He came downstairs a few minutes before seven and from force of habit strolled through the rooms on a tour of inspection. In keeping with his sense of personal dignity, he always put on his dinner coat in the evening, even when he was alone. He rang and asked the smartly capped and aproned maid who responded whether his daughter was at home.
“Miss Leila went to the Country Club this afternoon, sir, and hasn’t come in yet. She said she was dining here.”
“Thank you,” he replied colorlessly, and turned to glance over some new books neatly arranged on a table at the side of the living-room. A clock struck seven and on the last solemn stroke the remote titter of an electric bell sent the maid to the door.
“Mr. and Mrs. Shepherd Mills,” the girl announced in compliance with an established rule, which was not suspended even when Mills’s son and daughter-in-law were the guests.
“Shep fairly dragged me!” Mrs. Mills exclaimed as she greeted her father-in-law. “He’s in such terror of being late to one of your feasts! I know I’m a fright.” She lifted her hand to her hair with needless solicitude; it was perfectly arranged. She wore an evening gown of sapphire blue chiffon,—an effective garment; she knew that it was effective. Seeing that he was eyeing it critically, she demanded to know what he thought of it.
“You’re so fastidious, you know! Shep never pays any attention to my clothes. It’s a silly idea that women dress only for each other; it’s for captious men like you that we take so much trouble.”
“You’re quite perfectly turned out, I should say,” Mills remarked. “That’s a becoming gown. I don’t believe I’ve seen it before.”
Her father-in-law was regarding her quizzically, an ambiguous smile playing about his lips. She was conscious that he never gave her his whole approval and she was piqued by her failure to evoke any expressions of cordiality from him. Men usually liked her, or at least found her amusing, and she had never been satisfied that Franklin Mills either liked her or thought her clever. It was still a source of bitterness that Mills had objected strongly to Shepherd’s marrying her. His objections she attributed to snobbery; for her family was in nowise distinguished, and Constance, an only child, had made her own way socially chiefly through acquaintances and friendships formed in the Misses Palmers’ school, a local institution which conferred a certain social dignity upon its patrons.
She had never been able to break down Mills’s reserves, and the tone which she had adopted for her intercourse with him had been arrived at after a series of experiments in the first year of her marriage. He suffered this a little stolidly. There was a point of discretion beyond which she never dared venture. She had once tried teasing him about a young widow, a visitor from the South for whom he had shown some partiality, and he hadn’t liked it, though he had taken the same sort of chaff from others in her presence with perfect good nature.
Shepherd, she realized perfectly, was a disappointment to his father. Countless points of failure in the relationship of father and son were manifest to her, things of which Shepherd himself was unconscious. It was Mills’s family pride that had prompted him to make Shepherd president of the storage battery company, and the same vanity was responsible for the house he had given Shepherd on his marriage—a much bigger house than the young couple needed. He expected her to bear children that the continuity of the name might be unbroken, but the thought of bearing children was repugnant to her. Still, the birth of an heir, to take the name of Franklin Mills, would undoubtedly heighten his respect for her—diminish the veiled hostility which she felt she aroused in him.