Woodyard's face reflected surprise and concern.
"But, Con!" he stammered.
"Please, Percy!" She put her hand softly on his arm. "No matter what is in the way,—only for a few weeks!" and her eyes filled with tears, quite genuine tears, which dropped slowly to her pale face. "Percy," she murmured, "don't you love me any longer?"…
CHAPTER XXXVI
It was perfectly true, as Conny surmised, that Cairy went to Isabelle. But not that evening—the blow was too hard and too little expected—nor on the whole more frequently than he had been in the habit of going during the winter. Isabelle interested him,—"her problem," as he called it; that is, given her husband and her circumstances, how she would settle herself into New York,—how far she might go there. It flattered him also to serve as intellectual and aesthetic mentor to an attractive, untrained woman, who frankly liked him and bowed to his opinion. It was Cairy, through Isabelle, much more than Lane, who decided on the house in that up-town cross street, on the "right" side of the Park, which the Lanes finally bought. It was in an excellent neighborhood, "just around the corner" from a number of houses where well-known people lived. In the same block the Gossoms had established themselves, on the profits of The People's, and only two doors away, on the same side of the street, a successful novelist had housed himself behind what looked like a Venetian facade. Close by were the Rogerses,—he was a fashionable physician; the Hillary Peytons; the Dentons,—all people, according to Cairy, "one might know."
When Isabelle came to look more closely into this matter of settling herself in the city, she regretted the Colonel's illiberal will. They might easily have had a house nearer "the Avenue," instead of belonging to the polite poor-rich class two blocks east. Nevertheless, she tried to comfort herself by the thought that even with the Colonel's millions at their disposal they would have been "little people" in the New York scale of means. And the other thing, the "interesting," "right" society was much better worth while. "You make your own life,—it isn't made for you," Cairy said.
Isabelle was very busy these days. Thanks to the Potts regime, she was feeling almost well generally, and when she "went down," Dr. Potts was always there with the right drug to pull her up to the level. So she plunged into the question of altering the house, furnishing it, and getting it ready for the autumn. Her mother and John could not understand her perplexity about furnishing. What with the contents of two houses on hand, it seemed incomprehensible that the new home should demand a clean sweep. But Isabelle realized the solid atrocity of the Torso establishment and of the St. Louis one as well. She was determined that this time she should be right. With Cairy for guide and adviser she took to visiting the old furniture shops, selecting piece by piece what was to go into the new house. She was planning, also, to make that deferred trip to Europe to see her brother, and she should complete her selection over there, although Cairy warned her that everything she was likely to buy in Europe these days would be "fake." Once launched on the sea of household art, she found herself in a torturing maze. What was "right" seemed to alter with marvellous rapidity; the subject, she soon realized, demanded a culture, an experience that she had never suspected. Then there was the matter of the Farm at Grafton, which must be altered. The architect, who was making over the New York house, had visited Grafton and had ideas as to what could be done with the rambling old house without removing it bodily. "Tear down the barn—throw out a beautiful room here—terrace it—a formal garden there," etc. In the blue prints the old place was marvellously transformed.
"Aren't you doing too much, all at once?" Lane remonstrated in the mild way of husbands who have experienced nervous prostration with their wives.
"Oh, no; it interests me so! Dr. Potts thinks I should keep occupied reasonably, with things that really interest me…. Besides I am only directing it all, you know."
And glad to see her once more satisfied, eager, he went his way to his work, which demanded quite all his large energy. After all, women had to do just about so much, and find their limit themselves.