“It was clipped pretty close,” Irene admitted; and they both laughed at the drab effect of Mr. Corey’s skull, as they remembered it. “Did you like his nose?” asked Irene timorously.
“Ah, now you’re coming to something,” said Penelope. “I don’t know whether, if I had so much of a nose, I should want it all Roman.”
“I don’t see how you can expect to have a nose part one kind and part another,” argued Irene.
“Oh, I do. Look at mine!” She turned aside her face, so as to get a three-quarters view of her nose in the glass, and crossing her hands, with the brush in one of them, before her, regarded it judicially. “Now, my nose started Grecian, but changed its mind before it got over the bridge, and concluded to be snub the rest of the way.”
“You’ve got a very pretty nose, Pen,” said Irene, joining in the contemplation of its reflex in the glass.
“Don’t say that in hopes of getting me to compliment his, Mrs.”—she stopped, and then added deliberately—“C.!”
Irene also had her hairbrush in her hand, and now she sprang at her sister and beat her very softly on the shoulder with the flat of it. “You mean thing!” she cried, between her shut teeth, blushing hotly.
“Well, D., then,” said Penelope. “You’ve nothing to say against D.? Though I think C. is just as nice an initial.”
“Oh!” cried the younger, for all expression of unspeakable things.
“I think he has very good eyes,” admitted Penelope.
“Oh, he has! And didn’t you like the way his sack coat set? So close to him, and yet free—kind of peeling away at the lapels?”
“Yes, I should say he was a young man of great judgment. He knows how to choose his tailor.”
Irene sat down on the edge of a chair. “It was so nice of you, Pen, to come in, that way, about clubs.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean anything by it except opposition,” said Penelope. “I couldn’t have father swelling on so, without saying something.”
“How he did swell!” sighed Irene. “Wasn’t it a relief to have mamma come down, even if she did seem to be all stocking at first?”
The girls broke into a wild giggle, and hid their faces in each other’s necks. “I thought I should die,” said Irene.
“ ‘It’s just like ordering a painting,’ ” said Penelope, recalling her father’s talk, with an effect of dreamy absentmindedness. “ ‘You give the painter money enough, and he can afford to paint you a first-class picture. Give an architect money enough, and he’ll give you a first-class house, every time.’ ”
“Oh, wasn’t it awful!” moaned her sister. “No one would ever have supposed that he had fought the very idea of an architect for weeks, before he gave in.”
Penelope went on. “ ‘I always did like the water side of Beacon—long before I owned property there. When you come to the Back Bay at all, give me the water side of Beacon.’ ”
“Ow‑w‑w‑w!” shrieked Irene. “Do stop!”
The door of their mother’s chamber opened below, and the voice of the real Colonel called, “What are you doing up there, girls? Why don’t you go to bed?”
This extorted nervous shrieks from both of them. The Colonel heard a sound of scurrying feet, whisking drapery, and slamming doors. Then he heard one of the doors opened again, and Penelope said, “I was only repeating something you said when you talked to Mr. Corey.”
“Very well, now,” answered the Colonel. “You postpone the rest of it till tomorrow at breakfast, and see that you’re up in time to let me hear it.”
V
At the same moment young Corey let himself in at his own door with his latchkey, and went to the library, where he found his father turning the last leaves of a story in the Revue des Deux Mondes. He was a white-moustached old gentleman, who had never been able to abandon his pince-nez for the superior comfort of spectacles, even in the privacy of his own library. He knocked the glasses off as his son came in and looked up at him with lazy fondness, rubbing the two red marks that they always leave on the side of the nose.
“Tom,” he said, “where did you get such good clothes?”
“I stopped over a day in New York,” replied the son, finding himself a chair. “I’m glad you like them.”
“Yes, I always do like your clothes, Tom,” returned the father thoughtfully, swinging his glasses, “But I don’t see how you can afford ’em, I can’t.”
“Well, sir,” said the son, who dropped the “sir” into his speech with his father, now and then, in an old-fashioned way that was rather charming, “you see, I have an indulgent parent.”
“Smoke?” suggested the father, pushing toward his son a box of cigarettes, from which he had taken one.
“No, thank you,” said the son. “I’ve dropped that.”
“Ah, is that so?” The father began to feel about on the table for matches, in the purblind fashion of elderly men. His son rose, lighted one, and handed it to him. “Well—oh, thank you, Tom!—I believe some statisticians prove that if you will give up smoking you can dress very well on the money your tobacco costs, even if you haven’t got an indulgent parent. But I’m too old to try. Though, I confess, I should rather like the clothes. Whom did you find at the club?”
“There were a lot of fellows there,” said young Corey, watching the accomplished fumigation of his father in an absent way.
“It’s astonishing what a hardy breed the young club-men are,” observed his father. “All summer through, in weather that sends the sturdiest female flying to the seashore, you find the clubs filled with young men, who don’t seem to mind the heat in the least.”
“Boston isn’t a bad place, at the worst, in summer,”
