Carlisle continued to look at his downcast face, with the translucent eyes, and as she looked, the strangest thought shimmered through her, with a turning of the heart new in her experience. She thought: "This man is a good friend...."
And then she said aloud, suddenly: "I am not happy--very."
She could not well have regarded that as a Parthian shot, a demolishing rebuke. Nevertheless, she turned upon it, precipitately, and went away down the steps.
These events took place, in the course of ten minutes upon a doorstep, on the 31st of January. On the 27th of February, Carlisle departed, from the face of her mother's displeasure and all the horridness of home, for her Lenten visit to the Willings. Through the interval the dreariness of life continued; Canning was reported in Cuba; she had abandoned all thought of a little note. The nephew she saw no more; but it chanced that she came to hear his name on many lips. For on the cold morning of the birthday of the Father of his Country, old Armistead Beirne, whom three doctors had pronounced all but a well man, was found dead in his bed: and a few days later, by the probation of his will, it became known that of his fortune of some two hundred thousand dollars, he had left one-fifth to his eccentric nephew in the Dabney House.
XV
In which she goes to New York, and is very Happy indeed.
Mrs. Willing was twenty-four, handsome, expensive, lively, and intensely fond of what she thought was pleasure. Willing was thirty-two, and had a close-clipped mustache: there were ten thousand men in New York whom you might have mistaken for him at twenty paces. He was assistant something on a nineteenth story downtown, and his scale of living continually crowded his income to the wall. The Willings--there were, of course, but two of them--had the kind of home which farmers' daughters so envy the heroines of "society" novels. They lived in a showy apartment hotel in the West Fifties, kept a motor-car, and went out for dinner. In fact "out" was the favorite word in the establishment: the Willings did everything but sleep "out."
"I can't bear to stick at home," said Mrs. Willing to Carlisle. "I've always loved to go places."