“I am a man of broad sympathies and a very acute sensibility,” began Mr. Waddington, apropos, apparently, of nothing.
“Besides,” said George, “I did not like the man’s looks.”
“What man?”
“Lord Hunstanton.”
“Don’t talk of that guy! He gives me a pain in the neck.”
“Me, too,” said George. “And I was saying. …”
“Shall I tell you something?” said Mr. Waddington.
“What?”
“My second wife—not my first—wants Molly to marry him. Did you notice him at dinner?”
“I did,” said George patiently. “And I did not like his looks. He looked to me cold and sinister, the sort of man who might break the heart of an impulsive young girl. What Miss Waddington wants, I feel convinced, is a husband who would give up everything for her—a man who would sacrifice his heart’s desire to bring one smile to her face—a man who would worship her, set her in a shrine, make it his only aim in life to bring her sunshine and happiness.”
“My wife,” said Mr. Waddington, “is much too stout.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Much too stout.”
“Miss Waddington, if I may say so, has a singularly beautiful figure.”
“Too much starchy food, and no exercise—that’s the trouble. What my wife needs is a year on a ranch, riding over the prairies in God’s sunshine.”
“I happened to catch sight of Miss Waddington the other day in riding costume. I thought it suited her admirably. So many girls look awkward in riding-breeches, but Miss Waddington was charming. The costume seemed to accentuate what I might describe as that strange boyish jauntiness of carriage which, to my mind, is one of Miss Waddington’s chief. …”
“And I’ll have her doing it before long. As a married man, Winch—twice married, but my first wife, poor thing, passed away some years back—let me tell you something. To assert himself with his wife, to bend her to his will, if I may put it that way, a man needs complete financial independence. It is no use trying to bend your wife to your will when five minutes later you have got to try and wheedle twenty-five cents out of her for a cigar. Complete financial independence is essential, Pinch, and that is what I am on the eve of achieving. Some little time back, having raised a certain sum of money—we need not go into the methods which I employed to do so—I bought a large block of stock in a Hollywood Motion Picture Company. Have you ever heard of the Finer and Better Motion Picture Company of Hollywood, Cal.? Let me tell you that you will. It is going to be big, and I shall very shortly make an enormous fortune.”
“Talking of the motion-pictures,” said George, “I do not deny that many of the women engaged in that industry are superficially attractive, but what I do maintain is that they lack Miss Waddington’s intense purity of expression. To me Miss Waddington seems like some. …”
“I shall clean up big. It is only a question of time.”
“The first thing anyone would notice on seeing Miss Waddington. …”
“Thousands and thousands of dollars. And then. …”
“A poet has spoken of a young girl as ‘standing with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet. …’ ”
Mr. Waddington shook his head.
“It isn’t only meat. What causes the real trouble is the desserts. It stands to reason that if a woman insists on cramming herself with rich stuff like what we were having tonight she is bound to put on weight. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times. …”
What Mr. Waddington was about to say for the hundred and first time must remain one of the historic mysteries. For, even as he drew in breath the better to say it, the door opened and a radiant vision appeared. Mr. Waddington stopped in mid-sentence, and George’s heart did three back-somersaults and crashed against his front teeth.
“Mother sent me down to see what had become of you,” said Molly.
Mr. Waddington got about halfway towards a look of dignity.
“I am not aware, my dear child,” he said, “that anything has ‘become of me.’ I merely snatched the opportunity of having a quiet talk with this young friend of mine from the West.”
“Well, you can’t have quiet talks with your young friends when you’ve got a lot of important people to dinner.”
“Important people!” Mr. Waddington snorted sternly. “A bunch of super-fatted bits of bad news! In God’s country they would be lynched on sight.”
“Mr. Brewster Bodthorne has been asking for you particularly. He wants to play checkers.”
“Hell,” said Mr. Waddington, with the air of quoting something out of Dante, “is full of Brewster Bodthornes.”
Molly put her arms round her father’s neck and kissed him fondly—a proceeding which drew from George a low, sharp howl of suffering like the bubbling cry of some strong swimmer in his agony. There is a limit to what the flesh can bear.
“Darling, you must be good. Up you go at once and be very nice to everybody. I’ll stay here and entertain Mr.—”
“His name is Pinch,” said Mr. Waddington, rising reluctantly and making for the door. “I met him out on the sidewalk where men are men. Get him to tell you all about the West. I can’t remember when I’ve ever heard a man talk so arrestingly. Mr. Winch has held me spellbound. Positively spellbound. And my name,” he concluded, a little incoherently, groping for the door-handle, “is Sigsbee Horatio Waddington and I don’t care who knows it.”
III
The chief drawback to being a shy man is that in the actual crises of real life you are a very different person from the dashing and resourceful individual whom you have pictured in your solitary daydreams. George Finch, finding himself in the position in which he had so often yearned to be—alone with the girl he loved, felt as if his true self had been suddenly withdrawn and an incompetent understudy substituted at the last moment.
The George with whom he was familiar in daydreams was a splendid fellow—graceful, thoroughly at his ease, and full of the neatest sort
