"Do take off your gloves and things, dear, and make yourself comfortable! Such a day! New York in June is frightful—eighty-eight yesterday, and Heaven knows what it will be to-day. You'll stay to lunch, won't you?"
"Thanks, perhaps I will," replied Beatrice listlessly.
"I never have stayed in town so late in June," ran on Aunt Cecilia, "but I thought I wouldn't open the Tarrytown house this spring—it's only for six weeks and it is so much extra trouble.... I shall take the yacht and the boys directly on up to Bar Harbor afterward; we should love to have you come with us, if you feel like leaving James—you're looking so fagged. You must both come and pay us a long visit later on, though I suppose with Harry and Madge in the Berkshires you'll be running up there quite often for week-ends...."
Beatrice stirred a little. "Thanks, Aunt Cecilia, but I don't mind the heat especially. If James can bear it, I can, I suppose. I expect to stay here most of the summer."
She was perfectly courteous, and yet it suddenly occurred to Aunt Cecilia that perhaps she wouldn't be quite so free in showering invitations on Beatrice and James for a while. There was that about her, as she sat there.... Languid, that was the word; there had been a certain languor, not due to hot weather, in Beatrice's reception of most of her favors, now that she came to think of it. There had been that wedding trip in the Halcyone, to begin with. Both she and James had shown a due amount of gratitude, but neither, when you came right down to it, had given any particular evidence of having enjoyed it. Everything was as it should be, no doubt, but—one didn't lend yachts without expecting to have them enjoyed!
"That trip cost me over five thousand dollars," she had remarked to her husband shortly after the return of the bridal pair. "Of course I don't grudge it, but five thousand dollars is a good deal of money, and I'd rather have subscribed it to the Organized Charities than feel I was spending it to give those two something they didn't want!"
Aunt Cecilia gazed anxiously at Beatrice for a moment, memories of this sort floating vaguely through her mind. She scented trouble, somewhere. The next minute she thought she had diagnosed it.
"You're bored, dear, that's the long and the short of it, and I think I know what's the matter. I'm not sure that I didn't feel a little that way myself, at the very first. But I soon got over it. My dear, there's nothing in the world like a baby to drive away boredom...."
Beatrice tapped with the end of her parasol on what in winter would have been a pink and gray texture from Aubusson's storied looms but was now simply a parquet flooring. But she did not blush, not in the slightest degree.
"Yes," she answered, a trifle wearily, "I daresay you're right. Sometimes I think I would like to have a baby. It doesn't seem to come, though.... After all, it's rather early to bother, isn't it?"