Under the Skylights

by Henry Blake Fuller

Little O'Grady pondered. "Her folks are against us, that's all," he replied. "They're trying to marry her to somebody else," he told himself. "Who can it be?" Then, aloud and cheerfully: "If you can't see her at one house, why, just see her at another. Come along with you."

They found the town moving on Eudoxia Pence en masse, with several policemen in front to keep order. On the front steps they grazed elbows with the Joyces and the Gowans; and with these and other members of the general public they swept on, joining the vast throng of those who were so eager to press the great lady's Smyrna rugs with their own feet and fumble her silk hangings with their own fingers and rap her Japanese jars with their own knuckles and smell her new paintings with their own noses and see Mrs. Palmer Pence herself with their own eyes. "Gee! ain't it swell!" whispered Little O'Grady, who could make swans out of geese or geese out of swans with equal facility.

Prochnow ignored the swells, the jars, the pictures and all the rest; he sought only Preciosa. Little O'Grady was not in a new field for nothing, and he looked at everybody. First of all, there was the great Eudoxia herself, and her profile was as lovely as ever. When, when, when should he reach the point of modelling it? She stood there with a vain pretence of receiving,—she was too conventional to dispense with the recognised forms even on the occasion of a mere popular outpouring. Little O'Grady went up to her boldly and shook hands; he was outside the general understanding that made her, in so promiscuous a function, something to be looked at rather than touched—save by a few intimates. Only let him bring her within range of his aura, he thought, and her subjugation would inevitably follow. Then he stepped back and watched her. There was still a determined cordiality in her smile, but a furtive anxiety marked the glance she sent now and then into the second or third room beyond, where a pressing crowd and a subdued glare of candle-light seemed to indicate a focus of interest hardly second to the picture gallery itself. Little O'Grady caught this anxious look. "Is she afraid for her bric-a-brac or her spoons?" he wondered. "No, it's something more than that."

Beside Eudoxia stood Almira Hill,—"a mother in Israel, if ever there was one," O'Grady commented. "And what's the matter with her? Shy? Awkward? No, she's too old and experienced for that. There, she's looking in the same direction. Something's up. What is it?"

It was this: Almira's husband had told her that morning how it all depended upon Preciosa McNulty.

Roscoe Orlando Gibbons came through the crowd, with a great effect of smiling joviality. But he too glanced over the press of heads toward the glare of candle-light with a strained intensity not to be concealed.

Roscoe Orlando suddenly turned aside toward an old fellow who sat on a pink brocade sofa. "See, there's her grandfather," whispered Prochnow. Old Jeremiah had instinctively taken refuge on the one piece of furniture that reminded him of home. Here he sat, awkwardly twisting his hands and blinking every now and then at the great light that shone afar off. "I could never in the world have got him to anything resembling a dinner," declared Eudoxia. "He acts like a stray cat," said Little O'Grady. "But he needn't,—there seem to be plenty of the same sort here, after all." Yes, at a second glance old Jeremiah appeared to be less the victim of society than of circumstances; and when Roscoe Orlando Gibbons bowed over him and whispered and they both looked toward the illumination while Eudoxia Pence looked at them, Little O'Grady was surer than ever that something was in the air.

He felt Prochnow suddenly slipping behind him. "Her mother!" the young fellow explained. Yes, it was Euphrosyne in full fig and in very active circulation. She rustled, she swooped, she darted, she was as if on springs. "Well, she feels her oats," commented Little O'Grady. He looked at her again. No, what moved her was not vainglory, not a restless sense of triumph. She was keyed up to the most racking pitch of anxious expectation. She looked whither Eudoxia and Roscoe Orlando and all the others had looked, but with an intensified expression, and Little O'Grady almost felt as if challenged to solve some obscure yet widely ramified enigma.

He turned round as if in search of help. In a doorway near-by he saw another familiar face. "Why, there's Daff!" he cried. "It's Dill, our hated rival," he explained to Prochnow. "And that girl with him is Miss Jeffreys, the one he's going to marry."

Prochnow looked at the tall handsome figure in the long frock-coat with the bunch of violets, and felt abashed by his own short jacket and indifferent shoes. He noted too the assumption of ease and suavity with which the other was entertaining a little knot of ladies. It was this person, then, an out-and-out man of the world, against whom he, uncouth and unpractised boy, had presumed to pit himself!