“ ‘Difficult position’?” shrilled Hortense. “With Aunt Medora the very soul of kindness? I like that! Well, if you want to rescue her from her difficult position, do it. If you admire her—and love her—tell her so! She’ll be grateful—just read those sonnets over again!”
Hortense dropped her palette and brushes and burst into outrageous tears.
Cope sat bolt upright in that spacious chair. “Tell her? I have nothing to tell her. I have nothing to tell anyone!”
His resonant words cut the air. They uttered decision. He did not mean to make the same mistake twice.
Hortense drew across her eyes an apron redolent of turpentine and stepped toward the throne.
“Nothing? Why this sudden refuge in silence?” she asked, almost truculently, even if tremulously. “You usually find enough words—even though they mean little.”
“I’m afraid I do,” he admitted cautiously.
“You have nothing to tell anyone? Nothing to tell—me?”
Cope rose. “Nothing to tell anyone,” he repeated. “Noth‑ing.”
“Then let me tell you something.” There was an angry thrill in her voice. “For I am not so selfish and cold-hearted as you are. I have seen nobody but you all these months. I have never tried harder to please anybody. You have scarcely noticed me—you have never given me a glance or a thought. You could interest yourself in that silly Amy and in our foolish Carolyn; but for me—me—Nothing!”
Cope came down from the throne. If she had lavished her maiden thoughts on him, by day or evening or at night, he had not known and could hardly be supposed to know. Indeed, she had begun by treating him with a cursory roughness; nor had he noticed any great softening later on.
“Listen,” he said. Under the stress of embarrassment and alarm his cold blue eyes grew colder and his delicate nostrils quivered with an effect a little too like disdain. “I like you as well as another; no more, no less. I am in no position to think of love and marriage, and I have no inclination that way. I am willing to be friends with everybody, and nothing more with anybody.” The sentences came with the cruel detachment of bullets; but, “Not again, not twice,” was his uppermost thought. Any bluntness, any ruggedness, rather than another month like that of the past holiday season.
He took a step away and looked to one side, toward the couch where his hat and coat were lying.
“Go, if you will,” she said. “And go as soon as you like. You are a contemptible, cold-hearted ingrate. You have grudged me every minute of your company, everywhere—and every second you have given me here. If I have been foolish it is over now, and there shall be nothing to record my folly.” She stepped to the easel and hurled the canvas to the floor, where it lay with palette and brushes.
Cope stood with his hat in his hand and his coat over his arm. He seemed to see the open volume of some “printed play.” After all, there was a type which, even under emotional stress, gave a measure of instinctive heed to structure and cadence. Well, if there was relief for her in words, he could stand to hear her speak for a moment or two more, not longer.
“One word yet,” she said in a panting voice. “Your Arthur Lemoyne. That preposterous friendship cannot go on for long. You will tire of him; or more likely he will tire of you. Something different, something better will be needed—and you will live to learn so. I should be glad if I never saw either one of you again!”
She turned her stormy face away, and Cope slipped out with a blended sense of mortification, pain and relief.
XXVIII
Cope Absent from a Wedding
Cope went out on the square with his being a-tingle. If Hortense, on another occasion, had thrown a dash of brine, on this occasion she had rubbed in the salt itself. And he had struck a harsh blow in turn; the flat of his mind was still stinging, as if half the shock of the blow had remained behind. “But it was no time for half-measures,” he muttered to himself. “Not again; not twice!” he repeated.
Hortense remained for several days in a condition of sullen anger—she was a cloud lit up by occasional unaccountable flashes of temper. “Whatever in the world is the matter with her?” asked her aunt in more directions than one. And Amy Leffingwell, blissfully busy over her little trousseau and her selection of china-patterns, protested and opened wide, inquiring blue eyes against the intrusion of such a spirit at such a joyous time.
But Hortense, though better days intervened now and then, did not improve essentially; and she contrived at the climacteric moment of Amy’s career to make herself felt—unduly felt—after all.
The wedding took place during the latter half of April, as demanded by the enterprising wooer. Then there would be a rapid ten-day wedding-journey, followed by a prompt, businesslike occupancy of the new apartment on the first of May exactly.
Pearson’s parents prepared to welcome Amy handsomely; and her own people—some of them—came on from Iowa to attend the ceremony. There was her mother, who had been rather disconcerted by the sudden shift, but who was satisfied with George Pearson the moment she saw him, and who found him even more vivid and agreeable than Amy’s photograph of him had led her to expect. There was the aunt, who had lived a bare, starved life, and who luxuriated, along with her sister, in the splendor of the Louis Quinze chamber. And there was a friendly, wide-awake brother of fourteen who was tucked away in the chintz room upstairs, whence he issued to fraternize in the ballroom with Joe Foster, whose exacerbated spirit he did much to soothe.
This young brother was alert, cheery, chatty. He
