Through this variety of spoken words and unspoken thoughts Hortense sat silent and watchful. Presently the talk lapsed: with the best will in the world a small knot of people cannot go on elaborately embroidering upon a trivial incident forever. There was a shifting of groups, a change in subjects. Yet Hortense continued to glower and to meditate. What had the incident really amounted to? What did the man himself really amount to? She soon found herself at his side, behind the library-table and its spreading lampshade. He was silently handling a paper-cutter, with his eyes cast down.
“See me!” she said, in a tense, vibratory tone. “Speak to me!”—and she glowered upon him. “I am no kitten, like Amy. I am no tame tabby, like Carolyn, sending out written invitations. Throw a few poor words my way.”
Cope dropped the paper-cutter. Her address was like a dash of brine in the face, and he welcomed it.
“Tell me; did you look absurd—then?” she dashed ahead.
A return to fresh water, after all! “Why,” he rejoined reluctantly, “no man, dressed in all his clothes, looks any the better for being soaked through.”
“And Amy—she must have looked absolutely ridiculous! That wide, flapping hat, and all! I had been telling her for weeks that it was out of style.”
“She threw it away,” said Cope shortly. “And I suppose her hair looked as well as a woman’s ever does, when she’s in the water.”
“Well,” she observed, “it’s one thing to be ridiculous and another to go on being ridiculous. I hope you don’t mean to do that?”
The pronoun “you” has its equivocal aspects. Her expression, while marked enough, threw no clear light. Cope took the entire onus on himself.
“Of course no man would choose to be ridiculous—still less to stay so. Do, please, let me keep on dry land; I’m beginning to feel waterlogged.” He shifted his ground. “Why do you try to make it seem that I don’t care to talk with you?”
“Because you don’t. Haven’t I noticed it?”
“I haven’t. It seems to me that I—”
“Of course you haven’t. Does that make it any better?”
“I’m sure the last thing in the world I should want to do would be to—”
“I know. Would be to show partiality. To fail in treating all alike. Even that small program isn’t much—nor likely to please any girl; but you have failed to carry it out, small as it is. Here in this house, there on the dunes, what have I been—and where? Put into any obscure corner, lost in the woods, left off somewhere on the edge of things. …”
Cope stared and tried to stem her protests. She was of the blood—her aunt’s own niece. But whereas Medora Phillips sometimes “scrapped,” as he called it, merely to promote social diversion and to keep the conversational ball a-rolling, this young person, a more vigorous organism, and with decided, even exaggerated ideas as to her dues … Well, the room was still full, and he was glad enough of it.
“I don’t know whether I like you or not,” she went on, in a low, rapid tone; “and I don’t suppose you very much like me; but I won’t go on being ignored. …
“Ignored? Why,” stammered Cope, “my sense of obligation to this house—”
She shrugged scornfully. His sense of obligation had been made none too apparent. Certainly it had not been brought into line with her deserts and demands.
Cope took up the paper-cutter again and looked out across the room. Amy Leffingwell, questioningly, was looking across at him. He could change feet—if that made the general discomfort of his position any less. He did so.
Amy was standing near the piano and held a sheet or two of new music in her hands. And Medora Phillips, with a word of general explication and direction, made the girl’s intention clear. Amy had a new song for baritone, with a violin obbligato and the usual piano accompaniment, and Cope was to sing it. ’Twas an extremely simple thing, quite within his compass; and Carolyn, who could read easy music at sight (“It’s awfully easy,” declared Amy), would play the piano part; and Amy herself would perform the obbligato (with no statement as to whether it was simple or not).
Carolyn approached the task and the piano in the passive spirit of accommodation. Cope came forward with reluctance: this was not an evening when he felt like singing; besides, he preferred to choose his own songs. Also, he would have preferred to warm up on something familiar. Amy took her instrument from its case with a suppressed sense of ecstasy; and it is the ecstatic who generally sets the pace.
The thing went none too well. Amy was the only one who had seen the music before, and she was the only one who particularly wanted to make music now. However, the immediate need was not that the song should go well, but that it should go: that it should go on, that it should go on and on, repetitiously, until it should come (or even not come) to go better. She slid her bow across the strings with tasteful passion. She enjoyed still more than her own tones the tones of Cope’s voice—tones which, whether in happy unison with hers or not, were, after all, seldom misplaced, whatever they may have lacked in
