White Ashes | Page 2

pleasing personal qualities she might have
possessed. To him she was the daughter of a magnate who lived in a
large house on Beacon Street and whose traction company gave its
stockholders (whatever else might be said of its passengers) very little
cause for complaint. To a young man whose creditors would have
harried him nearly mad but for the fact that for several years past he
had been able to secure scarcely any credit from any one, Isabel
assumed the calm and quiet attractiveness of a well-managed national
bank. And had she seriously considered marrying him, she could have
confidently relied on his loyalty so long as Mr. Hurd could sign his
name to a check. This reflection might not have been a flattering one to
her, but it should have been a comforting one. Had it been beauty that
first attracted him, he might have wavered after the freshness faded, but
the chance that the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company
would be obliged to discontinue its liberal dividends was so remote as
to be negligible. And Wilkinson, at all events, was consistent.
Barnes, the stout butler, assisted him to remove his overcoat and took
his hat, and he stepped unannounced into the drawing room.
John M. Hurd's drawing room reflected the substance of its master in so
far that it appeared to represent lavish resources. In the rather dim light,
the deep rose tapestry curtains, the really beautiful rugs on the highly

polished floor, the heavy, stately furniture, and the big central crystal
chandelier all made for dignity. Even the broad-framed pictures on the
wall, although there were two or three old masters among them, looked
above suspicion. Miss Hurd was seated near the window, talking to two
young men who seemed on terms of informality in the house.
"Shall we have tea?" she asked, when her step-cousin had seated
himself.
"By all means--but I hope you don't mean it literally," replied
Wilkinson, promptly. "Tea, by all means, if necessary to preserve the
conventionalities, but especially anything and everything else you like."
He turned to Bennington Cole. "I feel rather proud of my success in this
establishment, Benny. A year ago Isabel would have handed you out
nothing except a couple of anemic sugar wafers with the cup; now you
can get English muffins and all kinds of sandwiches and éclairs--which
is at least a little better."
"Congratulate you," said Cole, with a laugh.
"Oh, I haven't finished," Wilkinson went on. "The next step in my
missionary movement will be a popular demand for chicken salad.
That's a big forward step---you eat it with a fork--and from there it will
be an easy gradation up the carte du jour until finally I triumph in the
introduction of real food, so that when you ask for tea in this house you
will get a full portion of porterhouse steak and French fried potatoes.
But don't think me hypercritical, Isabel," he added. "Even now I can
usually manage to part from you without reeling, faint with hunger,
down your front steps and collapsing at their feet--I should say foot."
"I'm extremely relieved to hear you say so," replied the girl.
The third young man, who alone of the three wore a frock coat, and
who retained on his hand his left glove while his right was laid
smoothly across his knee, now entered the conversation.
"You talk as though you were really hungry, Charlie," he said.

"Well, I am, rather," the other rejoined. "And I can tell you, Stan, that if
you lived in my boarding house, you never could have completed that
charming still-life effect of the platter of fish that I recently saw in your
studio. You would have eaten your model before you could have
finished the picture."
"Why don't you change your boarding house, Charlie, if it's so bad?"
Miss Hurd inquired.
"I did," her cousin replied. "Of boarding houses within my sadly
circumscribed means there is a very wide but strictly numerical choice.
They are all exactly alike, you understand. I changed once, twice,
twenty, forty times. I grew positively dizzy caroming from one inferior
boarding house to another. You would have thought I was trying a
peripatetic preventative for dyspepsia. Finally the mental strain of
remembering where to go home at night became so irksome that I
decided to leave bad enough alone and stay where I was--one eleven
Mount Vernon Place--at the sign of the three aces. It's no worse, you
see, than anywhere else--it's merely a matter of living down to my
painfully limited income. But," he added thoughtfully, "I sincerely wish
some philanthropist would put me to the trouble of moving again."
The two men laughed at Wilkinson's frank exposition, but his cousin
frowned a little.
"I wish father would do something