Later she said, as if she had been reflecting upon it for some time, "I did not know you were acquainted with and liked quiet, homey people like the Terhunes."
And he was very glad that Bill had changed.
The summer droned by, with the requisite number of heat waves, during which the newspapers screamed in black headlines of prostrations and of hundreds of thousands sleeping on Coney Island's sands; and the compensating number of comfortable periods in between too. John Dorning showed an ever-growing inclination to spend these hot spells away from the office, idling under the willows at Millbank. In many weeks, he did not appear on Fifth Avenue more than two or three days. John was making up for the long years he had kept clerk's hours, winter and summer. For the first time in his life, he had learned how to play. He had found in Elise an interest even more confining than Dorning and Son. He was hardly happy away from her.
Rodrigo rather enjoyed the added responsibility placed upon his own shoulders. And he did not particularly mind the heat. Frequently he would bundle himself and Mary Drake, who had taken over some of the recreant John's duties and was working harder than ever, into his recently purchased roadster, late in the afternoon, and dash out of the city's glare to Long Beach for a cooling swim. They would have supper at a shore roadhouse on the return, and he would deliver her to her Brooklyn home while it was still early in the evening, remaining for a chat with Mary and her mother or going back to New York for a theatre or other engagement. Rodrigo was quite sure that Mrs. Drake, who was keen-witted in spite of her wan face and mouselike quietness, liked him and approved of his interest in Mary.
Late in August, a museum project upon which John Dorning had been working for nearly a year, abruptly came up for decision and the committee in charge requested him to come out and meet with them. Rodrigo offered himself as a substitute, but John's conscience asserted itself at last and he declared he must really make the trip in person. It was the first time Elise and he had been separated, and he did not fancy it in the least, though it would be for only three days. Nevertheless, he superintended the packing of the models of the pieces Dorning and Son had submitted, saw them shipped off, and followed them two days later.
The morning after he left, Rodrigo's telephone rang. Elise was on the wire inviting him to take her to lunch. She was at Grand Central, she said, and would meet him at twelve-thirty. Rodrigo was filled with a curious mixture of annoyance and pleasure. She had promised frankly in the presence of her husband to do this very thing. There could be no harm in it. And yet he knew that there would always be danger to him in being alone anywhere with this woman, and the danger, he had to admit, was what gave the thing its interest. He finally issued the desired invitation and met her in the lobby of the Biltmore.
She was the soul of cool loveliness and discretion as they chatted over the salad and iced tea. Her friendliness lulled to sleep the resentment he now unconsciously always erected against her.
"I called you up one afternoon lately," she offered innocently, stirring the tall, iced glass with the long glass spoon, "and they told me at the office that you had gone to Long Beach swimming. It's so stiflingly hot this afternoon. Wouldn't it be jolly to be out there?"
He admitted that it would.
"You're thinking that I am frightfully bold," she admitted. "And I am. Frightfully warm too. Won't you, for John's sake, prevent John's wife from perishing by taking her swimming? Or did your mother once warn you not to go near the water?"