“Oh, I don’t know. He was too much of a spoiled baby, I guess, first his mother and then his sisters, always protecting him and admiring him until he was too tender to do anything but run home and hide, when anything real started to happen to him. And then he was supposed to be pretty much cut up over Lucy Hawthorn, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, I guess he was; but mercy, that was ages ago, and she certainly wasn’t the only pebble on the beach. And anyway, no man’s going to be faithful to one woman all his life if she’s out of reach—you needn’t tell me! Women do, but not men—it isn’t their nature. No, I guess he just wasn’t the marrying kind, or else as you say they made him too comfortable at home.”
Prentice made a vague conversational sound, his eyes straying to his newspaper, but Fannie went on, interested:
“You know it isn’t only Victor himself, but I believe the girls wouldn’t have been old maids if it hadn’t been for him. Maggie never said so, but everyone knew she broke her engagement so she could stay and take care of him; and they never could go anywhere or have pretty clothes or anything, because everything had to be spent on Victor. You can’t exactly blame him for being selfish, they never gave him a chance to be anything else. Did they? Did they, Prentice?”
“Mm,” said Prentice, reading.
“Mother always said Mrs. Campion would have married again if it hadn’t been for Victor. I remember there was someone. Mrs. Campion came to see Mother one day, and cried and said Victor was so sensitive he needed especially tender treatment, and Father said afterwards he needed a hairbrush applied to the seat of his trousers.”
“That’s about right.”
“Well, it seems queer to think of such a mild little man as Victor Campion having any influence on anybody. But I can’t help feeling sorry for him. An old bachelor seems so sad, somehow. Sort of forlorn. And can you imagine—even imagine life without any children, Prentice?”
“I can easily, and it sounds like a paradise of peace.”
“Oh, go on! Skidoo!” she cried, slapping him affectionately.
“Fannie! What language!”
“Well, it’s what Pren and Bobby say all the time—‘twenty-three, skidoo.’ ” She returned his goodbye kiss, as she put a pansy in his buttonhole, and then went back for just one more waffle with butter and maple syrup. She knew she oughtn’t to eat waffles, she was so fat. Elizabeth was always telling her so. “You mustn’t let yourself go to seed, Mother.” Oh, well! She poured out just a little more coffee, with three lumps and cream.
Victor Campion! Poor old thing! She was sorry for the girls, too. Isabel Leaf said they had had a dreadful time, with May’s suicide, and being poor, and having to sell The Maples. The Maples without the Campions, the Campions without The Maples—impossible to imagine! “We used to have such fun there!” she thought. “Poor old Maggie! It would be nice to ask her to Hartford for a visit—give her a good rest, and feed her up.” She would do it sometime—or at least she would if ever a time came when she wasn’t too occupied with her family. The family came first, of course.
Poor Maggie! Poor Lily! Poor Victor! Never to marry, never to have children and grandchildren—how awful! No one to love. Perhaps, she had gone to seed, as Elizabeth said, but what did it matter, when such fresh young flowers were springing up so thickly around her?
Her thoughts floated from the Campions to little Francie in her wild rose costume—to the dress she was embroidering for Elizabeth’s baby—the day’s menus—Pren would be bringing the Bangs boys home for dinner—Bobby back from Andover tomorrow—the sunshine wrapping her feet in soft warm gold—the pot of pansies on the breakfast table. One was dead, and in her mind she stretched out her hand and pinched it off, but her body was too comfortable to move. She sank into an agreeable torpor.
Victor lay in his bath, dreamily blowing bubbles. Nice to sleep late and dawdle over dressing on Sunday morning. “ ‘Oh, waltz me around again, Willie.’ ” he sang, making a beautiful lather.
“ ‘Around, around, around!
The music so dreamy, like peaches and creamy—’ ”
He was going to do exercises every morning—that was the way to keep fit. Sunday was the day to be lazy, but he’d start tomorrow. Twenty minutes brisk exercises every morning—what if it did mean getting up a little earlier? The very thought made him feel as glowing and strong-willed as if he had gone through them already.
“ ‘Oh, Willie Fitzgibbons he used to sell ribbons,
And stand up all day on his feet—’ ”
Where was his blue tie with the cream-colored dots?
“ ‘He got very spoony on Madeleine Mooney—’ ”
Last night he had come home old and tired. The dinner had been hard work. He had told all his funniest stories, and waited with an ear anxiously cocked for the laughter that did not come. Polite, vague smiles—“Oh, that’s perfect!” And afterwards, at the dance! No one really danced any more.
But at home again, where all things—the burning lamp, the doughnuts and milk waiting under a napkin on the hall table, his turned-back bed, light, and food, and rest—were symbols of love for him, he revived, he grew happy again.
Maggie was watering her plants in the bay window. A rubber bulb sprinkler filled itself—blub-blub-blub—in a pail of warm water standing on the newspapers spread on the floor under the dripping fringe of ivy, and the room was full of sunshine and the fragrance of sprinkled geraniums.
“You sound as lively as a cricket. Have a good time last night? Wait, I’ll bring in your breakfast—”
She loved Sunday mornings, when she could let him sleep late, when he had time to talk with her as he lingered over his breakfast. She made him a brown and gold puff of omelet while he was eating his orange, and brought it in to him
