The Happiest Time of Their Lives | Page 8

of law to become the president of the Peter Stuyvesant
Trust Company, for which he had been counsel. After fifteen years he
had retired from this, too, and had become, what he insisted nature had
always intended him to be, a gentleman of leisure. He retained a
directorship in the trust company, was a trustee of his university, and
was a thorny and inquiring member of many charitable boards.

He prided himself on having emancipated himself from the ideas of his
own generation. It bored him to listen to his cousins lamenting the
vulgarities of modern life, the lack of elegance in present-day English,
or to hear them explain as they borrowed money from him the sort of
thing a gentleman could or could not do for a living. But on the subject
of what a lady might do he still held fixed and unalterable notions; nor
did he ever find it tiresome to hear his own daughter expound the
axioms of this subject with a finality he had taught her in her youth.
Having freed himself from fine-gentlemanism, he had quite
unconsciously fallen the more easily a prey to fine-ladyism; all his
conservatism had gone into that, as a man, forced to give up his garden,
might cherish one lovely potted plant.
At a time when private schools were beginning to flourish once more
he had been careful to educate Adelaide entirely at home with
governesses. Every summer he took her abroad, and showed her, and
talked with her about, books, pictures, and buildings; he inoculated her
with such fundamentals as that a lady never wears imitation lace on her
underclothes, and the past of the verb to "eat" is pronounced to rhyme
with "bet." She spoke French and German fluently, and could read
Italian. He considered her a perfectly educated woman. She knew
nothing of business, political economy, politics, or science. He himself
had never been deeply interested in American politics, though very
familiar with the lives of English statesmen. He was a great reader of
memoirs and of the novels of Disraeli and Trollope. Of late he had
taken to motoring.
He kissed his daughter and nodded--a real New York nod--to his
son-in-law.
"I've come to tell you, Adelaide," he began.
"Such a thing!" murmured Mathilde, shaking her golden head above the
cup of tea she was making for him, making in just the way he liked; for
she was a little person who remembered people's tastes.
"I thought you'd rather hear it than read it in the papers."

"Goodness, Papa, you talk as if you had been getting married!"
"No." Mr. Lanley hesitated, and looked up at her brightly. "No; but I
think I did have a proposal the other day."
"From Mrs. Baxter?" asked Adelaide. This was almost war. Mrs.
Baxter was a regal and possessive widow from Baltimore whose long
and regular visits to Mr. Lanley had once occasioned his family some
alarm, though time had now given them a certain institutional safety.
Her father was not flurried by the reference.
"No," he said; "though she writes me, I'm glad to say, that she is
coming soon."
"You don't tell me!" said Adelaide. The cream of the winter season was
usually the time Mrs. Baxter selected for her visit.
Her father did not notice her.
"If Mrs. Baxter should ever propose to me," he went on thoughtfully, "I
shouldn't refuse. I don't think I should have the--"
"The chance?" said his daughter.
"I was going to say the fortitude. But this," he went on, "was an elderly
cousin, who expressed a wish to come and be my housekeeper. Perhaps
matrimony was not intended. Mathilde, my dear, how does one tell
nowadays whether one is being proposed to or not?"
In this poignant and unexpected crisis Mathilde turned slowly and
painfully crimson. How did one tell? It was a question which at the
moment was anything but clear to her.
"I should always assume it in doubtful cases, sir," said Wayne, very
distinctly. He and Mathilde did not even glance at each other.
"It wasn't your proposal that you came to announce to us, though, was
it, Papa?" said Adelaide.

"No," answered Mr. Lanley. "The fact is, I've been arrested."
"Again?"
"Yes; most unjustly, most unjustly." His brows contracted, and then
relaxed at a happy memory. "It's the long, low build of the car. It looks
so powerful that the police won't give you a chance. It was nosing
through the park--"
"At about thirty miles an hour," said Farron.
"Well, not a bit over thirty-five. A lovely morning, no one in sight, I
may have let her out a little. All of a sudden one of these mounted
fellows jumped out from the bushes along the bridle-path. They're a
fine-looking lot, Vincent."
Farron asked who the judge