As he finished it Gay appeared, having received a letter telling him to hurry ahead with the plans and contracts. Gay was rather obsequious in his manner since he did not know whether it was Steve or Beatrice who was to pay for this transformation.
“If my wife insists, go ahead––but don’t move your arts-and-crafts shop into my office. I’m not enough interested to see designs and so on. I never had time to be one of the leisure class, and I’m too old to be kidded into thinking I’m one of them now. But I did make a mistake,” he added, slowly, whether for Gay’s benefit or not no one could tell––“I thought the world owed me more than a living––that it owed 161 me a bargain. And there never was a bargain cheaply won that didn’t prove a white elephant in time.”
Gay’s one-cylinder brain did not follow the intricacies of the statement. He merely thought of Steve in more than usually profane terms––and concluded that Beatrice was paying the bill.
CHAPTER XI
It was April before Steve found himself visiting with Mary Faithful again and admiring as heartily as Luke had admired the new apartment Mary had chosen for her family.
It had, to Steve’s mind, the same delightful air of freedom and attractive shabbiness that he had come to consider as essential for a true home. While Beatrice was launched on her new object in life––making the house into a villa, from upholstering a gondola in sky-blue satin and expecting people to use it as a sofa to having the walls frescoed with fat, pouting cherubs––Mary had selected funny old chairs and soft shades of blue cretonne found in the remnant department, queer pottery, Indian blankets, and a set of blue dishes which just naturally demanded to be heaped with good things and eaten before an open fire at Sunday-night supper.
The whole expense came within Mary’s economical pocketbook, yet it seemed to Steve to have the combined richness of a Persian palace and the geniality of a nursery on Christmas Eve.
He deliberately invented an excuse to call, some detail of work which, more easily than not, could have waited until the next day. He was not only using the detail of work as a means to visit Mary but as an excuse to escape a parlour lecture on “What astral vibrations does your given name bring you?” by a pale-faced young woman. The pale-faced 163 young woman boasted of an advanced soul and was making a snug bank account from the rich set in undertaking occult analyses of their names by which to decide whether or not the accompanying astral vibrations harmonized with their auras; and if they did not––and were therefore detrimental and hampering to spiritual development and material progress––she would evolve occult names for them which would be sort of spiritual bits of cheese in material mousetraps baiting and capturing all the good things of this world and the next.