“The allegro, quite the allegro of my dinner symphony,” Miss Willie Lillieblade had once thankfully flattered him. “Ah, you were more. You were the absolute conductor. You were the salvation of our tempo during the entrée. The dear Bishop, who thought he was the religious theme for the trombones, how you quieted his ecclesiastical chantings. How you modulated the sputterings of that French horn of a count. And ah, my dear Hobart, how you obeyed my anxious sforzando over my mute little guest of honour. I’ve no beaux yeux to look you thanks, but I appreciated every breath of your baton.”
Thus, with his own charm, Hobart Eddy was one whom it was a simple thing to adore; and as Pelleas said with twinkling cruelty débutantes are dear, simple things. But among them all season after season Hobart moved, boyishly interested, urbanely ready as we thought to do the homage of the devotee and, one might have said, urbanely unable. And season after season we had failed to plan for him a concrete romance. For we thought that his wife should be no less than he a social ruler of many, yet she must have his own detached heart of youth. Moreover, we wished her to be clever, but not to every one; and wise, though with a pretty unreason; and girlishly unconscious, or if she was conscious then just conscious enough; and very willing to be ordered about a bit, though losing none of her pretty imperiousness—ah well, no wonder the case of Hobart Eddy baffled us. No wonder that I believed him hopeless as I had believed Nichola, who loves no one. We should long ago have laid the matter by if only there had not persisted about him that Devoted Young Husband look.
It was in the week made memorable both by our Easter day experience and by the moral of my matinée that our thought momentarily took up the case of Hobart Eddy in earnest. Indeed, our Easter day and my matinée did much to shape our Summer. For on a sudden it seemed so easy to make happiness in the world as well as to look close and read the fine print of romance that we found ourselves with almost no leisure. And in that very week Viola unexpectedly came home from school.
Viola is a niece of my dear Madame Sally Chartres and the previous Spring she had nominally spent a week with Pelleas and me. I say nominally because in reality she had spent it before the telephone on our landing.
“Viola, who,” Pelleas had been wont to say, “sounds like a Greek maiden captive in an Illyrian household and beloved of a Greek youth, Telephone, in four syllables.”
He was a young bank clerk in Broad street and he seemed to have a theory that whenever any one else had used the telephone Viola was no longer at the other end, and he was obliged to make sure. “Miss Viola, the telephone wants to talk to you,” Nichola had announced all day long. And though Pelleas and I are the first to love a lover, some way the case failed to impress us to partisanship—just as we lose sympathy with the influenza of a man who is perpetually shutting the car door.
“If I were a telephone,” Pelleas would say, “intended by Science for uses of medicine, bonds and the like I should get out of order if they tried to make me a courtier.”
“Pelleas,” I had justly protested, “you would be the first to be delighted.”
“Ah, yes,” he admitted, “I dare say I should, but then you see I know so little about science.”
When that Summer it was decided that Viola should complete her school in Switzerland, Pelleas and I understood that the Chartres family sympathized with our own impression about our telephone. But before the end of the year Viola unexpectedly returned from Lausanne. And the April day on which we learned of this from Hobart Eddy was further memorable to us: For it was on that very morning that the first rose-breasted grosbeaks appeared in the park.