“He played the craven. Wanted me to give him secret reports of your affairs, and then demanded his letters back. All relations are permanently broken off. Will guard absolute silence.”
It was at his leisurely breakfast in the Palm Garden, the next morning, that Vreeland, with a wildly-beating heart, tore open “Madonna’s” answering message.
He stifled the cry of exultation which rose to his lips, for the Rubicon was passed. It was really now “Guerra à cuchillo!”
Elaine Willoughby’s words were replete with that fortiter in re which the unlucky Hathorn was destined later to realize. He only knew her suaviter in modo.
“Ignore him. Be ready to report when I call you. Party from Washington expected in three days. Stand to your colors!” The signature, “True Blue,” was a reminder of their secret pact.
“I think, Mr. Frederick Hathorn, that I have you ‘dead to rights’ now,” mused Vreeland, who determined that the “social war” should blaze up fiercely, but without his hand at the bellows.
A round of calls in the next three days proved to him that Mrs. Alida Hathorn had harked back on all the old intimacy of the unhappy bridegroom, and was diligently sowing broadcast the Cadmus teeth of merciless and pointed satire upon the “sunset beauty on the retired list.” “A woman old enough to be my mother!”
When appealed to by many bright-eyed banditti, Mr. Harold Vreeland merely sadly shook his head in a vague deprecation. “I know nothing whatever,” he softly sighed. “All this sudden gossip is Greek to me, Greek of Cimmerian darkness.”
In the two clubs which he most affected, Vreeland—in a manly burst of platform oratory—when appealed to by eager quidnuncs—sternly announced his code.
“I never take a woman’s name on my lips in gossip. I know nothing, I have heard nothing—and—excuse me—I will listen to nothing. Both the ladies are valued friends of mine.” He was voted a “thoroughbred.”