"Oh, we jog on, John and I,—just the usual thing, you know,—no heights and no depths!"
An expression of futility came momentarily into her eyes. It wasn't what she had pictured to herself, her marriage and life. Somehow she had never quite caught hold of life. But that was a common fate. Why, after all, should she commiserate her brother, take the 'poor Vick' tone that everybody did about him? Had she attained to a much more satisfactory level than he, or had the others who 'poor Vickered' him? There was something in both their natures, perhaps, at jar with life, incapable of effectiveness.
Vickers finally consented to return to America with his mother and sister "for a visit." Delia, he said, ought to see her father, who was a broken man, living in some small place in the West. (Isabelle suspected that Vickers had sent him also money.) Conry had written him lately, asking for news of his daughter.
"Does Vick intend to tote that lump of a girl around with him for the next twenty years?" Mrs. Price demanded of Isabelle, when she heard that Delia was to be of their party.
"I suppose so, unless she totes herself off!"
"The woman dumped her child on him! Well, well, the Colonel had something of the fool in him where women were concerned,—only I looked after that!"
"Mother," Isabelle retorted mischievously, "I am afraid you'll never be able to keep down the fool in us; Vick is pretty nearly all fool, the dear!"
Her brother's return being settled, Isabelle plunged into her shopping, buying many things for both the houses, as well as her dresses. There were friends flitting back and forth, snatches of sight-seeing, and theatres. By the time they took the steamer Isabelle confessed she was a "wreck." Yet she talked of taking an apartment in Paris the next spring and sending her child to a convent, as Mrs. Rogers had done. "It would be nice to have my own corner over here to run to," she explained. "Only Potts wants me to bury myself at Schwalbach."
Cairy joined them at Plymouth. He had been in London making arrangements for the production of a play there, and had hopes of enlarging his sphere.
"Coming home?" he asked Vickers. "That's good!"