She barely glanced at it and then smiled again, the same smile, only a little diluted. She had seen at once that it was strong wine for Preston.
"You must meet Mr. and Mrs. Warren," she turned to the two who were fussing over their luggage. Warren was a tall, good-looking man and his wife an amiable, attractive little person.
Preston left the question open to them whether they wished to go to their hotel at once or would prefer to drive about, and see something of this new world, into which they had just stepped, and they decided in favor of the latter suggestion.
Through the town they drove, exclaiming over the roses, along the palm-lined boulevard by the shore and then in a rash moment at Alice's request, they turned toward the mountains. A rash suggestion and one that Preston had cause to rue, for presently they passed a carriage being rapidly driven in another direction and all apparently in the highest spirits. It was a party of three, two men and a girl, a slender, tanned, laughing girl, who caught Alice's eye at once. The next glance revealed the man who sat beside her, and who was leaning toward her explaining something, to be Cresswell Hepworth. As Alice bent forward, doubting the evidence of her senses, this girl lifted a bonbon from a box on her knees and held it out toward Hepworth with a pair of tiny gilt tongs. He snatched it deftly in one bite, to the accompaniment of immoderate laughter from his friends, in which he joined.
Oh, dignity! Oh, austere grief! What crimes are committed in thy name! In these days one might well paraphrase the famous lines from The School for Scandal and render them: "When a young girl marries a middle-aged man, what is she to expect?" The situation was graver than even Willoughby Hewston could have predicted. In the first surprise Alice had exclaimed, "Why, that's Cress!" And then to relieve Preston of embarrassment before the Warrens, an embarrassment which was manifesting itself in the deep flush which overspread his face, "He probably got through sooner than he expected," she said in a matter-of-fact tone and dropped the subject.
But she thanked fortune that both Mr. and Mrs. Warren were talkative people given volubly to voice their enthusiasm over the beauty about them, and thus her rather stunned preoccupation passed unnoticed.
She had upon her journey, and even before she started, pictured herself as a sort of missionary, with the not altogether unpleasant task before her of cheering up poor Cresswell. She knew the strength of his few affections, his devotion to Perdita and therefore she had some idea of how deeply this breach between them had affected him. But like most women, even the experienced ones, she had never realized that the masculine and feminine attitude toward grief is as wide apart as the poles. They may both wear rue, but with a difference. Woman seeks a cloister that she may brood over her sorrow, commune with it, hug it to her heart in solitude, but man does his best to shake that black, haunting shape, tries to lose it in a crowd, and willingly sips any kind of a nepenthes which seems to offer him forgetfulness.
Alice Wilstead had not expected that Hepworth would make any unmanly exhibition of his woes, weep on her shoulder or be excitingly dramatic; she knew him too well. But she had expected to see him a little older, perhaps; a little grayer, sadder, more quiet, with a hint of melancholy in his eyes. He might—occasionally she pictured the scene—open his heart to her now and then in a grave and reticent way and disclose a strong man's grief; but instead she had seen him sitting up in a very smartly appointed carriage beside a correspondingly smart young woman in a white serge gown, who was in the very act of popping an enormous marron glacé between his willing teeth.
"Men," said Mrs. Wilstead to herself, with cynical humor, "are all alike." A nugget of wisdom, by the way, which frequently falls from the lips of a sex prone to generalize from a personal experience.
On arriving at the hotel, Mrs. Warren professed herself a bit weary and retired to her rooms, followed by her dutiful husband, but Alice Wilstead, afire with repressed curiosity, suggested, with another of those smiles, full strength now, that Mr. Preston take a cup of tea with her. She was more tired than she had thought.