The girl gurgled out her pleasure in his funning, and everybody took him on his own ground of privileged character. He brought them all together in their friendliness for himself, and before the evening was over he had inspired Mrs. Mandel to have them served with coffee, and had made both the girls feel that they had figured brilliantly in society, and that two young men had been devoted to them.
“Oh, I think he’s just as lovely as he can live!” said Mela, as she stood a moment with her sister on the scene of her triumph, where the others had left them after the departure of their guests.
“Who?” asked Christine, deeply. As she glanced down at her ring, her eyes burned with a softened fire. She had allowed Beaton to change it himself from the finger where she had worn it to the finger on which he said she ought to wear it. She did not know whether it was right to let him, but she was glad she had done it.
“Who? Mr. Fulkerson, goosie-poosie! Not that old stuck-up Mr. Beaton of yours!”
“He is proud,” assented Christine, with a throb of exultation.
Beaton and Fulkerson went to the Elevated station with the Marches; but the painter said he was going to walk home, and Fulkerson let him go alone.
“One way is enough for me,” he explained. “When I walk up, I don’t walk down. Bye-bye, my son!” He began talking about Beaton to the Marches as they climbed the station stairs together. “That fellow puzzles me. I don’t know anybody that I have such a desire to kick, and at the same time that I want to flatter up so much. Affect you that way?” he asked of March.
“Well, as far as the kicking goes, yes.”
“And how is it with you, Mrs. March?”
“Oh, I want to flatter him up.”
“No; really? Why?—Hold on! I’ve got the change.”
Fulkerson pushed March away from the ticket-office window; and made them his guests, with the inexorable American hospitality, for the ride downtown. “Three!” he said to the ticket-seller; and, when he had walked them before him out on the platform and dropped his tickets into the urn, he persisted in his inquiry, “Why?”
“Why, because you always want to flatter conceited people, don’t you?” Mrs. March answered, with a laugh.
“Do you? Yes, I guess you do. You think Beaton is conceited?”
“Well, slightly, Mr. Fulkerson.”
“I guess you’re partly right,” said Fulkerson, with a sigh, so unaccountable in its connection that they all laughed.
“An ideal ‘busted’?” March suggested.
“No, not that, exactly,” said Fulkerson. “But I had a notion maybe Beaton wasn’t conceited all the time.”
“Oh!” Mrs. March exulted, “nobody could be so conceited all the time as Mr. Beaton is most of the time. He must have moments of the direst modesty, when he’d be quite flattery-proof.”
“Yes, that’s what I mean. I guess that’s what makes me want to kick him. He’s left compliments on my hands that no decent man would.”
“Oh! that’s tragical,” said March.
“Mr. Fulkerson,” Mrs. March began, with change of subject in her voice, “who is Mrs. Mandel?”
“Who? What do you think of her?” he rejoined. “I’ll tell you about her when we get in the cars. Look at that thing! Ain’t it beautiful?”
They leaned over the track and looked up at the next station, where the train, just starting, throbbed out the flame-shot steam into the white moonlight.
“The most beautiful thing in New York—the one always and certainly beautiful thing here,” said March; and his wife sighed, “Yes, yes.” She clung to him, and remained rapt by the sight till the train drew near, and then pulled him back in a panic.
“Well, there ain’t really much to tell about her,” Fulkerson resumed when they were seated in the car. “She’s an invention of mine.”
“Of yours?” cried Mrs. March.
“Of course!” exclaimed her husband.
“Yes—at least in her present capacity. She sent me a story for the syndicate, back in July some time, along about the time I first met old Dryfoos here. It was a little too long for my purpose, and I thought I could explain better how I wanted it cut in a call than I could in a letter. She gave a Brooklyn address, and I went to see her. I found her,” said Fulkerson, with a vague defiance, “a perfect lady. She was living with an aunt over there; and she had seen better days, when she was a girl, and worse ones afterward. I don’t mean to say her husband was a bad fellow; I guess he was pretty good; he was her music-teacher; she met him in Germany, and they got married there, and got through her property before they came over here. Well, she didn’t strike me like a person that could make much headway in literature. Her story was well enough, but it hadn’t much sand in it; kind of—well, academic, you know. I told her so, and she understood, and cried a little; but she did the best she could with the thing, and I took it and syndicated it. She kind of stuck in my mind, and the first time I went to see the Dryfooses—they were stopping at a sort of family hotel then till they could find a house—” Fulkerson broke off altogether, and said, “I don’t know as I know just how the Dryfooses struck you, Mrs. March?”
“Can’t you imagine?” she answered, with a kindly smile.
“Yes; but I don’t believe I could guess how they would have struck you last summer when I first saw them. My! oh my! there was the native earth for you. Mely is a pretty wild colt now, but you ought to have seen her before she was broken to harness. And Christine? Ever see that black leopard they got up there in the Central Park? That was Christine. Well, I saw
