Part 11

“Dolling,” Braithwaite replied; and followed his wife to the door. “I just happened to mention his name: Dolling. I—I didn’t address you as ‘darling,’ Mr. Dodge, though I see how you might easily have thought I did. The man’s name was Dolling. I shouldn’t like you to think I’d take the liberty of calling _you_——”

But here he was interrupted by such an uproarious shout of laughter from his host that his final words were lost. Mr. Dodge’s laughter continued, though it was interspersed with hearty expressions of hospitality and parting cheer, until the callers had passed the outer threshold and the door had closed behind them. Then the hilarious gentleman returned from the hall to face a wife who found nothing in the world, just then, a laughing matter.

“The worst thing you did,” she assured him, “was to be so fascinated that you told her I’d been amiable to you about your sending that check—just after I said I knew all about it _before_ you sent it and had _told_ you to send it! That was a pleasant position to put your wife in, wasn’t it?”

“Lydia!” he shouted, still outrageous in his mirth. “Let’s forget that part of it and remember only Dolling!”

“All right,” she said, and her angry eyes flashed. “Suppose his name _was_ Dolling. What was she talking to him about rosemary and remembrance for?”

“I don’t know, and it doesn’t seem important. The only thing I can get my mind on is your keeping to yourself so solemnly the scandalous romance of Dolling!” And becoming more respectably sober, for a time, he asked her: “Don’t you really see a little fun in it, Lydia?”

“What!” she cried. “Do you? After you saw that wretched little man of hers stand up there and recite his lesson like a trained monkey? Did you look at _her_ while he was performing? She stood in the doorway and held the whip-lash over him till he finished! And if this idol of yours is so innocent and pure, why did she go all to pieces the way she did when she saw me that morning by the hedge?”

“Why, don’t you see?” he cried. “Of course she saw you thought she’d called the man ‘darling’! She knew you didn’t know his name was Dolling. Isn’t it plain to you _yet_?”

“No!” his wife said, vehemently. “It isn’t plain to me and it never will be!”

XVII “DOLLING”

AGAINST all reason she persisted in a sinister interpretation of her lovely neighbour’s conduct;—never would Mrs. Dodge admit that Mr. Dodge had the right of the matter, and after a time she complained that she found his continued interest in it “pretty tiresome.”

“You keep bringing it up,” she said, “because you think you’ve had a wretched little triumph over me. It’s one of those things that never can be settled either way, and I don’t care to talk of it any more. If you want to occupy your spare thoughts I have a topic to offer you.”

“What topic?”

Mrs. Dodge shook her head in a certain way. “Lily.”

“Oh, dear me!” he said. “It isn’t happening again?”

She informed him that it was, indeed. Lily’s extreme affections were once more engaged. “We’re in for it!” was the mother’s preface, as she began the revelation; and, when she concluded, her husband sorrowfully agreed with her.

“It’s awful now and will be worse,” he said; and thus his “spare thoughts” became but too thoroughly occupied. In his growing anxiety over his daughter, he ceased to think of his neighbours;—the handsome chauffeur passed from his mind. Then abruptly, one day, as the wandering searchlight of a harboured ship may startlingly clarify some obscure thing upon the shore, a chance conjuncture illuminated for him most strangely the episode of Dolling.

He was lunching with a younger member of his firm in a canyon restaurant downtown, and his attention happened to become concentrated upon a debonair young man who had finished his lunch and was now engaged in affable discussion with the pretty cashier. He was one of those young men, sometimes encountered, who have not only a strong masculine beauty, but the look of talent, with both the beauty and the talent belittled by an irresponsible twinkle of the eye. Standing below the level of the cashier’s desk, which was upon a platform, there was something about him that suggested a laughing Romeo; and, in response, the cashier was evidently not unwilling to play a flippant Juliet. She tossed her head at him, tapped his cheek with a pencil, chattering eagerly; she blushed, laughed, and at last looked yearningly after him as he went away. Mr. Dodge also looked; for the young man was Dolling, once Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s chauffeur.

“Fine little bit of comedy, that,” the junior member of Mr. Dodge’s firm remarked, across their small table. “Talked her into giving him credit for his lunch. She’ll have to make it up out of her own pocket until he pays her. Of course, he’s done it before, and she knows him. Characteristic of that fellow;—he’s a great hand to put it over with the girls!”

“Do you know him, Williams?” Mr. Dodge asked, a little interested.

“Know him? Lord, yes! He was in my class at college till he got fired in sophomore year. Every now and then he comes to me and I have to stake him. He’s a reporter just now; but it’s always the same—whether he’s working or not, he never has any money. He can do anything: act, sing, break horses, drive an airplane, any kind of newspaper work—publishes poetry in the papers sometimes, and he’s not such a bad poet, either, at that. But he’s just one of these natural-born drifters—too good looking and too restless. He never holds a job more than a couple of months.”

“I suppose not,” Mr. Dodge said, absently. “I suppose he’s tried a good many.”

“Rather!” Williams exclaimed. “I’ve got him I don’t know how many, myself. The last time I did he was pretty well down and out, and the best I could get for him was a chauffeur’s job for a little cuss I happened to know in the brass trade—Braithwaite. Lives out your way somewhere, I think. O’Boyle _took_ it all right; it was chauff or starve!”

“I beg your pardon. Who took what?”

“O’Boyle,” said Williams. “Charlie O’Boyle, the man we’re talking about—the chap that was just conning the cashier yonder. I was telling you he took a job as chauffeur for a family out your way in the suburbs.”

“Yes, I understood,” Mr. Dodge returned, with more gravity than Williams expected as a tribute to this casual narrative. “You said this O’Boyle became a chauffeur to some people named Braithwaite and that you obtained the position for him. I merely wondered—I suppose when you recommended this O’Boyle to Mr. Braithwaite you—ah—you mentioned his name? I mean to say: you introduced O’Boyle as O’Boyle.”

“Well, naturally,” Williams replied, surprised and a little nettled. “Why wouldn’t I? I wouldn’t expect people to take on a man for a family job like that and not tell ’em his _name_, would I? I don’t see what you——”

“Nothing,” Mr. Dodge said, hurriedly. “Nothing at all. It was a ridiculous question. My mind was wandering to other things, or I shouldn’t have asked it. We’d better get down to business, I suppose.”

But that was something his wandering mind refused to do; nor would it under any consideration or pressure “get down to business” during the rest of that afternoon. He went home early, and, walking from his suburban station in the first twilight of a gray but rainless November day, arrived at his own gate just as the Braithwaites’ closed car drew up at the curb before the next house.

An elderly negro chauffeur climbed down rustily from his seat at the wheel and opened the shining door; Mrs. Braithwaite stepped gracefully down, and, with her lovely saint’s face uplifted above dark furs, she crossed the pavement, entered the low iron gateway, and walked up the wide stone path that led through the lawn to the house. On the opposite side of the street a group of impressed women stopped to stare, grateful for the favouring chance that gave them this glimpse of the great lady.

Mr. Braithwaite descended from the car and followed his wife toward the house. He did not overtake her and walk beside her; but his insignificant legs beneath his overcoat kept his small feet moving in neat short steps a little way behind her.

Meanwhile, the pausing neighbour gazed at them and his open mouth showed how he pondered. It was not upon this strange woman, a little of whose strangeness had so lately been revealed to him, that he pondered most, nor about her that he most profoundly wondered. For, strange as the woman seemed to him, far stranger seemed the little creature pattering so faithfully behind her up the walk.

In so helpless a fidelity Mr. Dodge felt something touching; and perhaps, too, he felt that men must keep men’s secrets. At all events, he made a high resolve. It would be hard on Mrs. Dodge, even unfair to her; but then and there he made up his mind that for the sake of Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s husband he would never tell anybody—and of all the world he would never tell Mrs. Dodge—what he had learned that day about Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s husband’s loyalty.

XVIII LILY’S FRIEND ADA

INDOORS Mr. Dodge too quickly found other matter to occupy his mind. Mrs. Dodge hurried down the stairs to set before him an account of a new phase in Lily’s present romance, and they began their daily discussion of their daughter’s beglamoured condition. In a way this was a strange thing for them to do, because, like many other fathers and mothers in such parental mazes, they realized that they struggled with a mystery beyond their comprehension. Lily’s condition was something about which they really knew nothing, and least of all did they guess what part her dearest girl-friend had in it.

Lily had formed with the sturdy Ada Corey one of those friendships that sometimes suggest to observers an unworthy but persistent thought upon the profundity of girlish vanity. So often is a beautiful girl’s best girl-friend the precise companion piece to set off most abundantly the charms of the beauty, or, if both girls of a pair be well-favoured, so frequently is one dark and the other fair, and each the best obtainable background for the other, that the spectator is almost forced to suppose many such intimacies to be deliberately founded upon a pictorial basis.

But this is not to say that these decorative elections to friendship are unaccompanied by genuine fondness; and although Lily Dodge found her background in the more substantial Ada, she found also something to lean upon and cling to and admire. For Lily was one of those girls we call ethereal, because they do not seem intended to remain long in a world their etherealness makes appear gross. They usually do remain as long as other people do, yet their seeming almost poised for a winging departure brings them indulgences and cherishings not shown to that stouter, self-reliant type to which Ada Corey was thought to belong.

Late on that same gray but rainless November afternoon, Ada, herself, spoke of this elaborate difference between them. “I don’t see why _you_ worry, Lily,” she said. “I believe you could get away with anything! You’re the kind that can.”

“Oh, not _this_!” Lily protested, in a wailing whisper. No one was near them; but in her trouble she seemed to fear the garrulity of even the old forest trees of the park through which the two were taking an autumnal stroll. “Nobody in the world could get out of such a miserable state of things as I’ve got myself into _now_, Ada.”

But this was by no means Miss Corey’s first experience of her friend’s confidences of despair. “I wouldn’t bother about it at all, if I were you, Lily,” she said, cheerfully. “I wouldn’t give it a thought.”

“You wouldn’t?” Lily cried, feebly, and her incredulity was further expressed by her feet, which refused to bear her onward in so amazed a condition. She halted, facing her companion in a stricken manner. “You wouldn’t give it a thought? When I’ve just told you that this time it’s _three_!”

“No,” Ada returned, stoutly. “I wouldn’t. If I were _you_, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t even if it were four!”

Lily moaned, and in a hopeless appeal for a higher witness to such folly, cast her eyes to heaven—or at least to as much of the dimming sky as roofed over the tattered brown foliage above her. “You wouldn’t give it a thought! Not even if there were four of ’em.” Then, as the woodland spot where they had stopped was somewhat secluded and apart from the main-travelled roads of the park, Lily felt at liberty to lean against a tree and apply a hand to her forehead in an excellent gesture of anguish. “I’m a goner this time, Ada,” she murmured. “I’m a goner!”

“You aren’t anything of the kind,” Miss Corey assured her. “I tell you it’s not worth bothering about.”

“Oh!” Lily uttered a sound of indignation, dropped the dramatic little hand, and spoke sharply. “You stand there, Ada Corey, and tell me that if such a thing happened to you, you wouldn’t give it a thought?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You did! You just said——”

“No; I said if I were _you_,” Ada explained. “A thing like this wouldn’t happen to me.”

“Why wouldn’t it? It might happen to anybody,” Lily returned, quickly. “Suppose it did happen to you? Do you mean to tell me that if three separate, individual men all pretty nearly considered themselves practically almost engaged to be married to you at the same time, you wouldn’t give it a thought? You wouldn’t bother about it at _all_?”

“I said I wouldn’t if I were _you_,” Ada insisted.

“Why wouldn’t you?”

“For just the reason I told you. Because you’re the kind that can get away with anything.”

“But I can’t!” Lily cried. “I’m _always_ in some sort of miserable mess or other.”

“Yes, pretty often,” her friend assented. “But it’s always a new one, and nobody ever does anything about the old one, so why should you care? You’ll write one of these three boys a little weepy note, and you’ll have a little weepy scene with another, and that’ll leave only the one you like the best, and——”

“But I don’t,” Lily interrupted, piteously. “I don’t absolutely _know_ I like him as much as I thought I did, either.”

“What!” Ada cried. “Not even _him_?”

“How can anybody ever be absolutely certain? I mean certain enough to get married. You know it’s a thing you’ve got to look at pretty seriously, Ada—getting actually _married_.”

But for the moment Ada did not seem to be sympathetic;—she was staring wide-eyed at her friend. “So you’re going to wriggle out of it with all three of them.”

“But maybe I can’t,” Lily moaned. “Suppose they insisted? Suppose they just wouldn’t _let_ me?”

“Has there ever been anything anybody wouldn’t let you do?”

Lily moaned again. “You mean I’m spoiled. You mean people let me make ’em miserable. Oh, it’s true, Ada! I do wish I could be more like you.”

“Like me?” Ada laughed shortly. “You wouldn’t for the world.”

“Yes, I would.” Lily took her friend’s hand in her own. “I’d give anything in the world to be like you. You don’t _know_ what a trouble I am to my mother and father! They’re always in some kind of stew or other over me, and I can’t help it, because I’m always getting myself into such fearful messes. You never trouble _your_ family; you’re always a comfort to ’em. You aren’t romantic and imaginative and sentimental and fly-off-the-handle, the way I am. You’re steady and reliable, and people always know exactly where to find you.”

But upon this, Ada looked puzzled. “Is that so?” she asked, gravely. “Is that how I seem to you, Lily?”

“To me? Good heavens! Don’t you know that’s the way everybody thinks of you? Everybody knows you’re dependable;—you’re what they call ‘so satisfactory,’ Ada. Your family and everybody else know you’ll never do anything reckless or susceptible or dreamy. Nobody on earth knows what _I’ll_ do, because I don’t myself. Just _look_ at the difference between us!”

With that, as if the bodily contrast of the two expressed the contrast in character she had in mind, Lily extended her arms sidewise from her in an emotional gesture inviting an inspection of herself foredoomed to be damning; then pointed dramatically at Ada. “Just look at you and then look at me,” she cried. “See what a _terrible_ difference it is!”

She dropped her arms to her sides, submitting her case to an invisible jury, who might well have returned a verdict that at least the outward difference was pleasant rather than terrible. In the twilight beneath the trees the fair-haired and ethereal Lily, in her slim gray dress, seemed to be made of a few wisps of mist and a little gold. About her was a plaintive grace, not a quality of her dark-eyed and more substantial companion; yet both girls were comely; both were of the peach-bloom age that follows the awkward years; each had a grace of her own; and neither had cause to be disturbed by anything wherein she was unlike the other. Yet, as it happened, both were so disturbed.

Ada’s gravity had increased. “You’re all wrong about it, Lily,” she said. “I’d give anything in the world to be like you.”

“What!” Lily cried. “You wouldn’t! Why?”

“Because of what I said. You can get away with anything, and people expect it. But if _I_ ever did anything queer it would upset everybody. There’d be no end to it.”

“But you never _will_!” Lily almost shouted.

“Won’t I?” Ada returned, her gravity not relaxing. “What makes you so sure?”

“Why, you simply couldn’t! _My_ life is just one long eternal succession of queernesses. I _never_ do anything rational; I don’t seem to know _how_; but you’re never anything but sensible, Ada. You’ll fall in love sensibly some day—not like me, but with just one man at a time—and he’ll be exactly the person your family’ll think you ought to be in love with. And you’ll have a nice, comfortable wedding, without any of the ushers misbehaving because you wouldn’t marry _him_ instead;—and then you’ll bring up a large family to go to church every Sunday and take an interest in missionary work and everything. Don’t you see how much _I_ ought to be like that, and how much you really are that? Don’t you, Ada?”

Ada shook her head slowly. “It doesn’t quite seem so,” she said. Then, beginning to stroll onward, continuing their walk, she looked even more serious than before, and inquired: “What are you going to wear to-morrow night?”

Lines almost tragic appeared upon Lily’s forehead, and her previously mentioned troubles seemed of light account compared to this one. “Oh, dear!” she wailed. “That’s _another_ thing that’s been on my mind all day. I haven’t the least idea. What would you?”

She was still hopelessly preoccupied with the problem when she reached home, after parting with Ada at the park gates; and in her own pretty room she went to one of her two clothes’-closets even before she went to a mirror. Frowning, she looked over her party dresses.

The slim, tender-coloured fabrics, charming even though unoccupied, hung weightlessly upon small, shoulderlike shapes of nickeled wire; and as she restlessly slid the hangers to and fro along the groved central rail that held them, she produced a delicate swish and flutter among the silks and chiffons before her, so that they were like a little pageant of pretty ghosts of the dances to which their young mistress had worn them. Lily approved of none of them, however; and, hearing her mother’s firm step approaching the open door of the room, behind her, she said, desperately, without turning, “I haven’t got a thing, Mamma; I haven’t got a single thing!”

Mrs. Dodge, that solid matron, so inexplicably unlike her daughter, came into the room breathing audibly after an unusually hurried ascent of the stairs. “Lily,” she said, in the tone of one who still controls an impending emotion, “Lily, you must never do this to me again. I can’t stand it.”

“Do what to you again?” Lily inquired, absently, not turning from her inspection. “I haven’t got a thing I could wear to-morrow night, Mamma. Absolutely, I don’t see how I can go unless——”

“_Lily!_” Mrs. Dodge exclaimed in a tone so eloquently vehement as to command a part of her daughter’s attention. “Listen to me!”

Lily half turned, holding forth for exhibition a dress she had removed from its hanger. “What’s the matter, Mamma? This pale blue chiffon is absolutely the only thing I haven’t worn so often I just couldn’t face anybody in again; but it never _was_ a becoming——”

“Lily, put down that dress and listen to me!”

“I’m sure it won’t do,” the daughter said, regretfully; but she obeyed and hung the dress over the back of a chair. Then she turned to her dressing-table mirror and began to remove her small hat. “Are you upset or anything, Mamma?”

“Upset? No! I’m indignant,” Mrs. Dodge explained, fiercely. “If you ever do such a thing to me again——”

“What? Why, I haven’t even seen you since lunch time, Mamma. How could I have been doing anything to you when I wasn’t anywhere around to _do_ it?”

“You know well enough what you did to me! You broke three separate engagements with three separate——”

But Lily’s light laughter interrupted. “Oh, did the poor things call up?” she asked, and seemed to be pleasantly surprised. “Well, my not being here might be doing something to _them_, maybe,” she added, reflectively;—“but I don’t see how it was doing anything to _you_, Mamma.”

“You don’t? You break three separate engagements without a word, and leave me here to explain it; and then you say that wasn’t doing anything to me!”

“But I didn’t leave you to do it. I didn’t even know you were going to be home this afternoon. I just thought maybe they’d call up and find I was out, and that’d be the end of it. What in the world did you go to the telephone _for_, Mamma?”

“Because two of them asked for me.”

“Did they? What for?”

“To ask where you _were_,” Mrs. Dodge said, explosively. “Each of ’em kept me about fifteen minutes.”

“That was very inconsiderate,” Lily observed. “Especially as I hadn’t absolutely promised either of ’em I’d go. I only said to call up about three and _probably_ I would. I don’t think they ought to have kept you so——”

“That isn’t what I’m complaining of,” her mother interrupted, grimly. “It was disagreeable, especially as I was unable to give either of them any information and they both seemed to think I could if they kept _at_ me long enough! It was trying, but it was bearable. What I refuse to have happen again, though, is what has been happening all the rest of the afternoon.”

Lily proved herself strangely able to divine her mother’s meaning without further explanation. Pink at once became noticeable upon her cheeks. “Oh, goodness!” she said. “Price didn’t come _in_, did he?”

“For two and one-half hours,” Mrs. Dodge replied, slowly and harshly. “For that length of time this afternoon I have been favoured with the society and conversation—the continuous conversation, I may say—of Mr. Price Gleason. I am strong enough to bear certain things, but not strong enough to bear certain other things, and I want to tell you that this is something you must never do to me again.”

Lily sank into a chair, staring widely. “Oh, goodness!” she said. “When did he go?”

“Not until about five minutes before you came in.”

“What did he say?”

“What didn’t he?” Mrs. Dodge returned. “He had time enough!”

Upon this Lily’s expression, grown grave, became tenderly compassionate. “Was he—was he _terribly_ hurt with me, Mamma?”

“Well, I shouldn’t say so—no. No, I don’t think he was just what one might call stricken. At first he seemed rather depressed—but not for long. I don’t think that young man will ever be much depressed about anything while he has a listener. All he asks of life is an audience.”

“He talks beautifully,” Lily said, with the dreamy look her mother knew so well. “Don’t you think he does, Mamma? What did he talk about?”

“About nothing,” Mrs. Dodge answered cruelly. “I mean, of course, about himself.”