White Ashes | Page 2

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 for you," she said. "There are so many things he could do if he chose."
"He was good enough to offer me a job as conductor on one of his street cars, the last time I mentioned the subject," the other responded cheerfully. "But I told him