On the roof of the Grantham they were excellently served; for Barney knew how to order a dinner, and he knew the art, which is an alchemistic mixture of suave diplomacy and the insinuated power and purpose of murder, of handling head-waiters and their sub-autocrats. Having no other business in hand, Barney devoted himself to that business which ran like a core through all his businesses—paying court to Maggie. And when Barney wished to be a courtier, there were few of his class who could give a better superficial interpretation of the role; and in this particular instance he was at the advantage of being in earnest. He forced the most expensive tidbits announced by the dinner card upon Maggie; he gallantly and very gracefully put on and removed, as required by circumstances, the green cobweb of a scarf Maggie had brought to the roof as protection against the elements; and when he took the dancing-floor with her, he swung her about and hopped up and down and stepped in and out with all the skill of a master of the modern perversion of dancing. Barney was really good enough to have been a professional dancer had his desires not led him toward what seemed to him a more exciting and more profitable career.
Maggie, not to rouse Barney's suspicions, played her role as well as he did his own. And most of the other diners, a fraction of the changing two or three hundred thousand people from the South and West who choose New York as the best of all summer resorts, gazed upon this handsome couple with their intricate steps which were timed with such effortless and enviable accuracy, and excitedly believed that they were beholding two distinguished specimens of what their home papers persisted in calling New York's Four Hundred.
Maggie got back to her room with the feeling that she had staved off Barney and her numerous other dilemmas for the immediate present. Her chief thought in the many events of the day had been only to escape her dangers and difficulties for the moment; all the time she had known that her real thinking, her real decisions, were for a later time when she was not so driven by the press of unexpected circumstances. That less stressful time was now beginning.
What was she to do next? What were to be her final decisions? And what, in all this strange ferment, was likely to germinate as possible forces against her?
She mulled these things over for several days, during which Dick came to see her twice, and twice proposed, and was twice put off. She had quiet now, and was most of the time alone, but that clarity which she had expected, that quickness and surety of purpose which she had always believed to be unfailingly hers, refused to come.
She tried to have it otherwise, but the outstanding figure in her meditations was Larry. Larry, who had not exposed her at the Sherwoods', and whose influence had caused Hunt also not to expose her—Larry, who without deception was on a familiar footing at the Sherwoods' where she had been received only through trickery—Larry, a fugitive in danger from so many enemies, perhaps after all undeserved enemies—Larry, who looked to be making good on his boast to achieve success through honesty—Larry, who had again told her that he loved her. She liked Dick Sherwood—she really did. But Larry—that was something different.
And thus she thought on, drawn this way and that, and unable to reach a decision. But with most people, when in a state of acute mental turmoil, that which has been most definite in the past, instinct, habit of mind, purpose, tradition, becomes at least temporarily the dominant factor through the mere circumstance that it has existed powerfully before, through its comparative stability, through its semi-permanence. And so with Maggie. She had for that one afternoon almost been won over against herself by the workings of Larry's secret diplomacy. Then had come the natural reaction. And now in her turmoil, in so far as she had any decision, it was instinctively to go right ahead in the direction in which she had been going.
But on the sixth day of her uncertainty, just after Dick had called on her and she had provisionally accepted an invitation to Cedar Crest for the following afternoon, a danger which she had half seen from the start burst upon her without a moment's warning. It came into her sitting-room, just before her dinner hour, in the dual form of Barney and Old Jimmie. The faces of both were lowering.
“Get rid of that boob chaperon of yours!” gritted Barney. “We're going to have some real talk!”
Maggie stepped to the connecting door, sent Miss Grierson on an inconsequential errand, and returned.