The Rivet in Grandfathers Neck | Page 6

girl did that.
* * * * *
It is honesty's part to give you the man no better than he was. Lichfield
at large had pampered him; many women had loved him; and above all,
Miss Agatha had spoiled him. After fifteen years of being the pivot
about which the economy of a household revolves, after fifteen years of
being the inevitable person whose approval must be secured before any
domestic alteration, however trivial, may be considered, no mortal man
may hope to remain a paragon of unselfishness.
Colonel Musgrave joyed in the society of women. But he classed
them--say, with the croquettes adorned with pink paper frills which
were then invariably served at the suppers of the Lichfield German
Club,--as acceptable enough, upon a conscious holiday, but wholly
incongruous with the slippered ease of home. When you had an
inclination for feminine society, you shaved and changed your clothes
and thought up an impromptu or so against emergency, and went forth
to seek it. That was natural; but to have a petticoated young person

infesting your house, hourly, was as preposterous as ice-cream soda at
breakfast.
The metaphor set him off at a tangent. He wondered if this Patricia
person could not (tactfully) be induced to take her bath after breakfast,
as Agatha did? after he had his? Why, confound the girl, he was not
responsible for there being only one bathroom in the house! It was
necessary for him to have his bath and be at the Library by nine o'clock.
This interloper must be made to understand as much.
The colonel reached the Library undecided as to whether Miss
Stapylton had better breakfast in her room, or if it would be entirely
proper for her to come to the table in one of those fluffy lace-trimmed
garments such as Agatha affected at the day's beginning?
The question was a nice one. It was not as though servants were willing
to be bothered with carrying trays to people's rooms; he knew what
Agatha had to say upon that subject. It was not as though he were the
chit's first cousin, either. He almost wished himself in the decline of life,
and free to treat the girl paternally.
And so he fretted all that afternoon.
* * * * *
Then, too, he reflected that it would be very awkward if Agatha should
be unwell while this Patricia person was in the house. Agatha in her
normal state was of course the kindliest and cheeriest gentlewoman in
the universe, but any physical illness appeared to transform her nature
disastrously. She had her "attacks," she "felt badly" very often
nowadays, poor dear; and how was a Patricia person to be expected to
make allowances for the fact that at such times poor Agatha was
unavoidably a little cross and pessimistic?

V
Yet Colonel Musgrave strolled into his garden, later, with a tolerable

affectation of unconcern. Women, after all, he assured himself, were
necessary for the perpetuation of the species; and, resolving for the
future to view these weakly, big-hipped and slope-shouldered
makeshifts of Nature's with larger tolerance, he cocked his hat at a
devil-may-carish angle, and strode up the walk, whistling jauntily and
having, it must be confessed, to the unprejudiced observer very much
the air of a sheep in wolf's clothing.
"At worst," he was reflecting, "I can make love to her. They, as a rule,
take kindlily enough to that; and in the exercise of hospitality a host
must go to all lengths to divert his guests. Failure is not permitted...."
Then She came to him.
She came to him across the trim, cool lawn, leisurely, yet with a
resilient tread that attested the vigor of her slim young body. She was
all in white, diaphanous, ethereal, quite incredibly incredible; but as she
passed through the long shadows of the garden--fire-new, from the
heart of the sunset, Rudolph Musgrave would have sworn to you,--the
lacy folds and furbelows and semi-transparencies that clothed her were
now tinged with gold, and now, as a hedge or flower-bed screened her
from the horizontal rays, were softened into multitudinous graduations
of grays and mauves and violets.
"Failure is not permitted," he was repeating in his soul....
"You're Cousin Rudolph, aren't you?" she asked. "How perfectly
entrancing! You see until to-day I always thought that if I had been
offered the choice between having cousins or appendicitis I would have
preferred to be operated on."
And Rudolph Musgrave noted, with a delicious tingling somewhere
about his heart, that her hair was really like the reflection of a sunset in
rippling waters,--only many times more beautiful, of course,--and that
her mouth was an inconsiderable trifle, a scrap of sanguine curves, and
that her eyes were purple glimpses of infinity.
Then he observed that his