The girl had laughed, as she could never help laughing at Wyant’s sallies; but in reality she admired her mother’s zeal, though she sometimes wondered if it were not a little too promiscuous. Nona was the daughter of Mrs. Manford’s second marriage, and her own father, Dexter Manford, who had had to make his way in the world, had taught her to revere activity as a virtue in itself; his tone in speaking of Pauline’s zeal was very different from Wyant’s. He had been brought up to think there was a virtue in work per se, even if it served no more useful purpose than the revolving of a squirrel in a wheel. “Perhaps your mother tries to cover too much ground; but it’s very fine of her, you know — she never spares herself.”
“Nor us!” Nona sometimes felt tempted to add; but Manford’s admiration was contagious. Yes; Nona did admire her mother’s altruistic energy; but she knew well enough that neither she nor her brother’s wife Lita would ever follow such an example — she no more than Lita. They belonged to another generation: to the bewildered disenchanted young people who had grown up since the Great War, whose energies were more spasmodic and less definitely directed, and who, above all, wanted a more personal outlet for them. “Bother earthquakes in Bolivia!” Lita had once whispered to Nona, when Mrs. Manford had convoked the bright elderly women to deal with a seismic disaster at the other end of the world, the repetition of which these ladies somehow felt could be avoided if they sent out a commission immediately to teach the Bolivians to do something they didn’t want to do — not to BELIEVE in earthquakes, for instance.
The young people certainly felt no corresponding desire to set the houses of others in order. Why shouldn’t the Bolivians have earthquakes if they chose to live in Bolivia? And why must Pauline Manford lie awake over it in New York, and have to learn a new set of Mahatma exercises to dispel the resulting wrinkles? “I suppose if we feel like that it’s really because we’re too lazy to care,” Nona reflected, with her incorrigible honesty.
She turned from Miss Bruss with a slight shrug. “Oh, well,” she murmured.
“You know, pet,” Miss Bruss volunteered, “things always get worse as the season goes on; and the last fortnight in February is the worst of all, especially with Easter coming as early as it does this year. I never COULD see why they picked out such an awkward date for Easter: perhaps those Florida hotel people did it. Why, your poor mother wasn’t even able to see your father this morning before he went down town, though she thinks it’s ALL WRONG to let him go off to his office like that, without finding time for a quiet little chat first . . . Just a cheery word to put him in the right mood for the day . . . Oh, by the way, my dear, I wonder if you happen to have heard him say if he’s dining at home tonight? Because you know he never DOES remember to leave word about his plans, and if he hasn’t, I’d better telephone to the office to remind him that it’s the night of the big dinner for the Marchesa — ”
“Well, I don’t think father’s dining at home,” said the girl indifferently.
“Not — not — not? Oh, my gracious!” clucked Miss Bruss, dashing across the room to the telephone on her own private desk.
The engagement-list had slipped from her hands, and Nona Manford, picking it up, ran her glance over it. She read: “4 P.M. See A. — 4.30 P.M. Musical: Torfried Lobb.”
“4 P.M. See A.” Nona had been almost sure it was Mrs. Manford’s day for going to see her divorced husband, Arthur Wyant, the effaced mysterious person always designated on Mrs. Manford’s lists as “A,” and hence known to her children as “Exhibit A.” It was rather a bore, for Nona had meant to go and see him herself at about that hour, and she always timed her visits so that they should not clash with Mrs. Manford’s, not because the latter disapproved of Nona’s friendship with Arthur Wyant (she thought it “beautiful” of the girl to show him so much kindness), but because Wyant and Nona were agreed that on these occasions the presence of the former Mrs. Wyant spoilt their fun. But there was nothing to do about it. Mrs. Manford’s plans were unchangeable. Even illness and death barely caused a ripple in them. One might as well have tried to bring down one of the Pyramids by poking it with a parasol as attempt to disarrange the close mosaic of Mrs. Manford’s engagement-list. Mrs. Manford herself couldn’t have done it; not with the best will in the world; and Mrs. Manford’s will, as her children and all her household knew, WAS the best in the world.
Nona Manford moved away with a final shrug. She had wanted to speak to her mother about something rather important; something she had caught a startled glimpse of, the evening before, in the queer little half-formed mind of her sister-in-law Lita, the wife of her half-brother Jim Wyant — the Lita with whom, as Miss Bruss remarked, she, Nona, danced away the nights. There was nobody on earth as dear to Nona as that same Jim, her elder by six or seven years, and who had been brother, comrade, guardian, almost father to her — her own father, Dexter Manford, who was so clever, capable and kind, being almost always too busy at the office, or too firmly requisitioned by Mrs. Manford, when he was at home, to be able to spare much time for his daughter.
Jim, bless him, always had time; no doubt that was what his mother meant when she called him lazy — as lazy as his father, she had once added, with one of her rare flashes of impatience. Nothing so conduced to impatience in Mrs. Manford as the thought of anybody’s having the least fraction of unapportioned time and not immediately planning to do something with it. If only they could have given it to HER! And Jim, who loved and admired her (as all her family did) was always conscientiously trying to fill his days, or to conceal from her their occasional vacuity. But he had a way of not being in a hurry, and this had been all to the good for little Nona, who could always count on him to ride or walk with her, to slip off with her to a concert or a “movie,” or, more pleasantly still, just to BE THERE— idling in the big untenanted library of Cedarledge, the place in the country, or in his untidy study on the third floor of the town house, and ready to answer questions, help her to look up hard words in dictionaries, mend her golf-sticks, or get a thorn out of her Sealyham’s paw. Jim was wonderful with his hands: he could repair clocks, start up mechanical toys, make fascinating models of houses or gardens, apply a tourniquet, scramble eggs, mimic his mother’s visitors — preferably the “earnest” ones who held forth about “causes” or “messages” in her gilded drawing-rooms — and make delicious coloured maps of imaginary continents, concerning which Nona wrote interminable stories. And of all these gifts he had, alas, made no particular use as yet — except to enchant his little half-sister.
It had been just the same, Nona knew, with his father: poor useless “Exhibit A”! Mrs. Manford said it was their “old New York blood” — she spoke of them with mingled contempt and pride, as if they were the last of the Capetians, exhausted by a thousand years of sovereignty. Her own red corpuscles were tinged with a more plebeian dye. Her progenitors had mined in Pennsylvania and made bicycles at Exploit, and now gave their name to one of the most popular automobiles in the United States. Not that other ingredients were lacking in her hereditary make-up: her mother was said to have contributed southern gentility by being a Pascal of Tallahassee. Mrs. Manford, in certain moods, spoke of “The Pascals of Tallahassee” as if they accounted for all that was noblest in her; but when she was exhorting Jim to action it was her father’s blood that she invoked. “After all, in spite of the Pascal tradition, there is no shame in being in trade. My father’s father came over from Scotland with two sixpences in his pocket . . .” and Mrs. Manford would glance with pardonable pride at the glorious Gainsborough over the dining-room mantelpiece (which she sometimes almost mistook for an ancestral portrait), and at her healthy