Flint: His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes

by Maud Wilder Goodwin

Of late Mr. Flint has taken to dropping in once or twice a week of an evening to play whist,—he and Winifred against her father and me. Now I like to beat as well as any one; but I do like some show of organized resistance, and this young man's playing is what I call impertinently poor, as if he did not think it worth while to try. Winifred seems just as well satisfied to be beaten as to beat, and the Professor takes a guileless and childlike satisfaction in his triumph which is quite pitiable. I take pains to let Mr. Flint see that I at least am not taken in; but he only smiles in that exasperatingly non-committal way of his, as if it mattered little enough to him what I thought one way or the other. After the game is over he gets a chance for a few minutes' talk with Winifred while I am hunting up my knitting and her father his pipe, and it is my belief that it's just those few minutes that he looks forward to all the evening, while he is ignoring his partner's trump-signal and leading from his weak suit.

Winifred has caught a very annoying trick of turning to him on all occasions, as if waiting to know what he thought before making up her mind. Altogether I don't like the look of things at all.

Of course there was no getting out of inviting Mr. Flint to the little birthday party which we [Pg 242] were planning for Nora Costello. To tell the truth, nobody but me seemed to want to get out of it. Professor Anstice says he is the most agreeable man that comes to the house, and when I confided to him that I was afraid Winifred would fall in love with him, he answered: "She might do worse. She might do much worse." That was all the consolation I got in that quarter, and with Winifred herself it was as bad. I thought it might do good to recall some of her early impressions, which seem to have changed so mightily of late.

"Don't you remember," I said, "how you called him a refrigerator?"

"Did I?" she said with a little laugh. "Well, he was rather frigid in those days."

"Yes, and you said how disagreeable his manners were, and how thoughtless he was of every one but himself."

At this Winifred colored up as if they hadn't been her own very words. "If I said it," she answered with a little toss of her head, "or if anybody else said it, it was a stupid slander, which grows stupider every time it is repeated."

I was a little nettled myself at her answering me like that. "You didn't think so," I said, "when you begged him to go away from Nepaug."

At this Winifred jumped straight up from her [Pg 243] chair, running her hand through her hair in a way she has when she is excited—"Did you hear that? Then you must have been listening," she cried out, as if she were accusing me of chicken-stealing.

"If you think that of me, Winifred, the sooner my trunk is packed the better," I answered, as stiff as the Captain's monument on Duxbury Hill.