“Coom back, Reginald, coom back!” There was the noise of a scuffle as Dosia, with her escort, laughingly ascended the stairs, to elicit a shriek of terror and a rear view of the mercurial Reginald in full flight for the nursery door, which banged after him, and behind which he still raised his voice, to the shrill accompaniment of the nurse.
“I’ll go in and keep him quiet,” said Zaidee reassuringly, in answer to her mother’s look of appeal, and she also disappeared beyond the prison bars, after a whisk of her short crisp pink skirt, and a smile at Dosia in which her little white teeth gleamed in an infantile glee that only accentuated her air of preternatural capability.
Her cousin’s kindly hands helped Dosia to remove the traces of travel, when she had definitely refused the offer pressed upon her to be undressed and go to bed and have her dinner brought up to her. It was sweet to be in feminine care once more, and be pitied for the terrors she had undergone, and feel the bond of relationship assert itself in spite of the fact that the cousins had not seen each other since Dosia’s early childhood. She did not want to be alone up-stairs, and sat instead in Justin’s place at the table, clad in a soft silken tea-gown of Lois’ that was in itself restful, trying to eat and drink and keep up her part in the conversation about her journey and the absent members of the family. Changes had crowded so upon poor Dosia that she felt as if she were living in a kaleidoscope that rattled her every minute or two into a new position; the glittering table and her cousin’s form would presently dissolve, and leave her perhaps out in the crowded, unknown streets, with wild-eyed faces pressing near her.
After all, she only changed to an arm-chair in the little drawing-room, with her head against a cushion and her feet on a foot-stool, and her cousin still beside her, pulling back the window-curtains once in a while to take a peep outside for her missing husband; in spite of the real kindness of her welcome, Dosia felt a certain preoccupation in it. Her coming was only accessory to the real importance of his, when she herself should have been the event; the warmth of heart which she had expected to feel toward her cousin somehow seemed to fail of expression in this attitude. At the same time, Lois was also conscious of a lack of response, a dullness, in Theodosia. Perhaps the likeness of relationship was answerable for a certain reserve of manner, a formality which neither knew how to break then or at a later time, and which was to last until the barriers were swept away by a mighty flood; but the real cause of the lack of sympathy lay in something much deeper. The strong thought of self is inevitably insulating—it is as restrictive of human contact as a live wire. Dosia, whose young life had all been spent in unselfishness, was experiencing unexpectedly the other swing of the pendulum in an intense and absorbing desire to have everything now as she wanted it. She was tired of thinking of other people; the scene should be set now for her. This desire was a huge mushroom growth, sprung up in a night; it had no real root in her nature, and would vanish as suddenly as it had come, but the shadow of it distorted her.
The house was very much smaller than Dosia had imagined, and her eyes roved over the little drawing-room in some perplexity, trying to make it come up to her anticipation. All dwellers in small country places, where economy is Heaven’s first law, expect to be dazzled by the grandeur and elegance of “the city.” People in Balderville never dreamed of buying new furniture from towns twenty or thirty miles away; as chair-legs broke off, or rockers split, or tables came to pieces, all sorts of domestic devices were resorted to by all but shiftless householders who tamely submitted to ruin, in coaxing the article into seeming wholeness and keeping it still in active use. The best families were learned in all the little ways and capabilities of string and wire, and wooden cleats and old hinges and tacks, and pieces of tin cut from tomato-cans, and in the glueing on of piano-keys, black-walnut excrescences, ornaments, and sofa-arms.
Mended furniture has, however, a deprecating expression of its own, not to be concealed by any art. Dosia recognized the absence of it in these trim chairs that stood nattily on their slender curved legs, in the little shining tables which did not require to be hidden by a hanging cloth, and in the china and bric-à-brac placed boldly where they could be seen on all sides. She wondered a little at the low wicker arm-chair in which she was sitting, for they had wicker furnishings in the Balderville hotel, but the blue-skyed water-color sketches on the walls caught her fancy, and the vista of a blue-and-white dining-room, seen through half-closed reddish portières, was charming. For all the shine and polish and multiplicity of small ornaments in the tiny apartment, it seemed to lack a kind of comfort to which she was used, and of which she had caught a glimpse in the sitting-room as she passed it. She gave an exclamation of delight as her eyes fell on a stand in one corner of the room on which was a long glass filled with pink roses.
“How beautiful these are! I haven’t seen any finer ones in Balderville, and you know we are famed for our roses there.”
“Oh,” said Lois, “to think that you have been in the house for over an hour and I never told you about them! Justin’s not coming upset everything. They were sent to you this afternoon.”
“Sent to me?”
“Yes—by Mr. Sutton. Didn’t you say you met him with Justin on the boat?—a short, stout man with sandy hair.”