ever see such a chest on a kid of that age?'
It was after the installation of Whiskers at the studio that the
diminution of Mrs. Porter's visits became really marked. There was
something almost approaching a battle over Whiskers, who was an Irish
terrier puppy which Hank Jardine had presented to William Bannister as
a belated birthday present.
Mrs. Porter utterly excommunicated Whiskers. Nothing, she maintained,
was so notoriously supercharged with bacilli as a long-haired dog. If
this was true, William Bannister certainly gave them every chance to
get to work upon himself. It was his constant pleasure to clutch
Whiskers to him in a vice-like clinch, to bury his face in his shaggy
back, and generally to court destruction. Yet the more he clutched, the
healthier did he appear to grow, and Mrs. Porter's demand for the dog's
banishment was overruled.
Mrs. Porter retired in dudgeon. She liked to rule, and at No. 90 she
felt that she had become merely among those present. She was in the
position of a mother country whose colony has revolted. For years she
had been accustomed to look on Ruth as a disciple, a weaker spirit whom
she could mould to her will, and now Ruth was refusing to be moulded.
So Mrs. Porter's visits ceased. Ruth still saw her at the apartment
when she cared to go there, but she kept away from the studio. She
considered that in the matter of William Bannister her claim had been
jumped, that she had been deposed; and she withdrew.
'I shall bear up,' said Kirk, when this fact was brought home to him.
'I mistrust your Aunt Lora as I should mistrust some great natural
force which may become active at any moment and give you yours. An
earthquake, for instance. I have no quarrel with your Aunt Lora in her
quiescent state, but I fear the developments of that giant mind. We are
better off without her.'
'All the same,' said Ruth loyally, 'she's rather a dear. And we ought
to remember that, if it hadn't been for her, you and I would never have
met.'
'I do remember it. And I'm grateful. But I can't help feeling that a
woman capable of taking other people's lives and juggling with them as
if they were india-rubber balls as she did with ours, is likely at any
moment to break out in a new place. My gratitude to her is the sort of
gratitude you would feel toward a cyclone if you were walking home late
for dinner and it caught you up and deposited you on your doorstep.
Your Aunt Lora is a human cyclone. No, on the whole, she's more like an
earthquake. She has a habit of splitting up and altering the face of
the world whenever she feels like it, and I'm too well satisfied with
my world at present to relish the idea of having it changed.'
Little by little the garrison of the studio had been whittled down.
Except for Steve, the community had no regular members outside the
family itself. Hank was generally out of town. Bailey paid one more
visit, then seemed to consider that he could now absent himself
altogether. And the members of Kirk's bachelor circle stayed away to a
man.
Their isolation was rendered more complete by the fact that Ruth, when
