Lifted Masks | Page 6

sense of the
desirableness of being slain for the lesser animal. For, cosily installed
in their favourite corner, were "the girls."
Virginia had explained to these friends some three hours before that she
could not go with them that afternoon as she must attend a musicale
some friends of her mother's were giving. Being friends of her mother's,
she expatiated, she would have to go.
Recollecting this, also for the first time remembering the musicale, she
bowed with the hauteur of self-consciousness.
Right there her friend contributed to the tragedy of a sheep's death by
dropping the yellow opera cloak. While he was stooping to pick it up
the violet velvet gown slid backward and Virginia had to steady it until
he could regain position. The staring in the corner gave way to
tittering--and no dying sheep had ever held its head more haughtily.
The death of this particular sheep proved long and painful. The legs of
Virginia's friend and the legs of the tea-table did not seem well adapted
to each other. He towered like a human mountain over the dainty thing,
twisting now this way and now that. It seemed Providence--or at least
so much of it as was represented by the management of that shop--had
never meant fat people to drink tea. The table was rendered further out
of proportion by having a large box piled on either side of it.

Expansively, and not softly, he discoursed of these things. What did
they think a fellow was to do with his _knees_? Didn't they sell tea
enough to afford any decent chairs? Did all these women pretend to
really like tea?
Virginia's sense of humour rallied somewhat as she viewed him eating
the sandwiches. Once she had called them doll-baby sandwiches; now
that seemed literal: tea-cups, petit gateau, the whole service gave the
fancy of his sitting down to a tea-party given by a little girl for her
dollies.
But after a time he fell silent, looking around the room. And when he
broke that pause his voice was different.
"These women here, all dressed so fine, nothing to do but sit around
and eat this folderol, they have it easy--don't they?"
The bitterness in it, and a faint note of wistfulness, puzzled her.
Certainly he had money.
"And the husbands of these women," he went on; "lots of 'em, I
suppose, didn't always have so much. Maybe some of these women
helped out in the early days when things weren't so easy. Wonder if the
men ever think how lucky they are to be able to get it back at 'em?"
She grew more bewildered. Wasn't he "getting it back?" The money he
had been spending that day!
"Young Lady," he said abruptly, "you must think I'm a queer one."
She murmured feeble protest.
"Yes, you must. Must wonder what I want with all this stuff, don't
you?"
"Why, it's for your wife, isn't it?" she asked, startled.
"Oh yes, but you must wonder. You're a shrewd one, Young Lady;
judging the thing by me, you must wonder."

Virginia was glad she was not compelled to state her theory. Loud and
common and impossible were terms which had presented themselves,
terms which she had fought with kind and good-natured and generous.
Their purchases she had decided were to be used, not for a knock, but
as a crashing pound at the door of the society of his town. For her part,
Virginia hoped the door would come down.
"And if you knew that probably this stuff would never be worn at all,
that ten to one it would never do anything more than lie round on
chairs--then you would think I was queer, wouldn't you?"
She was forced to admit that that would seem rather strange.
"Young Lady, I believe I'll tell you about it. Never do talk about it to
hardly anybody, but I feel as if you and I were pretty well
acquainted--we've been through so much together."
She smiled at him warmly; there was something so real about him
when he talked that way.
But his look then frightened her. It seemed for an instant as though he
would brush the tiny table aside and seize some invisible thing by the
throat. Then he said, cutting off each word short: "Young Lady, what
do you think of this? I'm worth more 'an a million dollars--and my wife
gets up at five o'clock every morning to do washing and scrubbing."
"Oh, it's not that she has to," he answered her look, "but she thinks she
has to. See? Once we were poor. For twenty years we were poor as dirt.
Then she did have to do things like that. Then I struck it. Or rather, it
struck me. Oil. Oil on a bit of land I