There were a few men in the lounge, hidden behind papers; a few men in the card-room, which was blue with smoke and close and distasteful after the open air of the country. He found his room gloomy and himself restless. His loneliness was turning to bitterness to-night. Changing his rough clothes for others he went out again.
Dick had lived in Carrington too long not to know where every sort of person sought his diversions. In twenty minutes he had found the group whose usual form of amusement he felt might fill the night for him. They were gathered, as he had guessed they would be, in the room of one of the men, with plenty of liquor and plenty of cards and a welcome for him. It was some years since he had joined this crowd, but once in it he felt natural enough, and the depression which had been bothering him was gone before long.
CHAPTER XXV
WINTER came early that year. Even in November the cold was steady and relentless. Cecily felt her isolation more as she was shut up with her children in the house, except for their periods of exercise. She dreaded the winter, especially the approach of Christmas, and the long winter evenings, which seemed so endless after the children were abed, dragged wearily—reading and reading, learning things, thinking things which her limited activities gave her no chance to put into practice. She had passed the point where she was in agony about her own troubles. Every book, every newspaper told her of tragedies much worse. And resolutely she tried not to think of Dick, although the news of him filtered through to her now and then. Some one had sent her a marked newspaper, the kind of paper to which she had no ordinary access, reeking with gossip and scandal. She did not want to read it, but of course she did, and in the smirking, veiled allusions, all nameless, she gathered that her story had filtered through to the public. She heard through Della that Dick was “going a pace.” She knew from the daily papers that he must be having trouble in the mining country. The winter had come early there, too, and the price of food and fuel had soared, fanning into a flame of irritation the discontents which were always smoldering. There were petty strikes already, with the threat of a big one hanging fire all the time. Cecily wondered how Dick was going to tackle all these problems with Matthew away, especially if he were not living well. It surprised her to find that the personal rancor at the intimations of Dick’s wildness did not arise. What she felt was rather this vague uninformed worry about his ability to handle these big affairs if he were in bad shape. She knew that he and Matthew were rich themselves, but that they had no great standing in comparison with the great financiers of the country who had tied up enormous sums of money in these mining ranges. Her stepfather told her that Dick had his hands full. She hated to ask further, telling herself that she had deliberately made it none of her business. But she searched the papers for news, none the less.
Allenby, the little town named for Matthew, where Dorothea had been born, seemed to be one source of trouble. She wondered sometimes if Dick went there often and if, when he passed Mrs. Olson’s gaunt little house, he remembered the time she had spent there. That reminded her of Fliss again.
Her father and Della had asked her to spend Christmas with them, but she could not make up her mind to do that. The children were to have a Christmas with the kind of spirit she wanted, even if it would revive all sorts of painful memories for her. She had decided that and Della had shrugged her pretty shoulders and regretted and said that she and Walter would be sorry, for Gerald was going to a house party and wouldn’t be home and that they wouldn’t bother with a tree if Cecily wasn’t coming and that she thought that she would give Walter a bathrobe and that she thought further that Walter was going to get her a platinum wrist watch, which she knew he couldn’t afford but which she wanted “awfully.” Cecily thought he probably would. Little use as she had for Della’s methods she was reluctantly and truthfully admitting that Della had a way of keeping Walter happy. It reminded her of Fliss’s way with Matthew. Both of them put their husbands in the foreground, flattered them, coaxed them, played with them. And as Matthew had been amused and relaxed by such treatment, Walter was amused and impassioned. He quarreled with Della. That Cecily knew. But they could quarrel one hour and be absolutely and publicly enamored of each other during the next. The catastrophe of Walter’s marriage had somehow not come to pass. And the bitterest drop in Cecily’s cup was that she, who held marriage in deeper respect than either Della or Fliss, had been the only one of the three whose husband was left desolate and alone. Walter was working hard to make money for his Della. In spite of late hours and concentrated excitement he was making good in his father’s business. While Fliss was in Washington sending back or having sent back little items to adorn the social pages of Carrington’s newspapers already. “Senator and Mrs. Allenby were in attendance at” this and that function. Odd how Cecily could miss none of those little items, no matter how she tried to ignore them.
On the first of December after looking over a horde of frightening bills, Cecily went to see her stepfather at his office. She chose the office as affording a chance for a less intimate meeting than one at her house. The array of clerks and stenographers and glazed doors made her feel very impersonal and keyed her up until she found herself confronting her stepfather over a glass-topped table and looked straight into his grave keen eyes.
“What is it, Cecily? Do you need some money?”
“I can’t get along on what I have. That house won’t run on two hundred and fifty dollars a month.”
“Of course you can’t. I could have told you that. Do you know how much it costs to run mine? Well, I won’t tell you. I’ll place a check to your credit to-day, my dear. And it will make me very happy.”