She faced him with her faint smile. “Oh, certainly. Come with me, then.”
“What’s the use of your going?” His handsome irresolute mouth grew sulky and resentful. “Fact is I rather want to see Lewis alone. We’ve got a little matter—”
His sister’s eyebrows rose ironically. “So I supposed. How much this time, Lorry?”
“How much—?”
“Yes. Only don’t exaggerate. I’ve told you I want the car for myself. How much were you going to ask Lewis to lend you?”
Her brother, flushing up, began to protest and ejaculate. “Damned impertinence—” But Halo lifted her arm to examine her wristwatch. “Don’t splutter like Father when he says he’s going to denounce an outrage in the papers. And don’t be exorbitant either.” She fumbled in the shabby antelope bag which hung from her other wrist. “Here—will this do?” She took out two ten-dollar notes and held them toward her brother.
“Hell, child—” he stammered, manifestly tempted and yet furious.
“You know you wouldn’t get as much out of Lewis. Better take it.”
He stood with his hands in his pockets, his chin down, staring at the notes without moving.
“Come, Lorry; I tell you I’m in a hurry.” She made a slight motion as though to reopen the bag and put back the money.
“I’ll go down myself to fetch Lewis,” he mumbled, all the fluid lines of his face hardening into an angry obstinacy.
“You won’t!”
“Won’t I? You’ll see, then—” He caught her by the wrist, and they stood glaring at each other and breathing hard, like two angry young animals. Then Halo, with a laugh, wrenched her hand free, and reopening the bag drew out another ten dollars. She tossed the three notes on the table, and walked across the hall and out of the front door. No footsteps followed her, and she deemed it superfluous to glance back and see if the money had been removed from the table.
VIII
In the cobwebby coach-house of the old stable she found the man-of-all-work, Jacob, who was chauffeur when he was not gardener and dairyman, lying on the floor with his head under the car. He emerged at her call, and said he guessed there was something wrong again, because Mr. Lorry had had trouble getting her up the hill, and maybe he’d better take her to pieces while he was about it.
“Not on your life. I’m going down to Paul’s Landing in her this minute.”
Jacob stared, but without protesting. “You won’t get back, very likely,” he merely observed, and Halo scrambled into the motor with a laugh and a shrug. The motor, she said to herself, was like life in general at Eaglewood: it was always breaking down, but it always managed to keep on going. “Tied together with string and patched up with court plaster: that’s been the way with everything in the family ever since I can remember.” She gave a little sigh as she slipped down the overgrown drive, heading for the stone pillars of the gateway. The motor, she knew, would be all right going down the hill to Paul’s Landing—and after that, at the moment, she didn’t particularly care. If she and Lewis Tarrant had to walk back to Eaglewood in the dark—well, Lewis wouldn’t mind, she imagined. But meanwhile she had to catch up somehow with her forgotten engagement.
In a few minutes the winding road down the mountain brought her to the sad outskirts of Paul’s Landing, and thence to the Tracys’ house. She jumped out, ran up the steps and knocked, looking about her curiously as she did so. She seldom went to the Tracys’, and had forgotten how shabby and humble the place was. The discovery increased her sense of compunction and self-disapproval. How could she have forgotten that clever boy there for so long! If he had been one of her own group it would never have happened. “If there’s anything I hate,” she reflected, “it’s seeming casual to people who live like this.” And instantly she decided that one ought to devote one’s whole life to the Tracys and their kind, and that to enjoy the world’s goods, even in the limited and precarious way in which they were enjoyed at Eaglewood, while other lives like these were being lived at one’s door, denoted a vulgarity of soul which was the last fault she would have cared to confess to. What made it worse, too, in the particular case, was the Tracys’ far-off cousinship with the Lorburn family; the fact that two or three generations ago a foolish (and elderly) Lorburn virgin had run away with farmer Tracy’s son, who worked in the cement factory down on the river, and being cast off by her family had dropped to the level of her husband’s, with whom affairs had not gone well, and who had left his widow and children in poverty. Nowadays all this would have signified much less, as far as the family’s social situation went; but in the compact life of sixty years ago it was a hopeless fall to lapse from the height of Eaglewood to the depth in which the small shopkeepers and farmers of Paul’s Landing had their being. It was all wrong, Halo mused, wrinkling her young brows like her mother’s in the effort to think out, then and there, while she waited for her ring to be answered, the quickest way of putting an end to such injustice.
The development of her plan was interrupted by the appearance of young Upton, who looked at her with such surprise that she felt more acutely than ever her suddenly discovered obligation toward his family.
“Oh, Upton, how are you? I know I’ve interrupted you at supper! I hope your mother won’t be very angry with me.”
“Angry—?” young Tracy echoed, bewildered. He passed the back of his hand over his mouth in the effort to conceal the fact that she had rightly suspected him of coming from supper. “I thought mebbe there was something wrong at the Willows,” he said.
“The Willows! No. Or rather,
