Yet, as time went on, he learned that Edith’s faults were tempered by her fastidiousness. She did not confuse liberty and license. She neither smoked nor drank. There was about her dancing a fine and stately quality which saved it from sensuousness. Yet when he told her things, there was always that irritating shrug of the shoulders. “Oh, well, I’m not a rowdy,—you know that. But I like to play around.”
His pride in her grew—in her burnished hair, the burning blue of her eyes, her great beauty, the fineness of her spirit, the integrity of her character.
Yet he sighed with relief when she told him of her engagement to Delafield Simms. He loved her, but none the less he felt the strain of her presence in his establishment. It would be like sinking back into the luxury of a feather bed, to take up the old life where she had entered it.
And Edith, too, welcomed her emancipation. “When I marry you,” she told Delafield, “I am going to break all the rules. In Uncle Fred’s house everything runs by clockwork, and it is he who winds the clock.”
Delafield laughed and kissed her. He was like the rest of the men of his generation, apparently acquiescent. Yet the chances were that when Edith was his wife, he, too, would wind the clock!
Their engagement was one of mutual freedom. Edith did as she pleased, Delafield did as he pleased. They rarely clashed. And as the wedding day approached, they were pleasantly complacent.
Delafield, dictating a letter one day to Frederick Towne’s stenographer, spoke of his complacency. He was writing to Bob Sterling, who was to be his best man, and who shared his apartment in New York. Delafield was an orphan, and had big money interests. He felt that Washington was tame compared to the metropolis. He and Edith were to live one block east of Fifth Avenue, in a house that he had bought for her.
When he was in Washington he occupied a desk in Frederick’s office. Lucy Logan took his dictation. She had been for several years with Towne. She was twenty-three, well-groomed, and self-possessed. She had slender, flexible fingers, and Delafield liked to look at them. She had soft brown hair, and her profile, as she bent over her book, was clear-cut and composed.
“Edith and I are great pals,” he dictated. “I rather think we are going to hit it off famously. I’d hate to have a woman hang around my neck. And I want you for my best man. I know it is asking a lot, but it’s just once in a lifetime, old chap.”
Lucy wrote that and waited with her pencil poised.