Brown Pendleton, Ph.D., L.H.D., F.R.G.S., frowned as he adjusted his white tie before the mirror of the Burgesses’ best guest-room. He was a vigorous, healthy American of thirty, quite capable of taking care of himself; and yet he had been dragged submissively across the continent by a lady who was animated by an ambition to marry him to her sister, toward whom his feelings, in the most minute self-analysis, were only those of polite indifference. And the mound-builders, now that he thought of it, were rather tame after Egypt and Babylon. As he surveyed his tanned face above his snowy shirt bosom he wished that he had never consented to deliver the address at the opening of the new Historical Museum at Indiana University, which was the ostensible reason for this Western flight. As for Miss Floy Wilkinson, she was a perfectly conventional person, who had—not to be more explicit—arrived at a time of life when people say of a girl that she is holding her own well. And she was. She was indubitably handsome, but not exciting. She was the sort of girl who makes an ideal house guest, and she had walked down church aisles ahead of one after the other of her old school friends all the way from Duluth to Bangor. Mrs. Burgess had become anxious as to Floy’s future, and in convoying Pendleton to Indianapolis and planting him in her best guest-chamber she was playing her cards with desperation.
Mrs. Burgess ran upstairs to dress after a hasty cross-examination of the cook, to make sure her telegraphic order for dinner had been understood, and found her husband shaking himself into his dress coat.
She presented her back to be unhooked and talked on in a way she had.
“Well, I suppose you got Grace Whiting or Minnie Rideout? And, of course, you couldn’t have failed on Billy Merrill. I think Grace and Billy are showing signs, at last, of being interested in each other. You can’t tell what may have happened during the summer. But if Pendleton should fail—well, Billy isn’t so dull as people think; and Floy doesn’t mind his clumsiness so much as she did. Did you say you got Minnie?”
Mr. Burgess, absorbed in a particularly stubborn hook, was silent. Mrs. Burgess was afraid to urge conversation upon him lest he should throw up the job, and Floy was monopolizing the only available maid. When a sigh advertised his triumph over the last hook she caught him as he was moving toward the door.
“Did you say Minnie was coming, Web?”
“No, Gertie—no. You didn’t say anything about Minnie in your telegram; you said to get a girl.”
“Why, Web, you know that meant Grace Whiting or Minnie Rideout; they are my old standbys.”
“Well, Grace has gone somewhere to bury her uncle, and Minnie is motoring through the Blue Grass. It was pretty thin picking, but I did the best I could.”
His tone and manner left much to be desired. His wife’s trunk was being unstrapped in the hall outside and there was no time for parleying.