"It's a curious shell," Lane remarked, picking up one of the empty shells from the ground.
"Yes, I have to have them specially made," replied Cairy. The toy was handed around and much admired.
"But, Uncle Tom," Marian asked, "why do you carry a pistol?"
"In the South gentlemen always carry pistols."
"Is it very dangerous in the South?" the little girl inquired. Then the older people laughed, and Cairy looked rather foolish.
CHAPTER XLVI
Isabelle's house appeared to Vickers more like a comfortable country club or a small country inn than the home of a private family. There were people coming and going all the time. Isabelle seemed at a loss without a peopled background. "And they are all interesting," she said to her brother, with a touch of pride. "It's the only place Dickie will stay in for any time,—he says I have the best collection of fakes he knows. But he likes to chatter with them." So far as Vickers could discover there was no special principle of selection in the conglomerate, except the vague test of being "interesting." Besides Gossom and Cairy and the Silvers and others of their kind there were Lane's business friends, officers of the railroad, and men that Lane brought out to golf with or ride with. "We don't go in for society," Isabelle explained, affecting a stronger indifference than she really felt for "merely smart people." She wished her brother to know that she had profited by her two years of New York life to gather about her intellectual people, and there was much clever talk at the Farm, to which Vickers paid an amused and bewildered attention.
From the quiet corner where Vickers looked on at the household these autumn days, he watched especially his brother-in-law. Lane could be at the Farm only for occasional days, and while there spent his time out of doors. He took small part in all the talk, but it amused him as might the vivacity of children. He left this personal side of life to Isabelle, content to be a passive spectator of the little game she was playing; while, as Vickers judged from what Gossom and other men said, Lane himself had a more absorbing, more exacting game in the city, which he was playing with eminent success. "He's getting close to the king row," Isabelle remarked to Vickers. "He was offered the presidency of some road of other out West. But we couldn't go out there again to live!"
Of all the men and women who came and went at the Farm, Cairy was on the most familiar footing. "He likes to work here," Isabelle explained with pride, "and he amuses John more than most of them. Besides he's very useful about the place!" Surely Cairy was pleasantly installed, as Conny would have said. He was delightful with the governess, who admired his light conversation, and he selected the pony for Molly, and taught her how to fall off gracefully. At domestic moments, which were rare, he effaced himself. He had a curious position in the household that puzzled Vickers. He was accepted,—the wheels ran around him. Isabelle treated him with a jesting, frank intimacy, very much as she treated her brother. And Lane, Vickers decided, had distinctly more use for the limping Southerner than he had for most of the people at the house, including his brother-in-law. Cairy was so completely out of Lane's world of men that there were no standards of comparison for him.
"Tommy distracts John," Isabelle explained to Vickers. "If he only could play golf, I suspect John would steal him from me."