What was the use of keeping up the feud? They had both come there young men, fighting for their places and their lives; now they were not very young any more; they would neither of them, probably, ever hold a better position. Couldn’t Langtry see it was a draw, that they had both been beaten?
IV
On Monday afternoon St. Peter mounted to his study and lay down on the box-couch, tired out with his day at the university. The first few weeks of the year were very fatiguing for him; there were so many exhausting things besides his lectures and all the new students; long faculty meetings in which almost no one was ever frank, and always the old fight to keep up the standard of scholarship, to prevent the younger professors, who had a sharp eye to their own interests, from farming the whole institution out to athletics, and to the agricultural and commercial schools favoured and fostered by the State Legislature.
The September heat, too, was hard on him. He wanted to be out at the lake every day—it was never so fine as in late September. He was lying with closed eyes, resting his mind on the picture of intense autumn-blue water, when he heard a tap at the door and his daughter Rosamond entered, very handsome in a silk suit of a vivid shade of lilac, admirably suited to her complexion and showing that in the colour of her cheeks there was actually a tone of warm lavender. In that low room she seemed very tall indeed, a little out of drawing, as, to her father’s eye, she so often did. Usually, however, people were aware only of her rich complexion, her curving, unresisting mouth and mysterious eyes. Tom Outland had seen nothing else, and he was a young man who saw a great deal.
“Am I interrupting something important, Papa?”
“No, not at all, my dear. Sit down.”
On his writing-table she caught a glimpse of pages in a handwriting not his—a script she knew very well.
“Not much choice of chairs, is there?” she smiled. “Papa, I don’t like to have you working in a place like this. It’s not fitting.”
“Much easier than to break in a new room, Rosie. A workroom should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it’s better than a new one.”
“That’s really what I came to see you about.” Rosamond traced the edge of a hole in the matting with the tip of her lilac sunshade. “Won’t you let me build you a little study in the back yard of the new house? I have such good ideas for it, and you would have no bother about it at all.”
“Oh, thank you, Rosamond. It’s most awfully nice of you to think of it. But keep it just an idea—it’s better so. Lots of things are. For the present I’ll plod on here. It’s absurd, but it suits me. Habit is such a big part of work.”
“With Augusta’s old things lying about, and those dusty old forms? Why didn’t she at least get those out of your way?”
“Oh, they have a right here, by long tenure. It’s their room, too. I don’t want to come upon them lying in some dump-heap on the road to the lake. They remind me of the times when you were little girls, and your first party frocks used to hang on them at night, when I worked.”
Rosamond smiled, unconvinced. “Papa, don’t joke with me. I’ve come to talk about something serious, and it’s very difficult. You know I’m a little afraid of you.” She dropped her shadowy, bewitching eyes.
“Afraid of me? Never!”
“Oh, yes, I am when you’re sarcastic. You musn’t be today, please. Louie and I have often talked this over. We feel strongly about it. He’s often been on the point of blurting out with it, but I’ve curbed him. You don’t always approve of Louie and me. Of course it was only Louie’s energy and technical knowledge that ever made Tom’s discovery succeed commercially, but we don’t feel that we ought to have all the returns from it. We think you ought to let us settle an income on you, so that you could give up your university work and devote all your time to writing and research. That is what Tom would have wanted.”
St. Peter rose quickly, with the light, supple spring he had when he was very nervous, crossed to the window, wide on its hook, and half closed it. “My dear daughter,” he said decisively, when he had turned round to her, “I couldn’t possibly take any of Outland’s money.”
“But why not? You were the best friend he had in the world, he owed more to you than to anyone else, and he hated having you hampered by teaching. He admired your mind, and nothing would have pleased him more than helping you to do the work you do better than anyone else. If he were alive, that would be one of the first things he would use this money for.”
“But he is not alive, and there was no word about me in his will, and so there is nothing to build your pretty theory upon. It’s wonderfully nice of you and Louie, and I’m very pleased, you know.”
“But Tom was so impractical, Father. He never thought it would mean more than a liberal dress allowance for me, if he thought at all. I don’t know—he never spoke to me about it.”
St. Peter smiled quizzically. “I’m not so sure about his impracticalness. When he was working on that gas, he once remarked to me that there might be a fortune in it. To be sure, he didn’t wait
