One Man in His Time | Page 6

rage was making her
unreasonable. "I didn't know you. I hadn't even been introduced to
you." It was on the tip of his tongue to add, "and I haven't been yet--"
but he checked himself in fear of unchaining the lightning. It was all
perfectly true. He had not even been introduced to the girl, and here she
was, as crude as life and as intemperate, accusing him of indifference
and falsehood. And after all, what had they done to her? No one had
been openly rude. Nothing had been said, he was sure, absolutely
nothing. It had been a "charity entertainment," and the young people of
his set had merely left her alone, that was all. The affair had been far
from exclusive--for the enterprising ladies of the Beech Tree Day
Nursery had prudently preferred a long subscription list to a limited
social circle--and in a gathering so obscurely "mixed" there were,
without doubt, a number of Gideon Vetch's admirers. Was it
maliciously arranged by Fate that Patty Vetch's social success should
depend upon the people who had elected her father to office?
"As if that mattered!"
Her scorn of his subterfuge, her mocking defiance of the sacred
formula to which he deferred, awoke in him an unfamiliar and
pleasantly piquant sensation. Through it all he was conscious of the
inner prick and sting of his disapprobation, as if the swift attraction had
passed into a mental aversion.
"As if that mattered!" he echoed gaily, "as if that mattered at all!"
Her face changed in the twilight, and it seemed to him that he saw her
for the first time with the peculiar vividness that came only in dreams
or in the hidden country within his mind. The sombre arch of the sky,

the glimmer of lights far away, the clustering shadows against the white
field of snow, the vague ghostly shapes of the sycamores--all these
things endowed her with the potency of romantic adventure. In the
winter night she seemed to him to exhale the roving sweetness of
spring. Then she spoke, and the sharp brightness of his vision was
clouded by the old sense of unreality.
"They treated me as if I were a piece of bunting or a flower in a pot,"
she said. "They left me alone in the dressing-room. No one spoke to me,
though they must have known who I was. They know, all of them, that
I am the Governor's daughter."
With a start he brought himself back from the secret places. "But I
thought you carried your head very high," he answered, "and you did
not appear to lack partners." Some small ironic demon that seemed to
dwell in his brain and yet to have no part in his real thought, moved
him to add indiscreetly: "I thought you danced every dance with Julius
Gershom. That's the name of that dark fellow who's a politician of
doubtful cast, isn't it?"
She made a petulant gesture, and the red wings in her hat vibrated like
the wings of a bird in flight. There flashed though his mind while he
watched her the memory of a cardinal he had seen in a cedar tree
against the snow-covered landscape. Strange that he could never get
away from the thought of a bird when he looked at her.
"Oh, Julius Gershom! I despise him!"
She shivered, and he asked with a sympathy he had not displayed for
mental discomforts: "Aren't you dreadfully chilled? This kind of thing
is a risk, you know. You might catch influenza--or anything."
"Yes, I might, if there is any about," she replied tartly, and he saw with
relief that her petulance had faded to dull indifference. "I was obliged
to dance with somebody," she resumed after a minute, "I couldn't sit
against the wall the whole evening, could I? And nobody else asked
me,--but I don't like him any the better for that."

"And your father? Does he dislike him also?" he asked.
"How can one tell? He says he is useful." There was a playful
tenderness in her voice.
"Useful? You mean in politics?"
She laughed. "How else in the world can any one be useful to Father? It
must be freezing."
"No, it is melting; but it is too cold to play about out of doors."
"Your teeth are chattering!" she rejoined with scornful merriment.
"They are not," he retorted indignantly. "I am as comfortable as you
are."
"Well, I'm not comfortable at all. Something--I don't know what it
was--happened to my ankle. I think I twisted it when I fell."
"And all this time you haven't said a word. We've talked about nothing
while you must have been in pain."
She shook her head as if his new solicitude irritated her, and a quiver of
pain--or was it amusement?--crossed