“Yes; I found him.”
“And, as usual, he sent you home for some horrid papers of some kind?”
“No, not exactly,” said Phil. How uncomfortable it is to have a dream dispelled—even a day-dream! All along the way to the house he had imagined just how she would look; he could see the flush of her cheek through the half-mile of darkness that he had traversed, his path had seemed illumined by the light of her eyes, yet now she was pallid, and her eyes had none of their customary lustre, and her mental condition—it did not seem at all appropriate to the conversation which he had a hundred times imagined and upon which he had set his heart that night. Well, he would be patient: “Faint heart never won fair lady.”
“Aren’t you a little severe on your father for his devotion to business?” he ventured to ask. “Out in the country we have an old saying, ‘Make hay while the sun shines.’ The sun never shone brighter than now in the iron-business.”
“Yes, I know,” replied Lucia, wearily. “It’s always something for business’ sake. Yes, we have that same dreadful saying in New York.”
“But it’s all for the sake of women that men are so absorbed in business,” argued Phil. “What would your father care for business, if it weren’t for his wife and charming daughters and younger children? He never sees iron, I imagine, while he is talking about it, nor even thinks of the money, for its own sake. Greenbacks and gold and notes and bonds all transform themselves, in his eyes, I suppose, into dresses and cloaks and bonnets and opera-boxes and trips to Europe, and——”
“You silly fellow!” said Lucia, with the first smile upon which she had ventured that evening; “I wonder where you get such notions. If you don’t give them up you will some day find yourself writing poetry,—something about the transmutation of railroad-iron into gold. Think how ridiculous that would seem!”
“But when iron attempts ‘to gild refined gold,—to paint the lily,’ ” said Phil, “as it does in your father’s case, why, ’twould be worth dropping into poetry to tell of at least one instance where Shakespeare’s conclusion was wrong. You know the rest of the quotation?”
Yes, evidently Lucia knew it, for her cheek glowed prettily under the compliment, which, while somewhat awkward, reached its mark by the help of Phil’s eyes. As for Phil, his heart began to be itself again: whose heart wouldn’t, he asked himself, under the consciousness of having given one second of pleasure to that dear girl?
“You seem to be in a sermonizing mood to-night,” said Lucia. “I know my father is the best man alive, and I supposed you liked him,—a little; but I can’t imagine what should have impressed you so strongly with him to-night.”