How they laughed, with tears in their eyes! How infinitely precious was the love that bound them together! Dad was never to be lost in the shuffle--never, never; and he was to write every day, and she was to write; and if it were a hundred Washingtons she'd come straight back to him if he were lonely, for to her there was only one real Golden Young Man, and that was her darling, darling father.
Yet as Mr. Ladd shut the study door, and returned to his seat beside the lamp, he knew in spite of himself that he had said good-by. His guardianship was over; near, now, was that unknown man, that unknown rival, for whose pleasure he had lavished twenty years of incessant care and devotion. Though Ladd was hardly a believer, the wish came out with the fervency of a prayer: "Oh, my God, let him be worthy of her!"
CHAPTER III
She did write every day; sometimes the merest snippets, sometimes long, graphic letters, full of the new life and the new people. Her début had been an immense success. Eddie Phelps, a horrid, tallowy, patronizing person, but socially a dictator, had put the stamp of his approval on her, and she had managed to receive it and not burst--which, if Papa only knew it, was a very remarkable feat. But, anyway, she had been hall-marked "sterling," and was enjoying herself furiously. And the young men were so different from Carthage, so much more polished and elegant--and pertinacious. Washington young men simply didn't know what "No" meant, and it was like shoveling snow to get rid of them. But Aunt Sarah was a regular White Wings, and the poor, the detrimental, and the fast--every one, in fact, who wasn't a first-class parti with references from his last place--got carted away before he knew what had struck him.
And Aunt Sally! "Why, Papa, we didn't know her at all. She is as young as I am, and twice as eager, and dances her stockings through every other night. Washington is divided between the people who hate her, and the people who love her, and they put a tremendous zip into either end of it. What she really wants is to marry me at the cold end, and strengthen her position as she calls it; and though I say it, who shouldn't, the cold-end young men are coming in fast. When one proposes to me, she calls it a scalp, and looks, oh, so pleased! But if I see any of them working up to that I try to stop him in time, though it's awfully exciting just the same. That's why I've only three scalps to report instead of about eight. Oh, Papa, what fun it is!"
In time her letters began to change, and there were little signs of disillusionment. One was almost a tract on worldliness, in which she talked about Vanity Fair, and dancing on coffins, and the inner hunger of the soul. There were also increasing references to J. Whitlock Pastor, always coupled with "ideals." J. Whitlock Pastor was quite a remarkable young man of thirty, with "a beautiful austerity," and "fine mind." His people were immensely wealthy, and immensely fashionable--even in Carthage there was a sacredness about the name of Pastor--and Phyllis said there was something splendid in his taking up forestry as a life work, and devoting himself to it, heart and soul, when he had been born--not with a silver spoon--but with a bird's-egg diamond in his mouth.
If there was anything to be said against J. Whitlock Pastor, it was that he was almost too good to be true. He wanted to leave the world better for his having been, and all that--and seemed to have what might be called an excruciating sense of duty. "A very quiet and rather a sad man," wrote Phyllis, "whom one might easily mistake for a muff if one hadn't seen him on horseback. He rides superbly, and I never saw a ring-master in a circus who could come anywhere near him."
All this worked up to a telegram that reached Mr. Ladd a few weeks later: "I accepted him last night, and, Papa, please come on quick and bless us."
Mr. Ladd hastened to Washington as speedily as his affairs would allow, which was five days later, and arrived just in time to dress for the introductory dinner at Mrs. Pastor's--J. Whitlock's mother's. He tried to imagine he was delighted, and caught his daughter in his arms with the enthusiasm of a stage parent. But Phyllis was so pale, so calm, so undemonstrative that he hardly knew what to make of her. He put her cool indifference down to Washington training, but still it puzzled and troubled him. It was so unlike a girl who had met her fate--so unlike another pair of lovers that had been so much in his head that day--Genivieve de Levancour, and a certain Bob Ladd. The contrast gave him a certain sense of foreboding.
In the carriage she was very silent, and nestled against him like a tired child. He repeated his congratulations; he strove again to be delighted; joked, not without effort, about the exalted position of the Pastors, and what a come-down it was for them to marry such poor white trash as the Ladds. Then it occurred to him that perhaps this jarred upon her! "Forgive me, Phyllis," he said humbly. "I--I hardly know what I am saying. I--I guess I'm trying to hide what this recalls to me--what this means to me."