St. Peter swung in over the window rail. "That is always the cue for the husband to enter, isn't it? What's this about Chicago, Louie?"
He sat down, and Marsellus brought him some tea, lingering beside his chair. "It must be a secret from Rosie, but you see it happens that the date of your lecture engagement at the University of Chicago is coincident with her birthday, so I have planned that we shall all go down together. And among other diversions, we shall attend your lectures."
The Professor's eyebrows rose. "Bus-man's holiday for the ladies, I should say."
"But not for me. Remember, I wasn't in your classes, like Scott and Outland. I'd give a good deal if I'd had the chance!" Louie said somewhat plaintively. "So you must make it up to me."
"Come if you wish. Lectures seem to me a rather grim treat, Louie."
"Not to me. With a wink of encouragement I'll go on to Boston with you next winter, when you give the Lowell lectures."
"Would you, really? Next year's a long way off. Now I must get clean. I've been working in my other-house garden, and I'm scarcely fit to have tea with a beautiful lady and a smartly dressed gentleman. What am I to do about that garden in the end, Lillian? Destroy it? Or leave it to the mercy of the next tenants?"
As he went upstairs he turned at the bend of the staircase and looked back at them, again bending over their little box. Mrs. St. Peter was wearing the white silk crêpe that had been the most successful of her summer dresses, and an orchid velvet ribbon about her shining hair. She wouldn't have made herself look quite so well if Louie hadn't been coming, he reflected. Or was it that he wouldn't have noticed it if Louie hadn't been there? A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.
Lillian's coquetry with her sons-in-law amused him. He hadn't foreseen it, and he found it rather the most piquant and interesting thing about having married daughters. It had begun with Scott—the younger sister was married before the elder. St. Peter had thought that Scott McGregor was the sort of fellow Lillian always found tiresome. But no; within a few weeks after Kathleen's marriage, arch and confidential relations began to be evident between them. Even now, when Louie was so much in the foreground, and Scott was touchy and jealous, Lillian was very tactful and patient with him.
With Louie, Lillian seemed to be launching into a new career, and Godfrey began to think that he understood his own wife very little. He would have said that she would feel about Louie just as he did; would have cultivated him as a stranger in the town, because he was so unusual and exotic, but without in the least wishing to adopt anyone so foreign into the family circle. She had always been fastidious to an unreasonable degree about small niceties of deportment. She could never forgive poor Tom Outland for the angle at which he sometimes held a cigar in his mouth, or for the fact that he never learned to eat salad with ease. At the dinner-table, if Tom, forgetting himself in talk, sometimes dropped back into railroad lunch-counter ways and pushed his plate away from him when he had finished a course, Lillian's face would become positively cruel in its contempt. Irregularities of that sort put her all on edge. But Louie could hurry audibly through his soup, or kiss her resoundingly on the cheek at a faculty reception, and she seemed to like it.