And Nancy goes back to wonder if the reason Oliver hasn't gone back to the hotel is that he is returning here in an appropriate suit of sackcloth. She hopes he will come before mother and father get back.
But even while she is hoping it, the large blue policeman is saying something about “'Sturbance of the peace” to the desk-sergeant, and Oliver is going down on the blotter as Donald Richardson.
XVIII
“You simply must not worry yourself about it so, Nancy, my darling,” says Mrs. Ellicott brightly. “Lovers' quarrels are only lovers' quarrels you know and they seem very small indeed to people a little older and more experienced though I daresay they may loom terribly large just at present. Why your father and myself used to have—ahem—our little times over trifles, darling, mere trifles ” and Mrs. Ellicott takes a pinch of air between finger and thumb as if to display it as a specimen of those mere trifles over which Mr. and Mrs. Ellicott used to become proudly enraged at each other in the days before she had faded him so completely.
Nancy, after a night of intensive sleeplessness broken only by dreams of seeing Oliver being married to somebody else in the lobby of the Hotel Rosario can only wonder rather dully when it could ever have been that poor father was allowed enough initiative of his own to take even the passive part in a quarrel over a trifle and why mother thinks the prospect implied in her speech of her daughter's marriage being like unto hers can be so comforting. Nancy made one New Year's resolution the second day of her engagement, “If I ever find myself starting to act to Ollie the way mother does to father I'll simply have to leave him and never see him again.” But Mrs. Ellicott goes on.
“If Oliver is at all the sort of young man we must hope he is, he will certainly come and apologize at once. And if he should not—well Nancy, my little girl,” she adds hieroglyphically “there are many trials that seem hard to bear at first which prove true blessings later when we see of what false materials they were first composed.”
Mr. Ellicott thinks it is time for him to go to the office. It is five minutes ahead of his usual time but Mrs. Ellicott has been looking at him all the way through her last speech until he feels uneasily that he must be composed of very false material indeed. He stops first though to give an ineffective pat to Nancy's shoulder.
“Cheer up, Chick,” he says kindly. “Always sun somewhere you know, so don't treat the poor boy too hard,” and he shuffles rapidly away before his wife can look all the way through him for the vague heresy implicit in his sentence.
“It is all very well for your father to say such things, but, Nancy, darling, you shall not be put upon by Tramplers” proceeds Mrs. Ellicott in her most cryptically perfect tones. “Oliver is a man—he must apologize. A man, I say, though little more than a boy. And otherwise you would now be pursuing your Art in Paris due to dear kind Mrs. Winters who has always stood our truest friend and now this other opportunity has come also but I would never be the first to say that even such should not be sacrificed most gladly for the love of a true kind husband and dear little children though marriage is but a lottery at best and especially when affections are fixed upon their object in early youth.”