The Happiest Time of Their Lives Part 22

"Well,"--Wayne stood up preparatory to leaving the room,--"I mean to take her if she'll go."

His mother, who had now finished winding her braid very neatly around her head, sank into a chair.

"Oh, dear!" she said, "I almost wish I weren't dining with Mr. Lanley.

He'll think it's all my fault."

"I doubt if he knows about it."

Mrs. Wayne's eyes twinkled.

"May I tell him? I should like to see his face."

"Tell him I am going, if you like. Don't say I want to take her with me."

Her face fell.

"That wouldn't be much fun," she answered, "because I suppose the truth is they won't be sorry to have you out of the way."

"I suppose not," he said, and shut the door behind him. He could not truthfully say that his mother had been much of a comfort. He had suddenly thought that he would go down to the first floor and get Lily Parret to go to the theater with him. He and she had the warm friends.h.i.+p for each other of two handsome, healthy young people of opposite s.e.xes who might have everything to give each other except time. She was perhaps ten years older than he, extremely handsome, with dimples and dark red hair and blue eyes. She had a large practice among the poor, and might have made a conspicuous success of her profession if it had not been for her intense and too widely diffused interest. She wanted to strike a blow at every abuse that came to her attention, and as, in the course of her work, a great many turned up, she was always striking blows and never following them up. She went through life in a series of springs, each one in a different direction; but the motion of her attack was as splendid as that of a tiger. Often she was successful, and always she enjoyed herself.

When she answered Pete's ring, and he looked up at her magnificent height, her dimples appeared in welcome. She really was glad to see him.

"Come out and dine with me, Lily, and go to the theater."

"Come to a meeting at Cooper Union on capital punishment. I'm going to speak, and I'm going to be very good."

"No, Lily; I want to explain to you what a pitiable s.e.x you belong to.

You have no character, no will--"

She shook her head, laughing.

"You are a personal lot, you young men," she said. "You change your mind about women every day, according to how one of them treats you."

"They don't amount to a row of pins, Lily."

"Certainly some men select that kind, Pete."

"O Lily," he answered, "don't talk to me like that! I want some one to tell me I'm perfect, and, strangely enough, no one will."

"I will," she answered, with beaming good nature, "and I pretty near think so, too. But I can't dine with you, Pete. Wouldn't you like to go to my meeting?"

"I should perfectly hate to," he answered, and went off crossly, to dine at his college's local club. Here he found an old friend, who most fortunately said something derogatory of the firm of Benson & Honaton.

The opinion coincided with certain phases of Wayne's own views, but he contradicted it, held it up to ridicule, and ended by quoting incidents in the history of his friend's own firm which, as he said, were probably among the crookedest things that had ever been put over in Wall Street. Lily would not have distracted his mind more completely.

He felt almost cheerful when he went home about ten o'clock. His mother was still out, and there was no letter from Mathilde. He had been counting on finding one.

Before long his mother came in. She was looking very fine. She had on a new gray dress that she had had made for her by a fallen woman from an asylum, but which had turned out better than such ventures of Mrs.

Wayne's usually did.

She had supposed she and Mr. Lanley were to dine alone, an idea which had not struck her as revolutionary. Accustomed to strange meals in strange company--a bowl of milk with a prison chaplain at a dairy lunch-room, or even, on one occasion, a supper in an Owl Lunch Wagon with a wavering drunkard,--she had thought that a quiet, perfect dinner with Mr. Lanley sounded pleasant enough. But she was not sorry to find it had been enlarged. She liked to meet new people. She was extremely optimistic, and always hoped that they would prove either spiritually rewarding, or practically useful to some of her projects. When she saw Mrs. Baxter, with her jetty hair, jeweled collar, and eyes a trifle too saurian for perfect beauty, she at once saw a subscription to the working-girl's club. The fourth person Mr. Wilsey, Lanley's lawyer, she knew well by reputation. She wondered if she could make him see that his position on the eight-hour law was absolutely anti-social.

Mr. Lanley enjoyed a small triumph when she entered. He had been so discreet in his description of her to Mrs. Baxter, he had been so careful not to hint that she was an illuminating personality who had suddenly come into his life, that he knew he had left his old friend with the general impression that Mrs. Wayne was merely the mother of an undesirable suitor of Mathilde's who spent most of her life in the company of drunkards. So when she came in, a little late as usual, in her long, soft, gray dress, with a pink rose at her girdle, looking far more feminine than Mrs. Baxter, about whom Adelaide's offensive adjective "upholstered" still clung, he felt the full effect of her appearance. He even enjoyed the obviously suspicious glance which Mrs. Baxter immediately afterward turned upon him.

At dinner things began well. They talked about people and events of which Mrs. Wayne knew nothing, but her interest and good temper made her not an outsider, but an audience. Anecdotes which even Mr. Lanley might have felt were trivial gossip became, through her attention to them, incidents of the highest human interest. Such an uncritical interest was perhaps too stimulating.

He expected nothing dangerous when, during the game course, Mrs. Baxter turned to him and asked how Mathilde had enjoyed what she referred to as "her first winter."

Mr. Lanley liked to talk about Mathilde. He described, with a little natural exaggeration, how much she had enjoyed herself and how popular she had been.

"I hope she hasn't been bitten by any of those modern notions," said Mrs. Baxter.

Mr. Wilsey broke in.

"Oh, these modern, restless young women!" he said. "They don't seem able to find their natural contentment in their own homes. My daughter came to me the other day with a wonderful scheme of working all day long with charity organizations. I said to her, 'My dear, charity begins at home.'

My wife, Mrs. Baxter, is an old-fas.h.i.+oned housekeeper. She gives out all supplies used in my house; she knows where the servants are at every minute of the day, and we have nine. She--"

"Oh, how is dear Mrs. Wilsey?" said Mrs. Baxter, perhaps not eager for the full list of her activities.

"Well, at present she is in a sanatorium," replied her husband, "from overwork, just plain overwork."

Mr. Lanley, catching Mrs. Wayne's twinkling eye, could only pray that she would not point out that a sojourn in a sanatorium was not complete contentment in the home; but before she had a chance, Mrs.

Baxter had gone on.

"That's so like the modern girl--anything but her obvious duty. She'll help any one but her mother and work anywhere but in the home. We've had a very painful case at home lately. One of our most charming young girls has suddenly developed an absolutely morbid curiosity about the things that take place in the women's courts. Why, as her poor father said to me, 'Mrs. Baxter, old as I am, I hear things in those courts so shocking I have hard work forgetting them; and yet Imogen wants me to let her go into those courts day after day--'"

"Oh, that's abnormal, almost perverted," said Mr. Wilsey, judicially.

"The women's courts are places where no--" he hesitated a bare instant, and Mrs. Wayne asked:

"No woman should go?"

"No girl should go."

"Yet many of the girls who come there are under sixteen."

Mr. Wilsey hid a slight annoyance under a manner peculiarly bland.

"Ah, dear lady," he said, "you must forgive my saying that that remark is a trifle irrelevant."

"Is it?" she asked, meaning him to answer her; but he only looked benevolently at her, and turned to listen to Mrs. Baxter, who was saying:

"Yes, everywhere we look nowadays we see women rus.h.i.+ng into things they don't understand, and of course we all know what women are--"

"What are they?" asked Mrs. Wayne, and Lanley's heart sank.

"Oh, emotional and inaccurate and untrustworthy and spiteful."

"Mrs. Baxter, I'm sure you're not like that."

"My dear Madam!" exclaimed Wilsey.