“Ought he to go out tonight, Doctor?” asked Mrs. Phillips in a whisper, appearing in the dining-room door.
“He might better stay if he can,” replied the authority, who happened to be at the nearer end of the table.
“Of course he can,” she returned. Of course there was a room for him.
When the party finally reassembled in the drawing-room Cope had disappeared. Mrs. Phillips could now enlarge on his attractiveness as a singer, and could safely assure them—what she herself believed—that they had lost a really charming experience. “If you could only have heard him that Sunday!” she concluded.
Cope had said, of course, “I can get home perfectly well,” and, “It’s a shame for me to be putting you out this way,” and so on and on—the things you yourself would have said in the circumstances; but he said them with no particular spirit, and was glad, as he walked uncertainly upstairs, that he had not far to go.
Mrs. Phillips indeed “had a room for him.” She had rooms aplenty. There was the chintz chamber on the third floor, where the Irish poet (who seemed not to expect very much for himself) had been put; and there was the larger, handsomer chamber on the second floor, where the Hindu philosopher (who had loomed up big and important through a vague Oriental atmosphere) had been installed in state. It was a Louis Quinze room, and the bed had a kind of silken canopy and a great deal too much in the way of bolsters and lace coverings. It was thought that the Hindu, judging from the report of the maid next morning, had been moved by some ascetic impulse to sleep not in the bed but on the floor beside it. This was the room now destined for Cope; surely one flight of stairs was enough. But there must be no further practice of asceticism—least of all by a man who was really ill; so Mrs. Phillips, snatching a moment from her guests, herself saw the maid remove the lace pillow-shams and coverlet, and turn down the sheets, and set the thermos-bottle on the stand beside the reading lamp. …
“Don’t get up a moment earlier than you feel like doing,” she said, at the door. “Breakfast—”
“Tomorrow is one of my busy days,” replied Cope wanly. “Goldsmith, Sheridan. …”
“Well, we have other wage-workers in the house, you know. At seven-thirty, then, if you must.”
“Seven-thirty, if you please. Thank you.”
By the time Mrs. Phillips had returned to her guests, the first of the limousines was standing before the house; its wet top shone under an electric globe. Her own car, meanwhile, obdurately reposed in its garage. Presently a second limousine joined the first, and a third the second; and in another quarter of an hour her guests were well on their way to dispersal. She bade them all goodnight in the best of good humor.
“You’ve never before had quite such an evening as this, I’m sure!” she said, with great gaiety.
“Isn’t it wonderful how she took it all!” said one lady to another, on the back seat of her car. “Anything like that would have thrown me off completely.”
The other lady laughed amusedly. She often found our Medora “great fun.”
Meanwhile, Cope, upstairs, was sinking deeper and deeper into his big, wide, overupholstered bed. And as his body sank, his spirit sank with it. He felt poor, unimportant, ill at ease. In especial, he felt greatly subordinated; he wished that he might have capitulated to a man. Then the mystery of handsome houses and of handsome furnishings came to harass him. Such things were everywhere: how were they got, how were they kept? Should he himself ever—? But no; nothing ahead for years, even in the most favorable of circumstances, save an assistant professorship, with its inconceivably modest emoluments. …
And Medora Phillips, in the stir of getting her guests out of the house, had her first vision of him as sinking off to sleep. Somehow or other his fine, straight yellow hair retained its backward sweep with no impairment by reason of turnings and tossings; his clear profile continued to keep itself disengaged from any depression in the pillows; his slender hands were laid in quiet symmetry over the wide edge of the down-turned coverlet. A decorous, unperturbed young old-master … Van Eyck … Carpaccio. …
Cope came down to breakfast a little pale, a little shamefaced; but he felt pretty well revived and he made up in excess of speech and action what he essentially lacked in spirit. Mrs. Phillips descended as early as the three girls—earlier, in fact, than Hortense, who entered informally through the butler’s pantry and apparently in full possession of last night’s facts. Carolyn inquired civilly after his condition; Amy Leffingwell, with her blue eyes intent upon him, expressed concern and sympathy; Hortense, with her lips closely shut in a satirical smile, said nothing at all: a possible exhibition of self-control which gave her aunt some measure of solicitude. It was not always well when she talked, and it was not always well when she kept silent. Mrs. Phillips pressed the toast upon him and recommended the grapefruit. He took both with satisfaction, and a second cup of coffee. With that he felt he could easily walk to his classroom; and the walk itself, in the fresh morning air, would brace him further for his hours of routine with his students.
“What a regular nuisance I’ve made of myself!” he said, on leaving the house.
“Oh, haven’t you, just!” exclaimed Mrs. Phillips joyously.
“Your name as an entertainer will be all over town! I’m sure you gave some of those poky people a real touch of novelty!”
Amy Leffingwell was in the front hall at the same time, with her music-roll. They were going the same way, to substantially the same place, to meet about the same hour in the day’s schedule. They went along the street together.
The morning air was brisk and cool after last night’s shower. Like the trees under
