XLVII
When Adelle descended from her room to the hotel parlor to meet her cousin on his arrival, she was conscious of trepidation. However the matter might turn out in the end, she must now give the young mason a first disappointment, and she was keenly aware of what that might be to him after dreaming his dream all these weeks of freedom and power that was unexpectedly to be his. She did not like to disappoint him, even temporarily, and she also felt somewhat foolish because she had so confidently assumed that it would be a simple matter to set the Clark inheritance right.
The stone mason was sitting cornerwise on his chair in the hotel room, twirling on his thumb a new "Stetson" hat that he had purchased as part of his holiday equipment. There was nothing especially bizarre in the costume that Tom Clark had chosen. Democracy has eradicated almost everything individual or picturesque in man's attire. The standard equipment may be had in every town in the land. There remains merely the fine distinction of being well dressed against being badly dressed, and Clark was badly dressed, as any experienced eye such as Adelle's could see at a glance. Nothing he had on fitted him or became him. A very red neck and face emerged from a high white collar, and those muscular arms that Adelle had always admired for their color of copper bronze and their free, graceful action, now merely prodded out the stiff folds of his readymade suit. His muscles seemed to resent their confinement in good clothes and played tricks like a naughty boy.
Adelle, perceiving him in his corner as soon as she entered the room, realized at once that he was out of place. It seemed that there were people, men as well as women, who were born to wear fine clothes and to acquire all the habits that went with them. For the past ten years these were the people she had associated with almost exclusively, people who could be known by their clothes. The stone mason belonged to that large fringe of the social world who must be known by something else. Adelle had recently perceived that there was another, small class of people like Judge Orcutt who could be known both by their clothes and by something finer than the clothes which they wore. Tom Clark could never become one of these.
But as soon as Adelle was seated near her cousin and talking to him, she forgot his defects of appearance—his red neck and great paws and clumsy posture. She felt once more the man—the man she had come to respect and like, who had an individuality quite independent of clothes and culture. After the first greetings Adelle was silent, and it was the mason himself who asked her bluntly,—
"Well, what did the bank say? I guess it surprised 'em some, didn't it?"
Then Adelle was obliged to tell him of her fruitless expedition to the Washington Trust Company.
"So they turned us down hard!" Clark commented, with a slight contraction of his eyebrows. "The stiffs!"
Already a sardonic grin was loosening the corners of his compressed lips. Life had in fact jested with him too often and too bitterly for him to trust its promises completely. He had no real confidence in Fortune's smiles.