“You may regret it, of course. That other man is an uncertain quantity.”
“Oh, come,” he said; “you’ve had the inside track from the very start: this house and everything in it. …”
“You have a house of your own, now.”
“Your dinners and entertainments. …”
“You have your own dinner-table.”
“Your limousine, your chauffeur—running to the opera and heaven knows where else. …”
“Taxis can always be had. Yes,” she went on, “you have held the advantage over a poor woman cooped up in her own house. While I have had to stick here, attending to my housekeeping, you have been careering about everywhere—you with a lot of partners and clerks in your office, and no compulsion to look in more than two or three times a week. Of course you can run to theatres and clubs. I wonder they don’t dispense with you altogether!”
“There’s the advantage of a business arranged to run itself—so far as I am concerned.”
“Yes, you have had the world to range through: shows and restaurants; the whole big city; strolls and excursions, and who knows what beside. …”
Thus Medora Phillips continued silently, and with no exact sense of justice, to work up her grievance. Presently she surprised Randolph with a positive frown. She had made a quick, darting return to Hortense.
“I shall send her away,” she said aloud. The girl might join her studio friend, who had stopped at Asheville on her way North, and stay with her for a few weeks. Yes, Hortense might go and meet the spring—or even the summer, if that must be. The spring here in town she herself would take as it came. “I shall welcome a few free, easy breaths after this past fortnight,” she finished audibly.
Randolph squared himself with her mood as best he could. “You are tired and nervous,” he said with banality. “Get the last of us out and go to bed. I’ll lead the way, and will give these loiterers as marked an example as possible.”
Medora Phillips hushed down her house finally and went thoughtfully upstairs to her room. Amy had gone off, and Hortense was sentenced to go. There remained only Carolyn. Was there any threat in her and her sonnets?
XXIX
Cope Again in the Country
Medora treated Hortense to a few cautious soundings, decided that another locale was the thing to do her good, and sent her South forthwith.
“It’s a low latitude,” she said to herself; “but it’s a high altitude. The season is late, but she won’t suffer.”
Hortense, who had been sullen and fractious, met her aunt halfway, and agreed passively when Medora said:
“It will benefit you to see the spring come on in a new scene and in a new fashion. You will find the mountains more interesting than the dunes.” So Hortense packed her things and joined her friend for a brief sojourn in sight of the Great Smokies.
Thus, when Medora herself went forth to meet the spring among the sandhills, she had only Carolyn and the other members of her domestic staff. Yet no simplest weekend without a guest or so, and she asked Cope to accompany them.
“You need it,” she told him bluntly; “—you need a change, however slight and brief. You are positively thin. You make me wish that thesises—”
“Theses,” Cope corrected her, rather spiritlessly.
“—that theses, then, had never been invented. To speak familiarly, you are almost ‘peakèd.’ ”
Cope, with the first warm days, had gone back to the blue serge suit of the past autumn, and he filled it even less well than before. And his face was thin to correspond.
“Besides,” she went on, “we need you. It will be a kind of camping-out for a day or two—merely that. We must have your help to pitch the tent, so to speak, and to pick up firewood, and to fry the bacon. … And this time,” she added, “you shall not have that long tiresome trip by train. There will be room in the car.”
She did not attempt to make room for Lemoyne. She was glad to have no need to do so; Lemoyne was deeply engrossed otherwise—“Annabella” and her “antics” were almost ready for the public eye. The first of May would see the performance, and the numerous rehearsals were exacting, whether as regarded the effort demanded or the time. Every spare hour was going into them, as well as many an hour that could hardly be spared. Lemoyne, who had been cast originally for a minor female part, now found himself transferred, through the failure of a principal, to a more important one. For him, then, rehearsals were more exigent than ever. He cut his Psychology once or twice, nor could he succeed, during office hours, in keeping his mind on office-routine. His superiors became impatient and then protestant. The annual spring dislocation of ordered student life was indeed a regular feature of the year’s last term; yet to push indulgence as far as Arthur Lemoyne was pushing it—!
Cope was concerned; then worried. “Arthur,” he said, “be reasonable about this. You’ve got real work to do, remember.”
But Lemoyne’s real work was in the musical comedy. “This is the biggest chance I’ve ever had in my life,” he declared, “and I don’t want to lose out on it.”
So Cope rolled away to the dunes and left Lemoyne behind for one Saturday night rehearsal the more.
Duneland gave him a tonic welcome. Under a breezy sky the far edge of the lake stood out clear. Along its nearer edge the vivacious waves tumbled noisily. The steady pines were welcoming the fresh early foliage of such companions as dressed and undressed in accord with the calendar; the wrecked trunks which had given up life and its leafy pomps seemed somehow less sombre and stark; and in the threatened woodlands behind the hills a multiplicity of small new greeneries stirred the autumn’s dead leaves and brightened up the thickets of shrubbery. The arbutus had companioned the hepatica, and the squads of the lupines were busily preparing their panoply
