The Chauffeur and the Chaperon | Page 3

invest my motor-boat," I said. "I'm going a cruise in it, and so are you."
"My darling girl, I hope you haven't gone out of your mind from the blow!" There was alarm and solicitude in Phil's accents. "When you've slipped on your dressing-gown and come out we'll talk things over."
"Nothing can make me change my mind," I answered. "It's been made up a whole minute. Everything is clear now. Providence has put a motor-boat into our hands as a means of seeing life, and to console us for not being Captain Noble's heiresses, as Mrs. Keithley wrote we were going to be. I will not fly in Providence's face. I haven't been brought up to it by you. We are going to have the time of our lives with that motor-boat."
The door shook with Phil's disapproval. "You do talk like an American," she flung at me through the panel.
"That's good. I'm glad adoption hasn't ruined me," I retorted. "But could you--just because you're English--contentedly give up our beautiful plans, and settle down as if nothing had happened--with your type-writer?"
"I hope I have the strength of mind to bear it," faltered Phyllis. "We've only had two days of hoping for better things."
"We've only lived for two days. There's no going back; there can't be. We've burned our ships behind us, and must take to the motor-boat."
"Dearest, I don't think this is a proper time for joking--and you in your bath, too," protested Phil, mildly.
"I'm out of it now. But I refuse to be out of everything. Miss Phyllis Rivers--why, your very name's a prophecy!--I formally invite you to take a trip with me in my motor-boat. It may cost us half, if not more, of your part of the legacy; but I will merely borrow from you the wherewithal to pay our expenses. Somehow--afterwards--I'll pay it back, even if I have to re?stablish communication with heavenly shop-girls and villainous duchesses. Oh, Phil, we'll get some fun out of this, after all. Anyhow, we shall go on living--for a few weeks. What matter if, after that, the deluge?"
"You speak exactly as if you were planning to be an adventuress," said Phyllis, coldly.
"I should love to be one," said I. "I've always thought it must be more fun than anything--till the last chapter. We'll both embark--in the motor-boat--on a brief but bright career as adventuresses."
With that, before she could give me an answer, I opened the door and walked out in my dressing-gown, so suddenly that she almost pitched forward into the bath. Phyllis, heard from behind a cold, unsympathetic door, and Phyllis seen in all her virginal Burne-Jones attractiveness, might as well be two different girls. If you carried on a conversation with Miss Rivers on ethics and conventionalities and curates, and things of that kind from behind a door, without having first peeped round to see what she was like, you would do the real Phil an injustice.
There is nothing pink and soft and dimpled about Phyllis's views of life (or, at least, what she supposes her views to be); but about Phyllis in flesh and blood there is more of that than anything else; which is one reason why she has been a constant fountain of joy to my heart as well as my sense of humor, ever since her clever Herefordshire father married my pretty Kentucky mother.
Phil would like, if published, to be a Sunday-school book, and a volume of "Good Form for High Society" rolled into one; but she is really more like a treatise on flower-gardens, and a recipe for making Devonshire junket with clotted cream.
Not that she's a regular beauty, or that she goes in for any speciality by way of features or eyelashes, or hair, or a figure, or anything really sensational of that sort, as I do in one or two directions. But there's a rose and pearl and gold-brown adorableness about her; you like her all the better for some little puritanical quaintnesses; and if you are an Englishman or an American girl, you long to bully her.
She is taller than I am (as she ought to be, with Burne-Jones nose and eyes), but this morning, when I sprang at her out of the bath-room, like a young tigress escaped from its cage on its ruthless way to a motor-boat, she looked so piteous and yielding, that I felt I could carry her--and my point at the same time--half across the world.
She had made cream eggs for breakfast, poor darling (I could have sobbed on them), and actually coffee for me, because she knows I love it. I didn't worry her any more until an egg and a cup of tea were on duty to keep her strength up, and then I poured plans, which I made as I went on, upon her