The Happiest Time of Their Lives | Page 7

glass over her mistress's
shoulder, and it was held in place with shining pins and hair-pins. She
lifted her head, sank back upon her heels, and raised her arms to the
offending cobweb of black meshes, while her husband went on in a
tone not absolutely denuded of reproach:
"You've been in some time."
"Yes,"--she stuck the first pin into the upholstery of the sofa,--"but
Pringle told me Mathilde had a visitor, and I thought it was my duty to
stop and be a little parental."
"A young man?"
"Yes. I forget his name--just like all these young men nowadays, alert
and a little too much at his ease, but amusing in his way. He said,
among other things--"
But Farron, it appeared, was not exclusively interested in the words of
Mathilde's visitor; for at this instant, perceiving that his wife had
disengaged herself from her veil, he sat up, caught her to him, and
pressed his lips to hers.
"O Adelaide!" he said, and it seemed to her he spoke with a sort of
agony.
She held him away from her.
"Vincent, what is it?" she asked.
"What is what?"
"Is anything wrong?"
"Between us?"

Oh, she knew that method of his, to lead her on to make definite
statements about impressions of which nothing definite could be
accurately said.
"No, I won't be pinned down," she said; "but I feel it, the way a
rheumatic feels it, when the wind goes into the east."
He continued to look at her gravely; she thought he was going to speak
when a knock came at the door. It was Pringle announcing the visit of
Mr. Lanley.
Adelaide rose slowly to her feet, and, walking to her husband's
dressing-table, repinned her hat, and caught up the little stray locks
which grew in deep, sharp points at the back of her head.
"You'll come down, too?" she said.
Farron was looking about for his coat, and as he put it on he observed
dryly:
"The young man is seeing all the family."
"Oh, he won't mind," she answered. "He probably hasn't the slightest
wish to see Mathilde alone. They both struck me as sorry when I left
them; they were running down. You can't imagine, Vin, how little
romance there is among all these young people."
"They leave it to us," he answered. This was exactly in his accustomed
manner, and as they went down-stairs together her heart felt lighter,
though the long, black, shiny pin stuck harmlessly into the upholstery
of the sofa was like a mile-stone, for afterward she remembered that her
questions had gone unanswered.
Wayne was still in the drawing-room, and Mathilde, who loved her
grandfather, was making a gentle fuss over him, a process which
consisted largely in saying: "O Grandfather! Oh, you didn't! O
_Grandfather_!"

Mr. Lanley, though a small man and now over sixty, had a distinct
presence. He wore excellent gray clothes of the same shade as his hair,
and out of this neutrality of tint his bright, brown eyes sparkled
piercingly.
He had begun life with the assumption that to be a New York Lanley
was in itself enough, a comfortable creed in which many of his
relations had obscurely lived and died. But before he was graduated
from Columbia College he began to doubt whether the profession of
being an aristocrat in a democracy was a man's job. At no time in his
life did he deny the value of birth and breeding; but he came to regard
them as a responsibility solemn and often irritating to those who did not
possess them, though he was no longer content with the current views
of his family that they were a sufficient attainment in themselves.
He was graduated from college in 1873, and after a summer at the
family place on the Hudson, hot, fertile, and inaccessible, which his
sister Alberta was at that time occupying, he had arranged a trip round
the world. September of that year brought the great panic, and swept
away many larger and solider fortunes than the Lanleys'. Mr. Lanley
decided that he must go to work, though he abandoned his traditions no
further than to study law. His ancestors, like many of the aristocrats of
the early days, had allowed their opinions of fashion to influence too
much their selection of real estate. All through the late seventies, while
his brothers and sisters were clinging sentimentally to brownstone
fronts in Stuyvesant Square or red-brick facades in Great Jones Street,
Mr. Lanley himself, unaffected by recollections of Uncle Joel's death or
grandma's marriage, had been parting with his share in such properties,
and investing along the east side of the park.
By the time he was forty he was once more a fairly rich man. He had
left the practice