“My father is gone again,” wailed Dorothea with spirit, making comedy out of tragedy, until Ellen, contrary to all discipline, presented her with an irrelevant chocolate cream which distracted her temporarily.
Ellen did not say anything more, but she kept her eyes on Cecily’s drooping figure and Cecily smiled at her rather pathetically.
“I suppose it’s all my fault, Ellen. Something’s gone wrong with the world and I’m tangled up in the machinery.”
Ellen never spoke in metaphors.
“It’s not what should be with a loving couple like you and Mr. Harrison.”
There came to Mr. Warner’s house a few hours later an A. D. T. messenger, weighted with an immense box of flowers. In the depths of the layers of roses, so fragrant and cool, was Dick’s note. “Cecily dear, I had no right to come, no right surely when I had come, to hurt you so. Please try to forget it and me; and if you can’t quite do that think of me as having a heart full of gratitude and respect and affection which expresses itself badly, but as best it can. To-morrow I want to send the children some Christmas things. Please let me do that, and if there’s any way I can help you—anything you will let me do for you—it will make me happy. Merry Christmas! Dick.”
He wrote that, after many drafts of its wording, sitting in his room at the club, and he hunted all over the city for flowers, finding some at length in a hotel flower-shop. If Cecily could have seen him as he wrote, his big hand thoughtfully penning the words, his face drawn and set, she would have known that it was not she alone who was humiliated and outraged by the turn of things. When he had sent the flowers he wrote other letters, one of them to Matthew, telling him that he contemplated going at once into the mining towns.
“It’s necessary, gentlemen,” he told a certain group of men a few days later as he outlined his plans. “We’ve put roughnecks up there in charge; we’ve let the social workers in and paid their salaries; we’ve put young fellows out of college up there, and none of it has worked. There’s more trouble all the time. The only thing we haven’t tried is for one of us who really is responsible to go up himself. At the present moment I can see my way to spending some time there. I won’t bring about a reformation, you know. I don’t promise to stop all the strikes, or to clean out the I. W. W. But I can promise you accurate information after a few months as to what all the trouble is about, and if anything can be done about the situation other than let it go to pot and save what we can of our money. How about it?”
They listened to him with interest—all these men who had money and all the things dependent on money at stake; seeming not too serious, as is the usual way of men of big affairs, showing no great enthusiasm, no excitement.
They liked Dick because he was, compared to most of them, so young and yet so sane and so successful, and they knew he’d “had trouble” with his wife, L. A. Warner’s stepdaughter, and they were sorry for that because, though the age of romance was past for them and the word love had lost its magnetism, they knew that a domestic upset was a serious thing for a young man. “Might send him to the dogs,” they would have said.