“She was a dear,” Mrs. Osborne said, dealing the cards with a twist of deft white wrists, “but so casual about her clothes. The artistic instinct, I suppose. All the Nettletons are dowdy. I met her at Capri, before the return of the Prodigal Husband, and she looked like an Englishwoman en tour, which is the last word. But the whole story is thrilling and unusual, and Olive Nettleton was faithful enough to deserve to be happy. It is over to you, Caroline.”
The girl across looked at her cards languidly. She was a very slender girl, with level brows and a direct gaze. She named a trump at random, and put down her cards with a little sigh of relief. Past Mrs. Osborne’s carefully coifed head, past Leila Dixon’s satirical smile when she saw the exposed cards, she looked through the long French window to where the passing clouds cast their shadows on the hills, and down in the valley a loaded hay wagon creaked along the road.
Up here on the hilltop there was little enough air stirring. The card table had been moved to the music room for coolness; and in the shadows of the alcove a young man in white flannels picked querulously at a guitar, striking an occasional impatient note on the piano as a guide. His eyes sought the girl persistently. Mrs. Baxter, a languid shadow of some brilliant and devastating yesterday, had been “sitting-out” the rubber. She picked up her heavy jeweled purse and trailed toward the man in the shadows.
“It is profanation to gamble or to gambol—in a room like this,” she said, looking down the length of the music room to where a sudden buzz of conversation showed the end of the rubber. “A music room without music is a body without a soul. I feel as though I am being facetious in the presence of a corpse.”
“It is pretty bad, isn’t it?” Osborne Kingsley said idly, watching Caroline Summers’ white-clad figure as she rose and went to the window. “The solemnity of those marble heads, and that funereal procession of black chairs against the wall—four chairs and Brahms, four more and Chopin, four more and Liszt.”
“High against the wall, with all their poor weaknesses written in their marble faces for the ages to see, instead of being allowed to rot respectably in their graves. Ah, me. And speaking of marble, how do you progress with Caroline?”
“I hardly see” he began stiffly.
Mrs. Baxter laughed. “Caroline is a husk,” she declared. “She’s a sort of frozen fire, King. Whatever happened to that man—a year ago, wasn’t it?—whether he died or was kidnapped or voluntarily effaced himself, everything that was worth having in Caroline Summers went with him.
“Think of it,” Mrs. Baxter persisted. “The bridesmaids and men, the bishop, everybody—well, ‘Waiting at the Church!’ Bella Severance was there, and she said she never put in such a half-hour. Mrs. Summers In hysterics. Every one but Caroline sure he had funked it at the last minute.”
The man rose suddenly and the guitar sent a sharp discordant jangle of piano keys through the room.
“I would like to shoot him—for her,” he said.
Mrs. Baxter smiled. “Don’t threaten,” she observed dryly. “You might happen to run across him, you know. Look at the Nettletons! Greg Nettleton is lost in New York, searched for from Alaska to Brazil, and is picked up in Rome, looking as if riotous living agreed with him. Oh, it’s a mean little world after all, King, and it shrinks every year. Look how the splendid isolation of twenty gives place to the rubbing of elbows of sixty.”
“And from that”—King caught her mood—”it is the merest step to the funeral urn of seventy, I suppose. Jolly, aren’t we, this afternoon!”
“I cannot think of you matrimonially, King,” said Mrs. Baxter. “What kind of a husband will you be? Will you be like the rest, or—will you be as you are now, just a little different?”
“I will love and honor the woman I marry,” he said stiffly.
“And marry a woman you love and honor! But you will be a loving husband, King, and the marriage will be most successful, because in every happy marriage there is one who cares, and one who does not care—so much.”
“And I will be”
“The one who cares.”
Tea had come in, but no one wanted tea. There were decanters and tall glasses and ice, and the bridge game had given way to scraps of gossip. Mrs. Baxter got up and walked slowly down the room. Near the table she turned.
“Caroline is on the veranda, King,” she called back. “I am sure she wants her tea.”
“Caroline is hopelessly temperate,” Mrs, Osborne sighed as she put in the cream. “I do not know whether I am wicked or merely self-indulgent; although I suppose we are always self-indulgent when we are wicked.”