The Happiest Time of Their Lives | Page 8

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 was, and, Mr. Lanley named him--named him slightly wrong, and Farron corrected him.
"I'll get you off," he said.
Adelaide looked up at her husband admiringly. This was the aspect of him that she loved best. It seemed to her like magic what Vincent could do. Her father, she thought, took it very calmly. What would have happened to him if she had not brought Farron into the family to rescue and protect? The visiting boy, she noticed, was properly impressed. She saw him give Farron quite a dog-like look as he took his departure. To Mathilde he only bowed. No arrangements had been made for a future meeting. Mathilde tried to convey to him in a prolonged look that if he would wait only five minutes all would be well, that her grandfather never paid long visits; but the door closed behind him. She became immediately overwhelmed by the fear, which had an element of desire in it, too, that her family would fall to discussing him, would question her