A Fool For Love | Page 4

back with his welcome.
The extension table in the open rear third of the private car was closed to its smallest dimensions, and the movable furnishings were disposed about the compartment to make it a comfortable lounging room.
Mrs. Carteret was propped among the cushions of a divan with a book. Her daughter occupied the undivided half of a tete-a-tete chair with a blond athlete in a clerical coat and a reversed collar. Miss Virginia was sitting alone at a window, but she rose and came to greet the visitor.
"How good of you to take pity on us!" she said, giving him her hand. Then she put him at one with the others: "Aunt Martha you have met; also Cousin Bessie. Let me present you to Mr. Calvert: Cousin Billy, this is Mr. Adams, who is responsible in a way for many of my Boston-learned gaucheries."
Aunt Martha closed the book on her finger. "My dear Virginia!" she protested in mild deprecation; and Adams laughed and shook hands with the Reverend William Calvert and made Virginia's peace all in the same breath.
"Don't apologize for Miss Virginia, Mrs. Carteret. We were very good friends in Boston, chiefly, I think, because I never objected when she wanted to--er--to take a rise out of me." Then to Virginia: "I hope I don't intrude?"
"Not in the least. Didn't I just say you were good to come? Uncle Somerville tells us we are passing through the famous Golden Belt,--whatever that may be,--and recommends an easy-chair and a window. But I haven't seen anything but stubble-fields--dismally wet stubble-fields at that. Won't you sit down and help me watch them go by?"
Adams placed a chair for her and found one for himself.
"'Uncle Somerville'--am I to have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Somerville Darrah?"
Miss Virginia's laugh was non-committal.
"Quien sabe?" she queried, airing her one Westernism before she was fairly in the longitude of it. "Uncle Somerville is a law unto himself. He had a lot of telegrams and things at Kansas City, and he is locked in his den with Mr. Jastrow, dictating answers by the dozen, I suppose."
"Oh, these industry colonels!" said Adams. "Don't their toilings make you ache in sheer sympathy sometimes?"
"No, indeed," was the prompt rejoinder; "I envy them. It must be fine to have large things to do, and to be able to do them."
"Degenerate scion of a noble race!" jested Adams. "What ancient Carteret of them all would have compromised with the necessities by becoming a captain of industry?"
"It wasn't their metier, or the metier of their times," said Miss Virginia with conviction. "They were sword-soldiers merely because that was the only way a strong man could conquer in those days. Now it is different, and a strong man fights quite as nobly in another field--and deserves quite as much honor."
"Think so? I don't agree with you--as to the fighting, I mean. I like to take things easy. A good club, a choice of decent theaters, the society of a few charming young women like--"
She broke him with a mocking laugh.
"You were born a good many centuries too late, Mr. Adams; you would have fitted so beautifully, into decadent Rome."
"No--thanks. Twentieth-century America, with the commercial frenzy taken out of it, is good enough for me. I was telling Winton a little while ago--"
"Your friend of the Kansas City station platform?" she interrupted. "Mightn't you introduce us a little less informally?"
"Beg pardon, I'm sure--yours and Jack's: Mr. John Winton, of New York and the world at large, familiarly known to his intimates--and they are precious few--as 'Jack W.' As I was about to say--"
But she seemed to find a malicious satisfaction in breaking in upon him.
"'Mr. John Winton': it's a pretty name as names go, but it isn't as strong as he is. He is an 'industry colonel,' isn't he? He looks it."
The Bostonian avenged himself at Winton's expense for the unwelcome interruption.
"So much for your woman's intuition," he laughed. "Speaking of idlers, there is your man to the dotting of the 'i'; a dilettante raised to the nth power."
Miss Carteret's short upper lip curled in undisguised scorn.
"I like men who do things," she asserted with pointed emphasis; whereupon the talk drifted eastward to Boston, and Winton was ignored until Virginia, having exhausted the reminiscent vein, said, "You are going on through to Denver?"
"To Denver and beyond," was the reply. "Winton has a notion of hibernating in the mountains--fancy it; in the dead of winter!--and he has persuaded me to go along. He sketches a little, you know."
"Oh, so he is an artist?" said Virginia, with interest newly aroused.
"No," said Adams gloomily, "he isn't an artist--isn't much of anything, I'm sorry to say. Worse than all, he doesn't know his grandfather's middle name. Told me so himself."
"That is inexcusable--in a dilettante," said Miss Virginia mockingly. "Don't you