“Oh, but your father isn’t absent! He is officially present and in the saddle,” laughed Griswold. “You must not admit, even to me, that he is not here in full charge of his office. And as for my leaving the field, I have not the slightest intention of going back to Virginia until the Appleweight ghost is laid, the governor of North Carolina brought to confusion, and the governor of South Carolina visibly present and thundering his edicts again, so to speak, ex cathedra. My own affairs can wait, Miss Osborne. My university may go hang, my clients may be mulcted in direst damages, but just now I am your humble servant, and I shall not leave your service until my tasks are finished. I am consulting not my duty, but my pleasure. The joy of having a hand in a little affair like this, and of being able to tell my friend Tommy Ardmore about it afterward, would be sufficient. Ardmore will never speak to me again for not inviting him to a share in the game.”
He was more buoyant than she had seen him, and she liked the note of affection that crept into his tone as he spoke of his friend.
“Ardmore is the most remarkable person alive,” Griswold continued. “You remember—I spoke of him this morning. He likes to play the inscrutable idiot, and he carries it off pretty well; but underneath he’s really clever. The most amazing ideas take hold of him. You never could imagine what he’s doing now! I met him accidentally in Atlanta the other day, and he was in pursuit of a face—a girl’s face that he had seen from a car window for only an instant on a siding somewhere.”
“He must have a romantic temperament,” suggested Barbara.
“Quite that. His family have been trying to marry him off to some one in their own set ever since I have known him, but he’s extremely difficult. One of the most remarkable things about him is his amazing democracy. He owns a palace on Fifth Avenue, but rarely occupies it, for he says it bores him. He has a camp in the Adirondacks, but I have never known him to visit it. His place in North Carolina pleases him because there he commands space, and no one can crowd him or introduce him to people he doesn’t want to meet. He declares that the most interesting people don’t have more than a dollar a day to spend; that the most intelligent and the best-looking girls in America clerk in shops and work in factories. A philanthropic lady in New York supplies him every Christmas with a list of names of laundry girls, who seem to appeal particularly to Ardy’s compassion, though he never knew one in his life, but he admires them for the zeal with which they destroy buttonholes and develop the deckle-edge cuff; and he has twenty-dollar bills mailed to them quite mysteriously, and without any hint of who Santa Claus really is.”
“But the girl he saw from the car window—did she also appeal to him altruistically?”
“No; it was with her eye. He declared to me most solemnly that the girl winked at him!”
Griswold was aware that Miss Osborne’s interest in Ardmore cooled perceptibly.
“Oh!” she said, with that delightful intonation with which a woman utterly extinguishes a sister.
“I shouldn’t have told you that,” said Griswold, guiltily aware of falling temperature. “He is capable of following a winking eye at a perfectly respectful distance for a hundred years, and of being entertained all the time by the joy of pursuit.”