Play the Game! | Page 7

we shall see!" She patted her cheek and sent her out of the
room ahead of Stephen.
"Well?" he wanted to know.
"But yes, a voice, as I have said. Send her to me when her schooling is
over."
"She has a future?"
The great contralto shrugged her thick shoulders. "I fear not. I think
not."
His face lengthened. "Why?"
"Because, my friend, she will care more for living. She will not care so
greatly to get, that large child. She will only give. She has not the fine
relentless selfishness to make the artist. Well, we shall see. Life may
break her. Send her to me. In two years, yes? No, no, I will have no
thanks. It is so small a thing to do.... One grows fat and old; it is good
to have youngness near. Now, go, my friend. I shall gargle my throat
and sleep." She gave him a hot, plump hand to kiss.
Honor was not especially impressed. She rather thought, when the time
came, she should prefer to go to Stanford, but she liked her music
lessons, meanwhile. It filled up her time, the business of singing, in that

last year when she was more or less marking time and helping Jimsy
through.
Her stepfather watched her with growing amazement. So far as any one
might judge, and to Mrs. Lorimer's tearful relief, Honor's attitude
toward the last of the "Wild Kings" was at seventeen what it had been
at twelve, at six.
"I was right, wasn't I?" Stephen wanted to know.
"Well ... if you can only keep on being right about it! I'm so thankful
about her singing. That year abroad will be wonderful. She'll meet new
people ... real men."
"Young Jimsy is exhibiting every known symptom of becoming a real
man."
"Yes, but he's a King."
"That appears to be the universal opinion regarding him."
"Stephen dear, don't be ridiculous! You've always been as bewitched
about the boy as Honor herself." Mrs. Lorimer was dressed for a
luncheon and her husband, heavy-eyed and flushed of face, had cut
short his late morning sleep to drive her. She was still for him the
everlasting Helen.
"Mildred," he said, quitting the battlefield for the eternal balcony, "do
you know that you are lovelier this instant than you were the day I
married you?"
Mrs. Lorimer knew it quite well. It was due somewhat to good
management as well as luck, and she liked having the results
appreciated. She let him kiss her, carefully, because she had her hat on.
The elder James King did not seem to age with the years. "He is,"
Stephen Lorimer said facetiously, "only too well preserved!" His
manner and mode of life remained the same, save that he lost more

heavily at cards. For the first time in its history the old King place was
mortgaged. In a day when every one who was any one, as Honor's
mother put it, was getting a motor car, the Kings had none. Jimsy, of
course, rode regally in every one else's. The Lorimers had two, an
electric in which Honor's mother glided softly with her little whirring
bell from clubs to luncheons and from luncheons to teas, and a rough
and ready seven-passenger affair into which the whole tribe might be
piled, and which Honor Carmody drove better than her stepfather, who
was apt to dream at the wheel. On Sundays Stephen Lorimer took them
all, Jimsy, Honor, Billy and Ted Carmody, the Lorimer twins and the
last little Lorimer, on motor picnics to the beach. They drove to Santa
Monica, down the Palisades, up the narrow, winding, wave-washed
road to the Malibou Ranch and built a fire and broiled chops and made
coffee and baked potatoes, after their swim, ate like refugees and slept
like puppies on the sand. In the afternoon, when they came back to the
gracious old house in its wide garden on South Figueroa Street Mildred
Lorimer would be waiting, in a frock he loved, to give her husband his
tea, cool, lovely, remote from the rougher fun of life.
In the evenings--Sunday evenings--Honor held her joyous At Homes.
Three or four favored girls and a dozen boys came to supper, a loud,
hilarious meal. Takasugi, the cook, and Kada, the second boy, were
given their freedom. Honor, in the quaint aprons her stepfather had
picked up here and there over the world, pink, capable, with the
assistance of Jimsy and her biggest brothers, got supper.
It was a lively feast. Jimsy King, in one of Kada's white jackets, waited
on the table. They ate enormously, and when they had finished they
pronounced their ungodly grace--a thunderous tattoo on the table edge,
begun with palms and finished with elbows--
None-but-the-righteous-shall-be-SAVED!--
followed, while the cups and plates