“The way Barslow puts these property matters,” said he, “you are called upon to think that all arrangements have been made upon a cold cash basis; and, actually, that’s the fact. But you mustn’t either of you think that in dealing with you we have forgotten that you are dear to us—friends. We should have had to act in the same way if you had been enemies, perhaps, but if there had been any way in which our—regard could have shown itself, that way would have been followed.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Trescott, “we understand that. Mr. Lattimore said almost the same thing, and we know that in what he did Mr. Cornish—”
“We must go now, mamma,” said Josie. “Thank you both very much. It won’t do any harm for me to take a day or so for considering this in all its phases; but I know now what I shall do. The thought of the distress that might come to people here and elsewhere as a result of these mistakes here is a new one, and a little big for me, at first.”
Jim sat by the desk, after they went away, folding insurance blotters and savagely tearing them in pieces.
“I wish to God,” said he, “that I could throw my hand into the deck and quit!”
“What’s the matter?” said I.
“Oh—nothing,” he returned. “Only, look at the situation. She comes in, filled with the idea that it was Cornish who proposed this plan, and that he did it for her sake. I couldn’t very well say, like a boy, ‘’Twasn’t Cornish; ’twas me!’, could I? And in showing her the purely mercenary character of the deal, I’m put in the position of backcapping Cornish, and she goes away with that impression! Oh, Al, what’s the good of being able to convince and control every one else, if you are always further off than Kamschatka with the only one for whose feelings you really care?”
“I don’t think it struck her in that way at all,” said I. “She could see how it was, and did, whatever her mother may think. But what possessed Lattimore to tell Mrs. Trescott that Cornish story?”
“Oh, Lattimore never said anything like that!” he returned disgustedly. “He told her that it was proposed by a friend, or one of the syndicate, or something like that; and they are so saturated with the Cornish idea up there lately, that they filled up the blank out of their own minds. Another mighty encouraging symptom, isn’t it?”
Not more than a day or two after this, and after the news of the “purchase” of the Trescott estate was being whispered about, my telephone rang, just before my time for leaving the office, and, on answering, I found that Antonia was at the other end of the wire.