XLIV.
For Peace Hughes and her sister, the summer passed uneventfully. The girl made up for the time she had lost earlier in the year by doing double duty at the increased business of the publishing house. The prosperity of A Modern Romeo had itself added to her work, and the new enterprises which its success had inspired Mr. Brandreth to consider meant more letter-writing and more formulation of the ideas which he struck shapelessly if boldly out. He trusted her advice as well as her skill, and she had now become one of the regular readers for Chapley & Co.
Ray inferred this from the number of manuscripts which he saw on her table at home, and he could not help knowing the other things through his own acquaintance, which was almost an intimacy, with Mr. Brandreth’s affairs. The publisher was always praising her. “Talk about men!” he broke out one day. “That girl has a better business head than half the business men in New York. If she were not a woman, it would be only a question of time when we should have to offer her a partnership, or run the risk of losing her. But there’s only one kind of partnership you can offer a woman.” Ray flushed, but he did not say anything, and Mr. Brandreth asked, apparently from some association in his mind, “Do you see much of them at their new place?”
“Yes; I go there every week or so.”
“How are they getting on?”
“Very well, I believe.” Ray mused a moment, and then he said: “If it were not contrary to all our preconceptions of a sort of duty in people who have been through what they have been through, I should say they were both happier than I ever saw them before. I don’t think Mrs. Denton cared a great deal for her children or husband, but in her father’s last days he wouldn’t have anybody else about him. She strikes one like a person who would get married again.”
Mr. Brandreth listened with the air of one trying to feel shocked; but he smiled.
“I don’t blame her,” Ray continued. “Perhaps old Kane’s habit of not blaming people is infectious. She once accounted for herself on the ground that she didn’t make herself; I suppose it might be rather dangerous ground if people began to take it generally. But Miss Hughes did care for those poor little souls and for that wretched creature, and now the care’s gone, and the relief has come. They both miss their father; but he was doomed; he had to die; and besides, his fatherhood struck me as being rather thin, at times, from having been spread out over a community so long. I can’t express it exactly, but it seems to me that the children of a man who is trying to bring about a millennium of any kind do not have a good time. Still, I suppose we must have the millenniums.”
“You said that just like old Kane,” Mr. Brandreth observed.
“Did I? I just owned he was infectious. If I’ve caught his habit of mind, I dare say I’ve caught his accent. I don’t particularly admire either. But what I mean is that Miss Hughes and her sister are getting on very comfortably and sweetly. Their place is as homelike as any I know in New York.”