“Oh, well! you will hear anything in a boarding-house. Indeed, that would be a great deal too good to be true.”
“May I ask where Miss Rieppe is all this while?”
“The last news was from Palm Beach, where the air was said to be necessary for the General.”
“But,” Mrs. Weguelin repeated, “we have every reason to believe that she is coming here in an automobile.”
“We shall have to call, of course,” added Mrs. Gregory to her, not to me; they were leaving me out of it. Yes, these ladies were forgetting about me in their using preoccupation over whatever crisis it was that now hung over John Mayrant’s love affairs—a preoccupation which was evidently part of Kings Port’s universal buzz to-day, and which my joining them in the street had merely mitigated for a moment. I did not wish to be left out of it; I cannot tell you why—perhaps it was contagious in the local air—but a veritable madness of craving to know about it seized upon me. Of course, I saw that Miss Rieppe was, almost too grossly and obviously, “playing for time”; the health of people’s fathers did not cause weekly extensions of this sort. But what was it that the young lady expected time to effect for her? Her release, formally, by her young man, on the ground of his worldly ill fortune? Or was it for an offer from the owner of the Hermana that she was waiting, before she should take the step of formally releasing John Mayrant? No, neither of these conjectures seemed to furnish a key to the tactics of Miss Rieppe and the theory that each of these affianced parties was strategizing to cause the other to assume the odium of breaking their engagement, with no result save that of repeatedly countermanding a wedding-cake, struck me as belonging admirably to a stage-comedy in three acts, but scarcely to life as we find it. Besides, poor John Mayrant was, all too plainly, not strategizing; he was playing as straight a game as the honest heart of a gentleman could inspire. And so, baffled at all points, I said (for I simply had to try something which might lead to my sharing in Kings Port’s vibrating secret):—
“I can’t make out whether she wants to marry him or not.”
Mrs. Gregory answered. “That is just what she is coming to see for herself.”
“But since her love was for his phosphates only—!” was my natural exclamation.
It caused (and this time I did not expect it) my inveterate ladies to consult each other’s expressions. They prolonged their silence so much that I spoke again:—
“And backing out of this sort of thing can be done, I should think, quite as cleverly, and much more simply, from a distance.”