The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig | Page 9

get you, Grant, or any man, I'd not be silly enough to fancy my character or lack of it would affect him. That isn't what wins men--is it?"
"You and Josh Craig have a most uncomfortable way of answering people's thoughts," said Arkwright. "Now, how did you guess I was thinking mean things about you?"
"For the same reason that Mr. Craig is able to guess what's going on in your head."
"And that reason is--"
She laughed mockingly. "Because I know you, Grant Arkwright--you, the meanest-generous man, and the most generous-mean man the Lord ever permitted. The way to make you generous is to give you a mean impulse; the way to make you mean is to set you to fearing you're in danger of being generous."
"There's a bouquet with an asp coiled in it," said Arkwright, pleased; for with truly human vanity he had accepted the compliment and had thrown away the criticism. "I'll go bring Josh Craig." "No, not to-night," said Miss Severence, with a sudden compression of the lips and a stern, almost stormy contraction of the brows.
"Please don't do that, Rita," cried Arkwright. "It reminds me of your grandmother."
The girl's face cleared instantly, and all overt signs of strength of character vanished in her usual expression of sweet, reserved femininity. "Bring him to-morrow," said she. "A little late, please. I want others to be there, so that I can study him unobserved." She laughed. "This is a serious matter for me. My time is short, and my list of possible eligibles less extended than I could wish." And with a satiric smile and a long, languorous, coquettish glance, she waved him away and waved the waiting Jackie into his place.
Arkwright found Craig clear of "Patsy" Raymond and against the wall near the door. He was obviously unconscious of himself, of the possibility that he might be observed. His eyes were pouncing from blaze of jewels to white neck, to laughing, sensuous face, to jewels again or to lithe, young form, scantily clad and swaying in masculine arm in rhythm with the waltz. It gave Arkwright a qualm of something very like terror to note the contrast between his passive figure and his roving eyes with their wolfish gleam--like Blucher, when he looked out over London and said: "God! What a city to sack!"
Arkwright thought Josh was too absorbed to be aware of his approach; but as soon as he was beside him Josh said: "You were right about that apartment of mine. It's a squalid hole. Six months ago, when I got my seventy-five hundred a year, I thought I was rich. Rich? Why, that woman there has ten years' salary on her hair. All the money I and my whole family ever saw wouldn't pay for the rings on any one of a hundred hands here. It makes me mad and it makes me greedy."
"'I warned you," said Arkwright.
Craig wheeled on him. "You don't--can't--understand. You're like all these people. Money is your god. But I don't want money, I want power--to make all these snobs with their wealth, these millionaires, these women with fine skins and beautiful bodies, bow down before me--that's what I want!"
Arkwright laughed. "Well, it's up to you, Joshua."
Craig tossed his Viking head. "Yes, it's up to me, and I'll get what I want--the people and I.... Who's THAT frightful person?"
Into the room, only a few feet from them, advanced an old woman-- very old, but straight as a projectile. She carried her head high, and her masses of gray-white hair, coiled like a crown, gave her the seeming of royalty in full panoply. There was white lace over her black velvet at the shoulders; her train swept yards behind her. She was bearing a cane, or rather a staff, of ebony; but it suggested, not decrepitude, but power--perhaps even a weapon that might be used to enforce authority should occasion demand. In her face, in her eyes, however, there was that which forbade the supposition of any revolt being never so remotely possible.
As she advanced across the ballroom, dancing ceased before her and around her, and but for the noise of the orchestra there would have been an awed and painful silence. Mrs. Burke's haughty daughter-in-law, with an expression of eager desire to conciliate and to please, hastened forward and conducted the old lady to a gilt armchair in the center of the dais, across the end of the ballroom. It was several minutes before the gayety was resumed, and then it seemed to have lost the abandon which the freely- flowing champagne had put into it.
"WHO is that frightful person?" repeated Craig. He was scowling like a king angered and insulted by the advent of an eclipsing rival.
"Grandma,"' replied Arkwright, his flippancy carefully keyed low.
"I've never seen a more dreadful person!" exclaimed Craig