"Immense! isn't it?" he said to me, throwing out his chest to the breeze and teetering in his white shoes, out of sheer abundance of vitality, on the planks beneath him.
There was only one drawback: his wife was really not well. And he wondered audibly to me, while my own wife was having a few words near by with Gertrude, how it was that a young woman could, within the first year of her married life, bear twins with no hurt or harm, and yet weaken, later, through the birth of a single child.
"She doesn't seem at all lively, that's a fact," he said, with a possible touch of impatience. "But another two weeks will do wonders for her," he added: "she'll go back all right."
Prepotent Johnny! No doubt it was a drain on vitality to live abreast of such a man, to keep step with his robustious stride.
On the forenoon of the day we left, Johnny was walking with Gertrude and her mother along the accepted promenade. His excess of vitality and of action gave him an air of gallantry not altogether pleasing to see. His wife sat at her window, looking down and waving her hand rather languidly. The Johnny of her belief had come, in part, assuredly, for a bit of enjoyment. She smiled unconcernedly.
III
Raymond waited back home for Albert, and Albert did not return. We gathered from a newspaper published near the shores of Narragansett Bay that Albert, as his mother's triumphant possession, was now being shown at another resort—and a more important one, judging by his grandmother's social affiliations; also, that Mrs. McComas, who had not done any too well on the Jersey shore, was appearing at the new plage—doubtless as the just and sympathetic friend (of social prominence in her own community) who had stood stanch through difficulties unjustly endured. Her husband himself had, of course, returned to the West.
His business called him, even in mid-summer. He had his bank, but he had more than his bank. There are banks and banks—you can divide them up in several different ways. There are, of course,—as we have seen,—the banks that fail, and the banks that do not. And there are the banks that exist as an end in themselves, and the banks that exist as a means to other things: those that function along methodically, without taking on any extraneous features; and those that serve as a nucleus for accumulating interests, as a fulcrum to move affairs through a wide and varied range. Of this kind was McComas's. Johnny was not the man to stand still and let routine take its way—not the man to mark time, even through the vacation season. Nor could he have done so even if he had wanted to. But all I need say, just here, is that he came back home again after three or four days, all told, and that any threatened embarassment was nullified, or at least postponed.