble with a luxuriant lock of it that persistently fell across his pale brow. With a weary, world-worn gesture he absently brushed this back into place from moment to moment. His thick eyeglasses were suspended by a narrow ribbon of black satin. His collar was low and his loosely tied cravat was flowing of line.
"Out of condition," said Wilbur, expertly. "Looks pasty."
"But very, very distinguished," supplemented Winona.
Patricia Whipple now came to their table with something like a dance step, though the music was stilled. She had been away from Newbern for two years.
"Europe and Washington," she hurriedly explained as Wilbur held a chair for her, "and glad to get back—but I'm off again. Nurse! Begin the course next week in New York—learning
how to soothe the bed of pain. I know I'm a
rattlepate, but that's what I'm going to do. All of us mad about the war."
Wilbur studied her as he had studied Merle. She was in better condition, he thought. She came only to his shoulder as he stood to seat her, but she was no longer bony. Her bones were neatly submerged. Her hair was still rusty, the stain being deeper than he remembered, and the freckles were but piquant memories. Here and there one shone faintly, like the few faint stars showing widely apart through cloud crevices on a murky night. Her nose, though no longer precisely trivial, would never be the Whipple nose. Its lines were now irrevocably set in a design far less noble. Her gown was shining, of an elusive shade that made Wilbur think of ripe fruits—chiefly apricots, he decided. She was unquestionably what she had confessed herself to be—a rattlepate. She rattled now, with a little waiting, half-tremulous smile to mark her pauses, as if she knew people would weigh and find her wanting, but hoped for judgments tempered with mercy.
"Mad about the war? I should think so! Grandpa Gideon mad, and Harvey D.—that dear thing's going to do something at Washington for a dollar a year. You'd think it was the only honest money he'd ever earned if you heard Merle talk about bankers sucking the life blood of the people. Juliana taking charge of something and Mother Ella mad about knitting—always tangled in yarn. She'll be found strangled in her own work some day. And Uncle Sharon mad about the war, and fifty times madder about Merle.
"D'you see Merle's picture in that New York paper yesterday?—all hair and eyeglasses, and leaning one temple on the two first fingers of the right hand—and guess what it said—'Young millionaire socialist who denounces country's entrance into war!' Watch him—he's trying to look like the picture now! Uncle Sharon read the 'millionaire socialist,' and barked like a mad dog. He says: 'Yes, he'd be a millionaire socialist if he was going to be any kind, and if he was going to be a burglar he'd have to be one of these dress-suit burglars you always read about.'