The Descent of Man and Other Stories

“How do you do, Mr. Haskett?” she said, and shook hands with him a shade less cordially.

The three men stood awkwardly before her, till Varick, always the most self-possessed, dashed into an explanatory phrase.

“We—I had to see Waythorn a moment on business,” he stammered, brick-red from chin to nape.

Haskett stepped forward with his air of mild obstinacy. “I am sorry to intrude; but you appointed five o’clock—” he directed his resigned glance to the time-piece on the mantel.

She swept aside their embarrassment with a charming gesture of hospitality.

“I’m so sorry—I’m always late; but the afternoon was so lovely.” She stood drawing her gloves off, propitiatory and graceful, diffusing about her a sense of ease and familiarity in which the situation lost its grotesqueness. “But before talking business,” she added brightly, “I’m sure every one wants a cup of tea.”

She dropped into her low chair by the tea-table, and the two visitors, as if drawn by her smile, advanced to receive the cups she held out.

She glanced about for Waythorn, and he took the third cup with a laugh.

EXPIATION

I.

“I CAN never,” said Mrs. Fetherel, “hear the bell ring without a shudder.”

Her unruffled aspect—she was the kind of woman whose emotions never communicate themselves to her clothes—and the conventional background of the New York drawing-room, with its pervading implication of an imminent tea-tray and of an atmosphere in which the social functions have become purely reflex, lent to her declaration a relief not lost on her cousin Mrs. Clinch, who, from the other side of the fireplace, agreed with a glance at the clock, that it was the hour for bores.

“Bores!” cried Mrs. Fetherel impatiently. “If I shuddered at them, I should have a chronic ague!”

She leaned forward and laid a sparkling finger on her cousin’s shabby black knee. “I mean the newspaper clippings,” she whispered.

Mrs. Clinch returned a glance of intelligence. “They’ve begun already?”

“Not yet; but they’re sure to now, at any minute, my publisher tells me.”

Mrs. Fetherel’s look of apprehension sat oddly on her small features, which had an air of neat symmetry somehow suggestive of being set in order every morning by the housemaid. Some one (there were rumors that it was her cousin) had once said that Paula Fetherel would have been very pretty if she hadn’t looked so like a moral axiom in a copy-book hand.

Mrs. Clinch received her confidence with a smile. “Well,” she said, “I suppose you were prepared for the consequences of authorship?”

Mrs. Fetherel blushed brightly. “It isn’t their coming,” she owned—“it’s their coming now.”

“Now?”

“The Bishop’s in town.”

Mrs. Clinch leaned back and shaped her lips to a whistle which deflected in a laugh. “Well!” she said.

“You see!” Mrs. Fetherel triumphed.

“Well—weren’t you prepared for the Bishop?”

“Not now—at least, I hadn’t thought of his seeing the clippings.”

“And why should he see them?”

“Bella—_won’t_ you understand? It’s John.”

“John?”

“Who has taken the most unexpected tone—one might almost say out of perversity.”

“Oh, perversity—” Mrs. Clinch murmured, observing her cousin between lids wrinkled by amusement. “What tone has John taken?”

Mrs. Fetherel threw out her answer with the desperate gesture of a woman who lays bare the traces of a marital fist. “The tone of being proud of my book.”

The measure of Mrs. Clinch’s enjoyment overflowed in laughter.

“Oh, you may laugh,” Mrs. Fetherel insisted, “but it’s no joke to me. In the first place, John’s liking the book is so—so—such a false note—it puts me in such a ridiculous position; and then it has set him watching for the reviews—who would ever have suspected John of knowing that books were reviewed? Why, he’s actually found out about the Clipping Bureau, and whenever the postman rings I hear John rush out of the library to see if there are any yellow envelopes. Of course, when they do come he’ll bring them into the drawing-room and read them aloud to everybody who happens to be here—and the Bishop is sure to happen to be here!”

Mrs. Clinch repressed her amusement. “The picture you draw is a lurid one,” she conceded, “but your modesty strikes me as abnormal, especially in an author. The chances are that some of the clippings will be rather pleasant reading. The critics are not all union men.”

Mrs. Fetherel stared. “Union men?”

“Well, I mean they don’t all belong to the well-known Society-for-the-Persecution-of-Rising-Authors. Some of them have even been known to defy its regulations and say a good word for a new writer.”