“I suppose the region out there has a high death-rate. How’s the malaria?”
“Not alarmingly prevalent, I understand. There’s a summer resort over on one side of Lake Annandale. The place is really supposed to be wholesome. I don’t believe your grandfather had homicide in mind in sending you there.”
“No, he probably thought the rustication would make a man of me. Must I do my own victualing? I suppose I’ll be allowed to eat.”
“Bates can cook for you. He’ll supply the necessities. I’ll instruct him to obey your orders. I assume you’ll not have many guests,—in fact,”—he studied the back of his hand intently,—“while that isn’t stipulated, I doubt whether it was your grandfather’s intention that you should surround yourself—”
“With boisterous companions!” I supplied the words in my cheerfullest tone. “No; my conduct shall be exemplary, Mr. Pickering,” I added, with affable irony.
He picked up a single sheet of thin type-written paper and passed it across the table. It was a formal acquiescence in the provisions of the will. Pickering had prepared it in advance of my coming, and this assumption that I would accept the terms irritated me. Assumptions as to what I should do under given conditions had always irritated me, and accounted, in a large measure, for my proneness to surprise and disappoint people. Pickering summoned a clerk to witness my signature.
“How soon shall you take possession?” he asked. “I have to make a record of that.”
“I shall start for Indiana to-morrow,” I answered.
“You are prompt,” he replied, deliberately folding in quarters the paper I had just signed. “I hoped you might dine with me before going out; but I fancy New York is pretty tame after the cafés and bazaars of the East.”
His reference to my wanderings angered me again; for here was the point at which I was most sensitive. I was twenty-seven and had spent my patrimony; I had tasted the bread of many lands, and I was doomed to spend a year qualifying myself for my grandfather’s legacy by settling down on an abandoned and lonely Indiana farm that I had never seen and had no interest in whatever.