Alice Adams--Booth Tarkington [93]
"Mama! When he goes there almost every----"
"Yes," Mrs. Palmer said, dryly. "It seems to me I've heard somewhere that other young men have gone there 'almost every!' She doesn't last, apparently. Arthur's gallant, and he's impressionable-- but he's fastidious, and fastidiousness is always the check on impressionableness. A girl belongs to her family, too--and this one does especially, it strikes me! Arthur's very sensible; he sees more than you'd think."
Mildred looked at her hopefully. "Then you don't believe he's likely to imagine we said those things of her in any meaning way?"
At this, Mrs. Palmer laughed again. "There's one thing you seem not to have noticed, Mildred."
"What's that?"
"It seems to have escaped your attention that he never said a word."
"Mightn't that mean----?" Mildred began, but she stopped.
"No, it mightn't," her mother replied, comprehending easily. "On the contrary, it might mean that instead of his feeling it too deeply to speak, he was getting a little illumination."
Mildred rose and came to her. "WHY do you suppose he never told us he went there? Do you think he's--do you think he's pleased with her, and yet ashamed of it? WHY do you suppose he's never spoken of it?"
"Ah, that," Mrs. Palmer said,--"that might possibly be her own doing. If it is, she's well paid by what your father and I said, because we wouldn't have said it if we'd known that Arthur----" She checked herself quickly. Looking over her daughter's shoulder, she saw the two gentlemen coming from the corridor toward the wide doorway of the room; and she greeted them cheerfully. "If you've finished with each other for a while," she added, "Arthur may find it a relief to put his thoughts on something prettier than a trust company--and more fragrant."
Arthur came to Mildred.
"Your mother said at lunch that perhaps you'd----"
"I didn't say 'perhaps,' Arthur," Mrs. Palmer interrupted, to correct him. "I said she would. If you care to see and smell those lovely things out yonder, she'll show them to you. Run along, children!"
Half an hour later, glancing from a window, she saw them come from the hothouses and slowly cross the lawn. Arthur had a fine rose in his buttonhole and looked profoundly thoughtful.
CHAPTER XXI
That morning and noon had been warm, though the stirrings of a feeble breeze made weather not flagrantly intemperate; but at about three o'clock in the afternoon there came out of the southwest a heat like an affliction sent upon an accursed people, and the air was soon dead of it. Dripping negro ditch-diggers whooped with satires praising hell and hot weather, as the tossing shovels flickered up to the street level, where sluggish male pedestrians carried coats upon hot arms, and fanned themselves with straw hats, or, remaining covered, wore soaked handkerchiefs between scalp and straw. Clerks drooped in silent, big department stores, stenographers in offices kept as close to electric fans as the intervening bulk of their employers would let them; guests in hotels left the lobbies and went to lie unclad upon their beds; while in hospitals the patients murmured querulously against the heat, and perhaps against some noisy motorist who strove to feel the air by splitting it, not troubled by any fore- boding that he, too, that hour next week, might need quiet near a hospital. The "hot spell" was a true spell, one upon men's spirits; for it was so hot that, in suburban outskirts, golfers crept slowly back over the low undulations of their club lands, abandoning their matches and returning to shelter.
Even on such a day, sizzling work had to be done, as in winter. There were glowing furnaces