it was the late end of the afternoon when peter stepped off the train at the lessing's station and into the trap that was waiting for him. he learned from lessing's man that the family had been kept by the tennis match at maplemont and he was to come on to the house at his leisure. that being the case, peter took the reins himself and made a long detour through the dust-smelling country roads, so that it was quite six when he reached the house, and everybody dressing for the early dinner.
he made so hasty a change himself in his fear of being late, that when he came down to the living-room in a quarter of an hour there was no one there to meet him. absorbed particles of the bright day gave off in the dusk and made it golden. there were honeysuckles on the pergola outside, and in the room beyond a girl singing[pg 125] a quiet air, half-trilled and half-forgotten. he heard the singer moving toward him through the vacant house, of which the doors stood open to the evening coolness, and the click of the electric button as she passed, and saw the rooms burst one by one into the bloom of shaded lights. so she came, busy with the hummed fragments of her songs, and turned the lamp full on peter before she was aware of him, but she was not half so much disconcerted.
"you must be mr. weatheral," she said. "mrs. lessing sent me to say she expected you. i am miss goodward."
she gave him her hand for a gracious moment before she turned to what had brought her so early down, the arrangement of two great bowls of wild ferns and vines which a servant had just placed on either end of the low mantlepiece.
"we brought them in from archer's glen on the way home," she told him over her shoulder, her hands busy with deft, quick touches. she was all in white, which took a pearly lustre from the lamps, and for the moment she was as beautiful as peter believed her. a tiny unfinished[pg 126] phrase of the song floated half consciously from her lips as a bubble. "they look better so, don't you think?" as she stood off to measure the effect, it seemed to peter that the spirit of the house had received him; it was so men dream of home-coming, without sensible displacement of a life going on in it, lovely and secure, as a bark slips into some still pool to its moorings. he yielded himself naturally to the impersonal intimacy of her welcome and all the sordid ways of his life led up to her.
it was not all at once he saw it so. he kept watching her all that evening as one watches a perfect thing, a bird or a dancer, sensing in the slim turn of her ankle, the lithe throat, the delicate perfume that she shook from her summer draperies, so many strokes of a master hand. she was evidently on terms with the lessings which permitted her acceptance of him at the family valuation, but the perfection of her method was such that it never quite sunk his identity as the junior partner in his character of uncle peter.
this was a nuance, if peter had but known it, which eunice goodward could have no more[pg 127] missed than she could have eaten with her knife. she had been trained to the finer social adjustments as to a cult: clarice's game of persuading life to present itself with a smiling countenance, played all in the key of personal relations. it was as if nature, having tried her hand at a great many ordinary persons, each with one gift of sympathy or graciousness, had culled and compacted the best of them into eunice goodward; which was precisely the case except that peter through his unfamiliarity with the best society couldn't be expected to know that the intelligence which had put together so much perfectness was no less calculating than that which goes to the matching of a string of pearls. all that he got from it was precisely all that he was meant to receive—namely, the conviction that she couldn't have charmed him so had she not been altogether charming.
and as yet he did not know what had happened to him. he thought, when he awoke in the morning to a new realization of the satisfactoriness of living, that the fresh air had done it, the breath of the nearby untrimmed forest, the loose-leaved roses pressed against the pane[pg 128] beginning to give off warm odours in the sun. then he came out on the terrace and saw eunice goodward, looking like a thin slip of the morning herself, in a blue dress buttoned close to her figure with wide white buttons and a tiny froth of white at the short sleeves and open throat. across her bosom it was caught with a blue stone set in dull silver, which served also to hold in place a rose that matched the morning tint of her skin. she was talking with the lessings' chauffeur as peter came up with her and all her accents were of dismay. they were to have driven over to maplemont that afternoon, she explained to peter, for the last of the tennis sets, and now gilmore had just told her that the car must go to the shop for two or three days. she was so much more charming in the way she forgave gilmore for her evident disappointment that he, being a young man and troubled by a sense of moral responsibility, was quite overcome by it.
"but, nonsense"; peter was certain "there is always something can be done to cars." there was, gilmore assured him, but it took time to do it, and to-morrow would be sunday.[pg 129] "if you'd only thought to come down in the motor yourself, sir——" the chauffeur reproached him. the truth was that peter hadn't a car of his own and gilmore knew it. there was an electric runabout which had gone down to bloombury with ellen, and a serviceable roadster which was part of the office equipment, but the rich mr. weatheral had never taken the pains to own a private car. now, as he hastily drew out his watch, it occurred to him that lessing's chauffeur was a fellow of more perspicuity than he had given him credit for. the two men communicated wordlessly across the cool width of the terrace steps.
"at what hour," peter wished to know, "would we have to leave here to reach maplemont in good time? then if you can be ready to leave the moment my car gets here...." he excused himself to go to the telephone; half an hour later when he joined the family at breakfast he had discovered some of the things that, besides making more money with it, can be done with money.
the knowledge suited him like his own garment, as if it had been lying ready for him to[pg 130] put on when the occasion required it, and now became him admirably. he perceived it to be a proper male function to produce easily and with precision whatever utterly charming young ladies might reasonably require. he appreciated miss goodward's acceptance of it as she came down from the house bewilderingly tied into soft veils for the afternoon's drive, as a part of her hall-marked fineness. if she couldn't help knowing, taking in the car's glittering newness from point to point, that its magnificence had materialized out of her simple wish for it, she at least didn't allow him to think it was any more than she would have expected of him. so completely did he yield himself to this new sense of the fitness of things that it came as a shock to have her, as soon as they had joined themselves to the holiday-coloured crowd that streamed and shifted under the bright boughs of maplemont, reft from him by friendly, compelling voices, and particularly by burton henderson, who played singles and went about bareheaded and singularly self-possessed. it was unthinkable to peter that, in view of her recently discovered[pg 131] importance in putting him at rights with himself, that he hadn't arranged with her that they were to be more together. for the moment it was almost a derogation of her charm that she shouldn't herself have recognized by some overt act her extraordinary opportunity. and then in a moment more he perceived that she had recognized it. he had only to wait, as he saw, and he would find himself pleasantly beside her, and at each renewal of the excluding companionship, he was more subtly aware that it was accorded not to anything he was but to what she had it in her power so beautifully to make of him.
so perfectly did she strike the key with him, when, in the intervals of the afternoon's entertainment they found themselves sitting or walking together, that he could not have imagined her to have been out of it, not even in a rather long session after tea with burton henderson among the rhododendrons, in which it was apparent from the young man's manner that she hadn't at least been in tune with him. it occurred just as they were leaving and served in the flutter of delay it occasioned to fix the[pg 132] attention of all their party on eunice coming out of the shrubbery with young henderson in her wake, batting aimlessly at the grass-tops with the racquet which he still carried. there was an air of sulkiness about him which caused mrs. lessing enigmatically to say that eunice was altogether too good to that young man. to which lessing's "well, if she is, he doesn't seem to appreciate," served also to confirm peter in the rôle which the effect she produced on himself had created for him. he at least appreciated the way in which she had made him feel himself the distributer of benefits, to a degree which made it almost obligatory of her to go on with it.
successfully as miss goodward had kept for peter during the day his new relation to his wealth on the one hand and society on the other, she seemed that evening quite to have abandoned him. while the family was having coffee on the terrace after dinner, she slipped away from them to reappear lower down among the rose trees, her white dress gathering all that was left of the lingering glow. the junior partner, feeling himself never so much junior,[pg 133] though he knew it was but a scant year or two, sat on through lessing's inconsequential comment on business and the day's adventures, hearing not a word; now and then his chair creaked with the intensity of his preoccupation. it grew dusk and the lamps blossomed in the house behind them; presently clarice slipped away to the children and the evening damp fell over the rose garden. peter could endure it no longer. he believed as he rose suddenly with a stretching movement that he meant merely to relieve the tension of sitting by pacing up and down; it was unaccountable therefore that he should find himself at the edge of the terrace. he wondered why on earth clarice couldn't have helped him a little, and then as if in response to his deep instinctive demand upon her, he heard her call softly to her husband from the door of the house. at the scrape of julian's chair on the terrace tiling, peter cast away his cigar and hurried into the dusk of the garden.
he found her at last by the herbacious border, keeping touch with the flight of a sphinx-head moth along the tall white rockets of phlox. peter whipped out his handkerchief and[pg 134] dropped it deftly over the fluttering wings. in a moment he had stilled them in his hand. miss goodward cried out to him:
"you've spoiled his happy evening!"
"he's not hurt...." peter laid the moth gently on a feathery flower head, and the tiny whispering whirr began again. "i thought you wanted him."
"i did—but not to catch him," miss goodward explained. "i wanted just to want him."
"ah, i'm afraid i'm one of those people with whom to want a thing is to go after it," peter justified himself.
"so one gathers from what one hears." she brushed him as lightly with the compliment as with the wings of a moth. "i wasn't really wanting him so much as i was wanting to be him for a while. just to pass from one lovely hour to another and nothing to pay! but we humans have always to pay something."
"or some one pays for us."
"well, isn't that worse ... taking it out of somebody else?"
"i'm not so sure; some people enjoy paying.[pg 135] it's not a bad feeling, i assure you: being able to pay. haven't you found that out yet?"
"not in trethgarten square." mrs. lessing had managed to let him know during the day that her guest had been reared within the sacred pale of those first families in whom the choice stock of humanness is refined by being maintained at precisely the same level for at least three generations.
"in trethgarten square," peter reminded her, "we are told that you settle your account just by being; that you manage somehow to become something so superior and delectable that the rest of us are willing to pay for the privilege of having you about." he would have liked to add that recently, no later in fact than the evening before, he had come to think that this was so, but as she hesitated in her walk beside him, he saw that she was concerned in putting the case to herself quite as much as to him.
"it's not that exactly; more perhaps that our whole thought about life is to live it so that there won't be anything to pay. we have to manage to add things up like a column of figures with[pg 136] nothing to carry. perhaps that's why we get so little out of it."
"don't you?"—he was genuinely surprised, "get anything out of it, i mean."
"oh, but i'm a selfish beast, i suppose! i want more—more!" they swung as she spoke into a broad beam of yellow light raying out from the library window, and he saw by it that with the word she flung out her arms with a lovely upward motion that lifted his mood to the crest of audacity.
"if you keep on looking like that," peter assured her, "you'll get it." he was struck dumb immediately after with apprehension. it sounded daring, like a thing said in a book; but she took it as it came lightly off the tip of his impulse, laughing. "yes ... the great difficulty is choosing which of so many things one really wants." they walked on then in silence, the air darkling after the sudden shaft of illumination, the light folds of her scarf brushing his sleeve. peter was considering how he might say, without precipitation, how suddenly she had limited and defined all the things that he wanted by expressing them[pg 137] so perfectly in herself, when she interrupted him.
"there's our moth again," she pointed; "he settles it by taking all of them. it's a possibility denied to us."
"even he," peter insisted, "has to reckon with such incidents as my dropping on him just now. i might have wanted him for a collection."
"oh, if he takes us into account it must be as men used to think of the gods walking." suddenly the familiar beds and hedges widened for peter; they stretched warm and tender to the borders of youth and the unmatched wonder.... it was so they had talked when they walked together in the garden which was about the house....
for some time after miss goodward left him peter remained walking up and down, thinking of many things and unable to think of them clearly because of a pleasant blur of excitement in his brain. as he came finally back to the house he heard the lessings talking from behind one of the open windows.
"my word, that car was never out of the shop before," julian was saying. "he's a goner!"[pg 138]
"and that lovely, dusty, brown colour that goes so well with her hair! who would have thought peter would be so noticing."
"it couldn't have cost him a cent under seven thousand." julian was certain, "and carrying it off with me the way he did—bought the six cylinder after all, he had.... i'll bet old peter don't know a cylinder from a stomach pump."
clarice was evidently going on with her own line of thought. "it will be the best thing that ever happened to eunice if she can only be got to see it."
"well, if she don't her mother will see it for her." lessing's voice died into a subdued chuckle as peter passed under it on the dew-damp lawn, but there was no revelation in it for the junior partner. he had already found out what was the matter with him and what he meant to do about it.
