He took a taxi to Whitestone’s cottage, and kept the cab waiting. He was very reluctant to enter; he dreaded the prospect of facing Rosalind, after Whitestone’s deplorable outburst.
“Not that it really meant anything,” he said to himself. “Pretty nearly all married couples have a row, now and then. The thing has probably all blown over now, and they’re happy again.”
Nevertheless, he didn’t want to see Rosalind just now if he could help it.
“I’ll take Robert up to the Country Club,” he thought. “It’ll do him good. We’ll have a couple of drinks. …”
He was relieved to find Whitestone smoking a pipe on one of the wooden settles built into the narrow porch.
“Hello, Robert!” he said, genially. “Just taking life easy, eh?”
“Oh. …Planning…” answered Whitestone.
“Planning a picture? Well, come on, old man! I’ll run you up—”
“No,” said Whitestone. “You remember what I told you this morning? There are still a few little details to work out. Because I’m going to do it tomorrow, if the weather’s good.”
Rosalind’s voice came from inside the house, gay and light.
“What are you two doing out there?”
“Talking about you, my dear,” said Whitestone.
CHAPTER IV
Rosalind’s Dinner Party
Hugh Acheson sat in his room, looking out of the window, and considering the situation.
It was a situation very familiar to him. How many times had he arrived at a house, and found there a girl—invited only on his account…!
This seemed to him a wrong and unfortunate thing; he always felt apologetic toward these girls, charming girls, pretty, well-bred, intelligent, altogether suitable; he liked them all—but never quite enough. Not one of them had that quality, which he could not have defined, or named, yet which was to him indispensable. Sometimes he had a glimpse of it in a play, an opera; Isolde had it, and Mary of Scotland; he could believe that there had once been women in the world who had that tragic and passionate magnificence. But he had lived for twenty-seven years without encountering it in actual life, and the girls he met seemed to him, all of them, a little insipid.
Mrs. Luff’s new protégée rather surprised him, although in his eyes Anabel Luff could do no wrong. She had been a friend of his mother’s, and ever since his schooldays he had felt for her an affection and respect he accorded to no one else. If she were so fond of this silent and almost sullen girl, then there must be something admirable in her which he had not yet discerned.
“Her father was Foxe Sackett, you know!” Mrs. Luff had told him, and seeing by his face that the name meant nothing to him: “The musician,” she had added. “A composer. …He was really famous, in musical circles. And Elsie plays marvelously, and she’s beautiful, don’t you think, Hugh?”
“Oh, very!” he had answered, politely.
He sighed now, thinking of Elsie. His chivalrous attitude toward woman was a burden to him; he could not help being deferential to them. He could not let Anabel Luff suspect how little interest he felt in her Elsie; he could not let her know how reluctant he was to go to dinner to-night with this artist fellow. Mrs. Luff enjoyed the society of artists, but Hugh didn’t. He admired them, of course; no doubt it was necessary for pictures to be painted, music and books to be written, and so on, but the people who did these things were trying. He did not know how to talk to them. What he understood and liked best were riding, hunting, polo, flying, sailing; he liked to be active physically. To-night, he would probably have to look at this fellow’s pictures, and say something. …
With another sigh, he rose and began to dress. Dressing was one of the many things he knew how to do well. He was extremely fastidious; his dinner-jacket was a marvel, his trousers were a work of art. Slender, fair-haired, boyish in appearance, he had none the less a sort of dignity about him; he was easy, friendly, polite, but no one took liberties with him.
Anabel was waiting in the hall for him. Her black evening dress did not fit very well; her sandy hair was untidy, as usual, but she was privileged to look like that; she was beyond criticism. Luff was with her, wooden and immaculate.
“We’ll have cocktails before we go,” he said. “Whitestone’s liquor is…Well, Anabel’s responsible for this.”
“Robert Whitestone’s quite charming,” said Mrs. Luff, firmly. “And very talented.”
“But he doesn’t do anything!” her husband objected. “I mean—after all—how d’you know he’s talented? Never has any pictures to show.”
“If you’d ever seen him at work,” said Mrs. Luff, “in an awful little sort of summer-house, full of spiders, and wearing a smock, and his hair ruffled…”
Her husband and young Acheson both smiled with inmeasurable indulgence. Anabel Luff was past fifty, there was gray in her hair, but she would always be able to evoke in men that tender amusement.
“You’ll see yourself—” she began, and stopped, looking toward the staircase. Elsie was coming down, in a long white evening frock, a rose-colored ribbon about her dark hair; her appearance was unusual, and as a rule Hugh Acheson disliked any sort of eccentricity. But this girl, he thought, was like some portrait in a gallery, fragile, immature, touchingly lovely.
“You won’t want a cocktail, dear…?” said Mrs. Luff.
“I do, please.”
“It’s not good for your complexion—”
“I need one!” Elsie said vehemently.
This seemed to Hugh in poor taste. A kid of her age had no business to “need” a drink.
“Neurotic,” he said to himself.
He did not know definitely what that word meant, but he did know what it connoted for him. It signified too much smoking, and too little fresh air, too much emotion, and too little exercise. He was sorry to see her swallow a cocktail almost at a gulp, and hold out her glass for another. For she was authentically young, not more than eighteen or nineteen, he decided, and her youth was exquisite.
She had been badly brought up, though, or else she was bad-tempered. As he sat beside her in the car, he made two or three attempts to talk to her as he talked to other girls, without getting anything better than the curtest possible retorts. So he let her alone.
The Whitestones’ house was worse than he had expected, shabbier and smaller; something queer in the atmosphere, too. Whitestone was silent and distrait; Mrs. Whitestone was too gay. Moreover, it made Hugh uncomfortable to be waited upon by his hostess; he found it embarrassing to sit at the table while she hurried back and forth. He wanted to help her, but she would not allow that, wouldn’t even let her husband help her.
“But you’ve hurt your hand, Mrs. Whitestone!” Hugh protested, observing a bandage about her fingers.
“It’s nothing,” she assured him, smiling. “Just a tiny burn.”
She could not suppress the other man, though, that Delancey whom Hugh had met earlier in the day. Delancey seemed very much at home here, jumping up from the table, going in and out of the kitchen, making good-humored and somewhat pointless jokes. He carried it off very well, but Hugh saw. …
It was perhaps because he so seldom read anything, because his thoughts were so largely occupied by sports and more or less impersonal matters, that Hugh Acheson had so great a power of observation. He observed, and he understood, only by the light of his own experiences. There were no other people’s ideas in his head. He was that rare creature,