Her husband laughed. “I can’t say that he struck me pleasantly,” he admitted. “We talked oil out on the porch. He was the optimist and I the pessimist.”
And it was to happen that the first rift in Glory’s 211 lute of happiness was to come out of Wharton’s agency, though she did not recognize it as his.
For in these times, despite a happiness that made her sing through the days, something like the panic of stage fright was settling over her: a thing yet of the future, but some day to be faced.
So long as life ran quietly, like the shaded streams that went down until they made the rivers of the greater and outer world, she was confident mistress of her life and had no forebodings. Spurrier loved her and she worshiped him—but out there beyond the ridges, the activities of his larger life were calling—or would call. Then they must leave here and she began to dread the thousand little mistakes and the humiliations that might come to him because of her unfamiliarity with that life. Since the bearings of achievement are delicate, she even feared that she might throw out of gear and poise the whole machinery of his success, and in secret Glory was poring over absurd books on etiquette and deportment. That these stereotyped instructions would only hamper her own naturally plastic spirit, she did not know when she read and reread chapters headed, “How to Enter a Drawing-room” and “Hints upon Refined Conversation.”
That Spurrier would suggest going without her to any field into which his work called him, she did not dream. That he would leave her to wait for him here, as the companion only of his backwoods hours, her pride never contemplated.
Yet in the fall Spurrier did just that thing, and to 212 the letter which induced its doing was signed the name of George Wharton. The latter wrote:
“We must begin to lay out lines for work with the next legislature. There are people in Louisville and Lexington whom you should meet and talk with. I think you had better make your headquarters at one of the Louisville clubs, and when you get here I will put you in touch with the proper bearings.”
That much might have puzzled any of the mountaineers who had taken their own cues from Spurrier’s thinly concealed manner of hostility to Wharton, but the last part of the letter would have explained that, too:
“The little game down at your house was nothing short of masterly. Your acting was superb, and though you were the star, I think I may claim to have played up to you well. The device of gaining their confidence so that, of their own accord, they turned to you for counsel—and then seeming to gloom on me when I talked oil, was pretty subtle. I could openly preach buying and instead of turning away from me in suspicion, they fell on me for a sucker. I—and others acting for me—have, as the result, secured a good part of the options we need—and you appear to be of all men, the least interested.”
Spurrier read the thing twice, then crushed it savagely in his clenched hand and cursed under his breath. “The damned jackals,” he muttered. “That’s the pack I’m running with—or rather I’m running with them and against them at once.”