“There is no accounting for taste, Evelyn.” Maynard felt himself on delicate ground; widening the breach between the Burnhams and Evelyn would be like applying a match to a keg of gunpowder. “It didn’t strike me that Burnham was such a bad sort when I first knew him.”
“You haven’t got him in the family,” exclaimed Evelyn shrewdly. “It makes all the difference between tolerance and active dislike. I wish Mother wasn’t so under his influence.”
“You think she is?”
“I do. I left her fretting about him because his temperature had gone up and sending frantically all over town for Dr. Hayden.”
Maynard looked serious. “Has it occurred to you, Evelyn, that your step-father is an ill man? Perhaps his irritability and peculiar behavior is due to some chronic disorder.”
“I’ll ask Dr. Hayden to give him a liver pill.” Evelyn declined to take her step-father’s health seriously. “He used to go out a great deal, now he sits around the house hour after hour, doing nothing, or else playing chess; he seems to live for his chess problems alone.”
“It is an absorbing study,” replied Maynard. “Do you know the game?”
“Indeed I don’t,” promptly. “One chess player in the family is quite enough.” Evelyn’s active mind flew off at a tangent. “You missed a nice row by not coming home for luncheon.”
“Row!” Maynard looked at her in astonishment. “I was unpardonably rude not to telephone your mother that I was detained at the theater and not to wait luncheon for me, but surely a row——”
“Oh, bless you, the row wasn’t about you,” Evelyn chuckled. “Dr. Hayden read the riot act to Mrs. Ward and made her get up; she was malingering, you know.”